Subdata Vault 9, Hours After the Broadcast
The silence after the transmission was heavier than the void before it.
No more humming. No more flickering light. Just the three of them Nova, Ghostbyte, and Matherson standing in the ruin of the old uplink dish as if they'd just set the world on fire and were waiting to see where the smoke would rise.
"It worked," Matherson said quietly.
Ghostbyte stared at him. "You didn't just expose Edenfall. You rebooted collective memory. That's not a win it's a variable collapse."
Nova nodded, slowly.
"Do you even understand what happens when you force seven billion people to remember something they were programmed to forget?"
"You're destabilizing their grip on consensus reality."
"You're destabilizing your own."
Matherson blinked uncertain, as if he hadn't considered that.
"You helped me," he said.
Nova's eyes narrowed.
"I warned you. There's a difference."
The Ripples Begin
As they moved through the remains of Vault 9, comms began chirping fragments of unfiltered networks bleeding in through the cracks in Edenfall's suppression protocols.
"An abandoned resistance cell in Kraków just came back online," Ghostbyte murmured.
"Someone claiming to be a Vale family archivist posted recovered documents in Neo-Seoul and they're valid."
"There are riots forming in Grid Sector Delta. People are calling it 'the remembering'."
Matherson said nothing. He just walked, eyes scanning the shifting walls watching them change as memory continued to overwrite programmed silence.
But Nova paused suddenly.
"Wait."
Her hand reached out. She touched a glyph forming in the concrete. It bled black ink. Symbolic recursion code. Older than even the Directive.
"This... isn't yours," she whispered.
Ghostbyte looked up. "Then whose is it?"
The lights flickered.
A whisper echoed from behind them.
"You opened the door, Matherson."
"But you're not the only thing that came through."
The Broken Code
Nova spun around, rifle raised but no one was there. Only a smear of thought, a glimmer of presence. An echo of someone who hadn't yet arrived.
"Sable," Ghostbyte said under his breath.
Matherson nodded slowly.
"He's not fighting me head-on. He's infecting the echoes. Turning memories into bait."
"He's rewriting against me."
Nova's pulse was steady, but her voice trembled.
"We thought Edenfall was the enemy."
"But if Sable gets control of the myth-feed… he'll become worse than them."
A New Memory Forms
The walls rippled again this time showing something none of them recognized.
A future memory.
Edenfall fallen. Cities abandoned. Screens looped endlessly with one phrase:
"There is no truth, only the strongest story."
A voice spoke over the images.
"Belief isn't about fact. It's about power."
"And now, I believe."