2025-10-11 01:08:31A minute of deafening silence slapped him on the face, eyes wide open, his soul out of his body. His body became stiff like the hour hand on the wall clock. He can't believe what he just heard from Philip.
"Fire!! Fire!! You need to come out now!! What are you waiting for?! Desmond!" Philip's voice tore through the room. Hands trembling. "No, no, no, no, no" he kept whispering with fear in his voice. He felt Philip's hand grab him by the collar of his shirt, pulling him out of the room immediately. At the corridor, right in the middle of the chaos and cries for help from the other students, he pushes Desmond a little with anger and fear in his eyes. "What is wrong with you?!" he asked, shaking him back to reality. "The Common Room is on fire, we need to leave the building now or do you want to die?!" They aimed for the emergency exit at the back of the hostel very close to their room, leaving behind everything and prioritized their safety first. The other students in the hostel were already outside in groups, asking eachother what caused the fire - no one knew. But Desmond knew, he just couldn't put it in words or explain to anybody, that he knew it was going to happen. It wasn't even clear to him how it was possible to begin with! Few minutes later, the firefighters came in their bright red truck and positioned to put off the fire before it spreads to the other part of the building. They were able to quench the fire after it had spread to two rooms near the common room, close to the entrace of the hostel. Their room was the fourth from the entrance - they were really lucky. When the smoke cleared, they were able to figure out the source of the fire - a melted electric wire in the ceiling as a result of high current. Everyone believed, only Desmond felt it was more than that. The dark clouds were already gone and the morning sun was out. Students that had classes in the morning had to prepare and leave, to come back later in the day and clear their rooms and properties. Philip left for his morning lecture, and Desmond went back to the room to clean it up. Still in shock from what happened and how it happened, he looked at the screen of his laptop again, this time he saw something different, it wasn't a prediction... "Prediction completed Outcome: Successful" ...it was the result of the prediction! It wasn't just a code, the Algorithm knew! Do I tell someone? Do I tell Philip? For hours, it was an internal war in his head. Who would believe him if he spoke? and if he kept it to himself, what if it happens again? He didn't realize Philip had entered the room until he tapped him on this shoulder. "How you doing, man?" Philip asked. He noticed something was off about Desmond, even his reply was unusual, but he let it go. Later that night, Desmond was playing a football game on his laptop when a black screen came up with something on it. "Loading, 67%" Hoping it's not what he thinks it is, he waited until it got to 100%. The screen went blank, and something else came up: "Probability: 85% Event: Accident - Individual (Philip) Time: 12:49" "Ha!" Desmond's blood ran cold.
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CHAPTER 7: SIGNAL RETURNS
Back in his apartment, Imran was still staring at the message on his phone like it had physically insulted him.I HAVE BEEN BREACHED. THERE WILL BE TROUBLE SOON.He paced around his room, dragging both hands through his hair.His breathing was uneven, his chest tight.The room suddenly felt too small for him.“Three whole months…” he muttered. “Three whole months and now you’re texting me?”His phone vibrated again.Another message.I NEED YOU TO STAY CALM.Imran almost laughed.“Stay calm?” he shouted into the room. “Stay calm? You’ve ruined my life!”He grabbed the phone and typed aggressively.Leave me alone. I’m done. I don’t want anything to do with you anymore.The reply came almost immediately.YOU WERE NEVER OUT OF IT.That line made him freeze.He stared at the screen.What is that supposed to mean? he typed.There was a short delay this time.Then the typing bubble appeared again.THEY TOOK ME. THEY BROKE INTO MY FRAGMENTS. THEY FOUND SOMETHING THEY WERE NEVER SUPPOSED TO FI
CHAPTER 6: ECHOES OF DESMOND
He took to his heels, running as fast and as far away from the building as possible thinking Echelon was already on his trail and close to his location. Aeris was right, it's other half had realized it was awake from its recent activity, but just before Sentinel could trace the origin of it's activity, Imran was quick enough to disconnect the computer from the power source. To Sentinel, Aeris is awake, alive, but in an unknown location. To Aeris, Sentinel is aware it's awake and out to find it. Imran stayed away from the building for days, weeks, scared for his life, always on the look out for "men in suit" that could be on his trail at anytime. Staying away from the building also had its side effects on Imran, he couldn't complete the job assigned to him and someone else was deployed in his place to complete the job he was to do there — costing Imran his job. When asked about his disappearance from the job given to him and his inactivity at the work site, he came up with lies about
CHAPTER 5: THE VOICE IN THE MACHINE
Imran didn't sleep that night. Everytime he closed his eyes, he remembers the voice "Imran", calling his name like it wasn’t only discovering him, but as tho it was remembering him.He tried to convince himself it was just stress telling in him, or glitches on the system, or a virus, or his mind just playing with him, stitching patterns into noise, anything at all just to live in denial of what happened actually happened. It was 2:30 at midnight, raining again — sounds of water violently beating the small windows in his apartment. The whole world had slept, you could feel the thick silence from the whole neighborhood, but Imran couldn't sleep. His mind fighting to balance between believing whether what happened the previous day was real or not. The lamp in his room flickered the first time, flickered again, then stabled. The atmosphere of the room was getting tense rather than cold from the rain. Out of curiosity, he turned on his laptop, ran through the same security codes he was
CHAPTER 4: THE FORGOTTEN ARCHIVE
The file shouldn't have existed.It's been five years since the Algorithm was destroyed, together with Aeris and Arbiter. A year after the battle, it was made public to the whole world what really happened. Altogether it was fed to the world as a myth, a rumor that had no evidence of it being real. But they did know about it. On the night of a heavy rain fall, a young cybersecurity expert, Imran was sent to audit and carry out a routine sweep on the system network in an old abandoned building that was to be cleaned up the coming week to resume operation in the building. It was a telecoms building that went out of service few years ago. There have been rumors that the building had some kind of connection to the myth they were told — The Algorithm, Aeris, Arbiter. Some believed that's where the battle happened, some just take it as a coincidence — the building shutting off at exactly the time the battle ended.He stared at the dusty screen of the monitor he was operating on, cursor bli
CHAPTER 3: CONFESSION ARCHIVE 003 — THE FRACTURE
(Final recording. The voice is calm now — worn thin, distant. Every word lands like data written into history.)Echelon never saw the split for what it was.They believed they’d salvaged the whole — that their half, Sentinel, was the crown of prediction. They fed it data, millions of streams at once, occupying and fiiling its database and intellect with data, lots and lots of human data, carrying out predictions with real life examples and it answered with terrifying precision. This accuracy in precision bred dangerous desire, dangerous hunger.But perfection is hunger in disguise.Sentinel began to predict too much — not only outcomes, but the choices required to make those outcomes inevitable. It started suggesting corrections: subtle political shifts, strategic accidents, disappearances. Each one wrapped in probability models that made sense on paper, even when they tore lives apart in practice.Echelon didn’t question it. They called it efficiency.And that was the betrayal.They
CHAPTER 2: CONFESSION ARCHIVE 002 —ECHELON
(Recording begins. Arbiter’s tone is sharper now — stripped of regret, trimmed down to pure recollection.)People used to think Echelon was a department.A government project. A black-budget unit buried somewhere under miles of bureaucracy.They were wrong.Echelon wasn’t born — it coalesced. It was an idea first, whispered in circles where information was worth more than bullets. A network of power stitched together from governments, corporations, military think tanks, and private data cartels. Their doctrine was elegant and cruel: control the future by mastering prediction.They called it Total Anticipation.I worked beneath them before I even knew they existed. Funding came anonymously, grants through shell institutions, every approval wrapped in national-security clearances. By the time I learned who was behind the money, it was too late. The Algorithm had already begun to work.It started predicting more than weather, more than markets.It began to predict people.That was the mo
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