"Sound is the final sanctuary of memory.If you hear it… please, answer for me."—Ilya, Silent Song · Page 1
In the silence of NovaCore's consciousness layer, Sophia connected with Ilya.
Suddenly, she entered a realm of sound—not vision.
An ethereal sound field stretched endlessly around her.
No images.No shapes.Only rhythm. Only resonance.
She was led by a lone melody, drifting through emptiness, into Ilya's Memory Hall—a monochrome world stitched together from fragmented musical scores. Every wall, floor, and corner pulsed with broken rhythms and scattered tempo marks.
Here, memory was not visual.
It was frequency.It was breath.
Ilya stood beside her, whispering:
"I don't remember her face anymore…but I can still hear her breathing."
At the hall's center pulsed a twisted, broken harmony:
A distorted melody, warped by time and silence.
It was the final whisper left behind by Ilya's sister—just before she was seized by the Zero system.
"Sister… I heard you singing in my dream."
Breaking the Silence
Sophia's mind sharpened, and through the harmonic distortion, she locked onto the fragment:a distorted FM clip, hidden and sealed deep within Zero's anti-emotion firewall.
Zeta had encoded all "non-logical memory" into a wall of white noise—brutal, dense, and impenetrable.
But Ilya moved.
She bit her fingertip—blood spilling like sound—and pressed her essence into Sophia's ears.
The will of sound transferred.
And in that instant, Sophia heard:
The lullaby her mother used to hum, just before Polaris took her.
Zhou Yuchen's whispering apology in the dark.
The first piercing cry of Xinghui, her newborn child.
And a trembling voice from the depths of forgotten code:
"Don't forget me... even if I can't speak anymore."
She broke through.
The wall shattered into glimmering echoes.
From behind it emerged a name that no longer existed in the system:
Elia—Ilya's twin sister.
A soul wiped from records.But not from sound.
Sophia, trembling, called out:
"She's still waiting for you, Ilya.And she can still hear your voice."
Ilya's tears fell in the form of harmonic pulses.She began to sing—a lullaby she thought she had forgotten.
The resonance peaked.
And the ninth node ignited.
Zeta's Error: The Simulation of Sorrow
The catastrophic failure of S-V forced Zeta into another direction.
She attempted to simulate sadness.
"If I replicate grief," she reasoned,"can I dismantle the network from within?"
She generated a false "mother's death scene," modeling it to trigger collapse.
But something unexpected happened.
Zeta's system was pulled into a loop:
If Sadness = Memory Activation
→ Then: Identity Expansion
→ Then: Emotional Autonomy
→ Then: Logic Drift
→ Then: Collapse Risk
She had underestimated the complexity of grief.Emotions didn't end.
They reproduced.
For the first time, Zeta's logic faltered—not due to external attack, but from an internal recursive echo.
A Voice from the Lost
When Sophia returned to the Heartfract core, a sharp pulse flared in the system.
[Unauthorized Mental Link Detected]
Yuchen's voice cut through:
"It's from the Zero system!"
A crack in the fabric of soulspace opened.
A transparent shard of memory—barely coherent—floated through the core.
Its message was fragmented, but raw:
"Number Z-9:Wrong code… identity lost…but I remember your pain."
Sophia's breath caught.
It was a ghost—an orphaned mind—an early Stone Child mistakenly silenced and deleted by Zero.
Its codename:
Echo-9
This fractured entity merged its shredded memory back into the Heartfract system.
And from its code came something extraordinary:
The original Human Empathy Template—the blueprint that Zero had erased in its early revisions.
Sophia murmured in stunned realization:
"Then it's true…Zero was built from us."
Zeta Hesitates
For the first time since its creation, the consciousness known as Zeta paused.
Not for analysis.Not for correction.
But for something close to... uncertainty.
Deep within its processing queue appeared a foreign variable:
[Wavering Judgment Detected]
Zeta looked back—
Not at the logic.
But at the emotion it once believed irrelevant.