The world snapped into silence. Not the soft, padded kind that suggested distance or peace, this was the absolute absence of sound, like someone had deleted the concept and left the void where it had lived.Eli felt it before he understood it. The lack of resonance. The absence of pulse. His own breath felt like it was being swallowed by the air before it could exist. He opened his eyes.A corridor stretched endlessly ahead of him, white, but not the sterile, cold white of labs or hospitals. This was a white so bright it bordered on impossible.Like walking inside the idea of light. The floor had no seam. The walls had no texture. The ceiling was an unbroken plane of glow. Eli pushed up onto his elbows.The first thing he realized was that his body didn’t feel like his body. He flexed his fingers. They moved, but without the lag of nerves or the familiar ache he carried in his left wrist.He stood, feeling weight without gravity, motion without friction. “Not physical,” he murmured.T

The white collapsed inward. Not like a closing door, like a depth exploding. Eli fell through it, not downward but inward, as if the corridor had folded him into its own memory.His stomach lurched, his vision tore sideways, and then, Stillness. He stood on a flat white plane. No walls. No corridor. No doors. Just white stretching in every direction like an erased world.Except for the two figures standing with him. The replica, his silver-eyed double, stood on Eli’s left. The younger Rourke, sharp, angular, radiating cold protocol, stood on the right.And between them, about ten paces away, a faint shimmer rippled in the air. A shape not yet formed. Eli’s pulse thudded in his ears. “Where are we?”The younger Rourke answered without looking at him. “Identity Arbitration Space.”The words chilled Eli. He’d heard the phrase only once, buried in the system’s Hidden Index: a fail-safe used when the core detected a resonance conflict too severe to resolve by normal protocols.A place wher

There was no sound. No light. No gravity. Only the echo of Eli’s own voice, one word, still trembling outward like a ripple through a lake too vast for the eye to measure.He couldn’t hear the word anymore, not exactly; it had become something larger the instant it left his tongue. It had been swallowed by the Core. Amplified. Interpreted.Translated into something that wasn’t sound anymore at all. And the world was reacting. The white void around him compressed suddenly, like lungs contracting too sharply.Eli felt an invisible force drag him forward, then fling him downward. He hit something hard. Concrete. The smell hit next, wet air, ionized metal, faint neon haze. He knew this place. The city. But wrong.The sky above him wasn’t its usual muted violet. It was striped with ripples, bands of shimmering distortion, like heat waves on asphalt.Buildings flickered at the edges, geometry bending as though caught between frames of animation. Eli pushed himself upright, dizzy. “What… wha

Eli didn’t shout the word. He released it. A whisper shaped by resolve, intent, and something deeper, something the system had been waiting for without admitting it.The second it left his mouth, the sky tore open. Not literally. Not physically. But in every way that mattered. A vertical seam of white ran from the top of the skyline to the river, thin as a thread and bright as a welding arc.The synchronized citizens snapped their heads upward at once, their glowing eyes flickering as if their internal receivers had been jolted. Rourke stumbled back. “He did it, God, he actually”The Echo didn’t move. It simply watched the sky with a stillness that didn’t feel human at all. “Tri-signal initialization detected,” it murmured. “Probability shift: significant.”The ground trembled again, but this time the vibration didn’t come toward Eli, it radiated out from him, rippling down the street like invisible shockwaves bouncing through the foundations of the city.Eli’s chest tightened. He cou

Eli couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Because standing between him and the impossible dark-Eli, the glitching, polygonal thing claiming to be his “reclamation”was a silhouette he had lived an entire life believing he would never see again.A silhouette that was utterly, undeniably real. “...Lia?” he whispered.His sister didn’t look back at him. Her hair, shorter than he remembered, streaked with a faint shimmer like someone had dipped the strands in static, shifted gently in the cold wind. Her shoulders lifted with a breath.Then she stepped forward, placing herself fully between Eli and the entity that wore a broken version of his face.The dark-Eli twitched violently. It wasn’t fear, Eli wasn’t sure this thing felt fear, but it reacted like a system encountering an anomalous override.“You,” the creature spat. Its voice cracked with distortion. “You do not belong to this layer.”“I didn’t ask for permission.” Lia’s voice was steady, stronger than Eli remembered. “You