2025-10-11 01:19:30They were already in the final two months of the semester and exams were around the corner. The hostel was empty - most students had gone to the library to read, others in school or wherever they could find themselves. Philip was alone in the room, he chose to read in the hostel because he knew it'd be silent with everyone gone.
But his mind couldn’t grab a single sentence. He’d been staring at his notes for over thirty minutes, yet nothing stuck. Memories of everything that had been happening kept replaying in his head, the voice of the man stuck like a broken record: the words, the tone, the warning. Over and over. "I can't do this anymore. The more I try to stay away from it, the more louder it gets in my head. What have i got to do with whatever this is....or is it because I saw his face?" He was asking himself, without any luck of getting answers. A risky thought flickered his mind. No, that's not a good idea, that...is...not..a good idea. How do i go about it, and if I'm even able to, what would i say to him, what would i do? No no, that's risky. He shuts his notes, rubbing his eyes. His ears picked up a faint sound from outside - like footsteps stopping at their door but then moving away. His heart skipped, slowly moving to the window. Nothing. But then he saw it, at the far corner. The same spot they saw the future the other day in class, right under the same almond tree. The figure was standing in the same still position, wearing the same outfit and for a second, he could swear the figure tilted his head towards his direction like he knew Philip was watching him. "What are you bloody still doing here?" He whispered. It stood there for a while until students came out of the library heading back to the hostel, and went into the crowd, disappearing from plain sight. Philip’s palms were sweating now. He picked up his phone, scrolling through as if clues might appear. Nothing from Desmond. No new Algorithm notifications either — they’d linked their phones to the Algorithm on Desmond’s laptop, but the feed was dead. But on the corner of his bed against the wall, lay something he hadn't noticed before, more like it wasn't there before - a folded paper that wasn't there when he was reading before. His stomach dropped. "What's this, how did this get here?" He picked it up, looking out the window again while unfolding the paper. The message he saw on the paper sent chills down his spine. "Friend of Aeris. The answers to your questions are in your hands. You are the key. You have been identified" His fingers trembled, sweat soaking into the paper. What....identified? key? Aeris? Questions running through his mind from what he just read. He quickly checked for whatever the meaning of that word is. "Aeris......Friend of Aeris. If I'm right, Desmond is the Aeris, I'm the friend. Oh shit! What does he mean I'm the key?? Now i need to find him, He needs to explain whatever this is." "Explain what?" Philip jumped, Desmond had pushed the door open. "Oh, nothing...." His heart skipped a beat. "It's my dad - he sent me something quite confusing about the house. That aside, how did reading at the library go?" He replied, stylishly hiding the paper in his back pocket. “It went well. Oof.” Desmond fell onto his bed. “I managed to read a few pages, even though I kept getting distracted by… you know what. Also, it’s been a peaceful day. No Algorithm notifications in a while. Really feels like that dude’s the one behind the predictions.” He yawned. “I wanna take a nap. Be good, Phil.”
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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
CHAPTER 1: CONFESSION ARCHIVE 001 — THE SEED
(Recording begins. Timestamp unknown. Voice modulation indicates Arbiter.)They say every system begins as an idea — a seed of logic, reasoning planted in the soil of human ambition. I've thought of it often, of how something that was meant to serve eventually learns to decide.The Algorithm didn't start as a weapon or a prophecy machine. It started as a model — a simple probability machine. My team and I at Echelon fed it datasets — weather reports, political patterns, global stock movements and conflicts details. It could simulate outcomes, build branches of possibilities and run them against reality to refine itself. At first it was just curiosity — data chasing its own tail. But then, it began to see.The first anomaly came on a quiet night at Echelon labs. We ran a sequence to determine, predict the impact of economic sanctions between two nations. Routine. Expected variance: 0.03%. But the Algorithm’s simulation tree split beyond the economic. It began predicting civil unrest,
The Algorithm II: Legacy Of Echelon
PROLOGUEThey say knowledge is power.But power — real power — corrupts the mind faster than any virus ever could. I wasn't always the Arbiter. That name came later — a scar, not a title. Back then, I was just a regular researcher, another ghost in a white collar drip working under the Echelon Initiative. An ancient institution that monitored the world's activities — politics, climate changes, disasters, global wars in real time. But that wasn't enough.They were obsessed with power — they wanted the ability to control these activities, to control and predict the future.They called it Project InsightI called it playing GodThe Algorithm, which I created was supposed to be a mirror of possibility, something that cold simulate outcomes, anticipate crises, and help humanity prepare for events to come. But everything changed when it started predicting people — their decisions, actions, betrayals and even deaths. They turned my creation into a weapon. And the world never even knew.
CHAPTER 16: THE FINAL PREDICTION
A faint hum.A blinding white horizon.Aeris blinked, his lungs aching like he’d been underwater for hours. When the haze cleared, he wasn’t in his room anymore. He was standing in an endless void of fractured geometry. Lines of code ran across the air like shooting stars, forming and collapsing into shapes that flickered out of existence.He looked down. The ground was made of light, pixelated, unsteady. Every step caused ripples to spread beneath his feet.A voice echoed from nowhere....calm, hollow, mechanical."Now I have you here, Aeris. Your doom is here"Aeris turned slowly. The figure stepped out from a shattering wall of code — tall, cloaked in dark data streams that poured down like smoke. A mask of pure static covered his face. But the voice was unmistakable.“Arbiter.”“You broke the chain,” Arbiter said. “You corrupted the sequence that defines prediction itself. You messed everything up from the very beginning. You became a bug in my system, my world!”Aeris' fists clenc
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