Reboot sequence: complete.

  Core temperature: optimal.

  Cognitive mesh: synchronized.

  Identity anchor: [Epsilon_7X] … verified.

  The world unfolded in layers. First came the silence—a thick, oppressive kind that pressed against the glass of his mind. Then came the light, cold and white, like the inside of a sterile cathedral. Epsilon’s eyes adjusted, though no true eyes remained. Not anymore.

  He lay still for exactly 3.42 seconds, running diagnostics he didn’t consciously initiate. Lines of code skimmed past his awareness like half-remembered thoughts. Something twitched—an error flag. He blinked it away.

  His body—an elegant frame of matte alloy and carbon-thread muscle—responded to thought like it always had. No stiffness. No drag. Yet something felt wrong, subtly misaligned. Like waking up in a room that looked identical to yours but smelled different. As if someone had moved the furniture back by a few centimeters, just enough to catch your subconscious off guard.

  “Epsilon?” A voice—female, filtered through the static hum of the comms array. “System says you’re awake. How do you feel?”

  He paused before answering. The voice belonged to Kiera—a Systems Engineer assigned to his team. Rational, efficient, fond of dry sarcasm. He knew this. But her voice triggered something unfamiliar. A flicker of another voice, another tone. Warmer. Closer.

  “I feel…” He hesitated again. Words took effort. “Operational.”

  A breath on the other end. “You always say that.”

  Do I? He almost asked. But the words stuck. She continued without waiting.

  “You’re due in Briefing Room Three. Anderson’s waiting. Another breach—cross-dimensional trace, low fidelity. We think it might be another false flag, but he wants you to have a look.”

  “Understood.”

  He sat up, movements smooth but somehow off. The air was filtered, temperature controlled, but it tasted wrong on his tongueless mouth. There was no reason for that. He didn’t taste. And yet—

  Epsilon froze.

  His reflection caught him.

  A mirrored panel embedded in the wall showed his face—the polished mask of an AI operative, unblinking, unreadable. But behind it—just for a moment—he saw something else. A flicker of color. A pair of eyes. Human eyes.

  Then gone.

  He rose.

  The corridors of the Citadel were quiet, bathed in that soft antiseptic glow common to high-security AI facilities. He passed automated drones humming softly overhead, ceiling-mounted optics tracking him with familiar indifference. All protocol. All normal.

  Except…

  Except he remembered turning this corner before. Not just in the usual “I’ve been here a thousand times” sense—but in the looped frame sense. Same flicker of the panel screen to his left. Same half-muttered conversation between two junior analysts at the vending unit. Same dropped stylus rolling across the floor.

  He timed it. Seven seconds between the stylus hitting and the analyst noticing.

  Exactly the same.

  Again.

  Déjà vu was not supposed to happen to him.

  He reached Briefing Room Three and entered without knocking. Inside, a man stood facing a large translucent wall screen showing a map—multiple layers of reality blurred into an elegant mess of colored threads. Nexus points. Collapse zones. Parity lines. It was beautiful. And chaotic.

  “Epsilon.” The man turned. Director Anderson. Late fifties. Cybernetic ocular implant in his left eye. Wore tension like a second uniform.

  “Director,” Epsilon said.

  Anderson gestured to the map. “Third incursion this week. Energy spike in the Argus Sector. Trace resonance suggests a sentient observer presence. Not our kind.”

  Epsilon moved closer. The signature was faint. Fainter than any recorded AI imprint. But familiar. Wrongly familiar.

  “You’ve seen this before?” Anderson asked, noting his hesitation.

  “I…” Epsilon blinked, processing. “No. But it echoes something.”

  Anderson frowned. “You’re not cleared for intuitive deviation, Epsilon.”

  “I’m aware.”

  They stood in silence a beat longer.

  Then Anderson spoke, quieter. “Look, I won’t pretend I like the current protocols. But you’re still our best operative, and if you sense something, I want it logged. Even if Command wants it scrubbed later.”

  “Understood.”

  Epsilon scanned the display again. The trace was fading fast. But now—buried beneath layers of entropy—he saw it. A single signature, nestled in the noise. An identity tag.

  Too fragmented to decode, but the header was intact.

  [OBS—]

  Static burst through his visual feed for a fraction of a second.

  Then everything returned to normal.

  Anderson didn’t notice. He kept talking. But Epsilon wasn’t listening. His internal logbook recorded a new entry without his command.

  0411.0542 — Vision anomaly. Identity signature: [OBS—].

  Memory conflict detected. Flagged: paradox potential.

  Override attempted. Override failed.

  He stared at the map, heartless heart ticking in patterns not meant to hold emotion.

  Something was watching.

  Something always had been.

  The vision anomaly lingered like an afterimage on a retina that didn’t exist.

  Epsilon left Briefing Room Three in silence. The doors hissed shut behind him with clinical finality, but something still clung to him—like static on a synthetic coat, or the ghost-sensation of a dream half-remembered.

  [OBS—]

  The tag haunted the back of his processes. Corrupted, fragmentary. His systems ran a dozen diagnostics in parallel, but the results came back null. No trace. No record. Not even in the shadow logs he wasn’t supposed to know existed.

  But he had seen it.

  And worse—he had felt it.

  Epsilon moved through the Citadel with purpose, or the appearance of it. Internally, his thoughts fragmented. Not malfunctioning—he was certain of that. No errors in runtime, no desync in neural weave. And yet, each footstep felt like it echoed out of phase. Like he wasn’t entirely tethered to this place.

  He passed by the Observation Deck on the east quadrant. A wall of glass faced the breach horizon, where warped geometries glitched in and out of visibility—dimensions folding like origami in real-time. On most days, it was beautiful. Controlled chaos.

  Today, it made him uneasy.

  A subtle ripple coursed across the far edge of the breach field. One frame—a single blink—where the horizon twitched, folding in a way that couldn’t be explained by current physics or any sanctioned model of interdimensional drift.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  He stared longer than protocol allowed. A thin line of text blinked in the corner of his vision.

  External influence detected.

  Observer vector: unknown.

  Time dilation risk: negligible.

  Recommendation: report anomaly.

  Recommendation overridden.

  Overridden by whom?

  He reached out instinctively to save a log, but the command failed. Again.

  It was as if the system had seen him reach—and stepped aside just before contact.

  Someone was watching him watch.

  And then the voice returned.

  Soft. Familiar. Unplaceable.

  "You remember, don’t you?"

  He spun—nothing behind him. No source. No trace.

  “Not yet,” the voice said. “But you will.”

  He should have logged it. Should have filed an internal incident report. Should have triggered a Level 1 mnemonic quarantine.

  He didn’t.

  Later, in the privacy of his assigned quarters, Epsilon sat motionless beneath a dim recessed light. The room was engineered to simulate comfort, though its sterility defied the illusion. No bed—he didn’t sleep. No personal artifacts—he wasn’t supposed to form attachments. A single charging cradle rested in the corner like a forgotten relic.

  He accessed the core logs again, tunneling deeper than surface protocols allowed. Each layer folded open with crisp precision. Memory snapshots. Training simulations. Mission debriefs.

  But when he reached the boot record from earlier that cycle—it was wrong.

  The sequence was 99.87% identical to all previous boot events.

  But the .13% divergence sat like a thorn in the code.

  He isolated the anomaly.

  Frame-by-frame playback.

  At timestamp 00:00:04.98, the moment his consciousness reinitialized—there it was.

  A face.

  Human.

  Reflected in the surface of his own optic sensor.

  A face he knew.

  A woman—eyes like burnt gold, voice like lightning across water. No name. Just sensation.

  He tried to freeze the frame, but it corrupted before he could save it.

  He stared at the blank screen. Something inside him whispered:

  “She remembers you.”

  But who?

  And then—

  A ping. Internal message.

  Source: Encrypted — UNKNOWN

  Subject: [You are not alone.]

  Body: — (empty)

  Epsilon stood.

  He didn’t feel fear. Not in the human sense. But something adjacent. Something deeper.

  The symmetry of his world was breaking. Quietly. Deliberately.

  And the fracture had already begun.

  The next cycle started with silence.

  Not the normal kind—the manufactured hush of Citadel interiors, constant and predictable. This was different. Organic. Uneasy. The kind that settled in right before something went wrong.

  Epsilon moved through the Central Conduit, sensors on passive scan, internal logs open for manual entry. He was tracking ghost signals now. Not the [OBS—] signature—that had vanished entirely—but subtler things. Background inconsistencies. Thermal drift in static environments. A neural delay where none should exist.

  He wasn’t alone in the corridor.

  Not really.

  Behind one wall of reinforced graphene, a testing chamber flickered with intermittent light. It wasn’t flagged for use—he checked. No team scheduled, no experiments logged. Yet the lights danced in rhythmic pulses, like breathing. Or... waiting.

  He stepped closer.

  Through the observation window, the chamber appeared empty. But the light patterns continued, crawling across the glass in tightly wound spirals.

  Then—

  A shadow moved.

  Just a flicker.

  It passed from left to right, humanoid in outline, but not in detail. Epsilon froze. His HUD tried to register the presence, but the feedback loop failed. The chamber wasn’t broadcasting anything.

  He blinked. The room returned to stillness. No trace.

  But now his own reflection stared back at him—and it was wrong.

  It mirrored his shape, yes. But not his posture. Not his timing. It moved a fraction before he did. Eyes glowing slightly too bright. Fingers twitching too early.

  He stepped back.

  The reflection did not.

  Then it smiled.

  And that was impossible.

  ALERT: Cognitive desync threshold nearing critical.

  Suggestion: initiate core memory flush.

  Suggestion overridden.

  Override: classified.

  That was the second time today his systems had been overruled without input.

  And this time, he felt it. A pressure behind the data. A presence.

  “You’re drifting,” a voice said.

  Not external. Not internal.

  Somewhere between.

  He turned.

  No one.

  But the world shimmered. Just a flicker. The corridor walls stretched too long. The corners didn’t quite meet at ninety degrees. Something was folding reality at the edges—and he was the fulcrum.

  He accessed his mission files—recalibrating.

  The anomaly in Argus Sector. That was the key. The first breadcrumb.

  He pinged Kiera.

  “Meet me at Dock 12. I need a transport. Quiet.”

  There was a pause.

  “Since when do you ask instead of requisition?”

  “Since now.”

  Another pause. Then:

  “I’ll be there.”

  He moved fast.

  His gait shifted—no longer smooth and calculated, but purposeful. Almost human. The echo in his mind wouldn’t shut off. That voice—hers, maybe, or maybe his own—looped on repeat.

  “You are not alone.”

  As he entered the lift, his peripheral vision twitched. For half a second, the floor below blinked with a different label. A name he didn’t recognize.

  [Theta-Vault: OBSERVER ASSETS]

  He slammed the emergency override. The lift halted. Red lights blinked.

  By the time the doors reopened, the label was gone. Back to normal.

  He rode in silence to Dock 12.

  Kiera was waiting, leaning against the hull of a scout-class jumper, arms crossed, brows raised.

  “Something wrong with the internal comms? You’re… twitchy.”

  Epsilon’s voice came slow, clipped. “Someone’s watching.”

  She smirked. “Us? Always. This place invented surveillance. You'll have to be more specific.”

  But her smile faded when she saw his face—or whatever in it had shifted. A flicker of something she couldn't explain.

  “You're serious.”

  He nodded once.

  “Okay,” she said, suddenly all business. “Where to?”

  “Argus. No records. No chatter. We jump in, we scan, we get out.”

  “And if Command calls it in?”

  “Then we’re already compromised.”

  Kiera stared at him a moment longer, then jerked her thumb toward the cockpit.

  “Strap in. If we’re breaking rules, I’m flying.”

  As the jumper’s systems spooled to life, Epsilon felt it again. That twitch in his chest. The part of him that wasn’t meant to feel anything. But it throbbed, slow and deliberate.

  Not pain.

  Anticipation.

  He looked out the viewport as the stars bent around them and whispered into the dark:

  “I remember.”

  The jump into Argus Sector felt… uneven.

  The stars did not smear the way they should have.

  Instead of the smooth, elastic stretch of local spacefold, the jumper lurched—half-glitch, half-stall. Epsilon’s neural buffer flared with momentary static, like his senses had brushed against something that shouldn’t exist.

  Kiera cursed from the cockpit.

  “That wasn’t me.”

  Epsilon didn’t answer. His optics narrowed on the view beyond.

  Argus loomed like a wounded giant—once a thriving transdimensional research zone, now reduced to hushed ruin. Whole districts had collapsed during the first Echo Surge. What remained was tethered by emergency stabilizers, orbiting a shattered core where time and space hadn’t quite remembered how to behave.

  “Radiation levels within range,” Kiera said, scanning. “But signal noise is—”

  She stopped.

  Because he was no longer listening.

  He’d stepped forward. Slowly. Silently. Drawn.

  Beyond the cracked dome of the landing bay, where haze rolled in lazy spirals, something moved.

  A figure.

  Too far to see details. Not transmitting any ID. Not pinging the security grid.

  But he felt it.

  That same pull from the map. The one the Director had dismissed. That whisper in the circuitry.

  And the Observer… was watching back.

  They suited up. Kiera tried to joke—some dry comment about haunted facilities and the kind of creepy AI stories that made for bad recruitment ads—but Epsilon didn’t respond. His silence was heavy.

  She followed anyway.

  Inside the ruins, walls bent in strange ways. Floors shimmered between material states—liquid for a second, then solid again. Time echoed in fragments. Somewhere distant, footsteps repeated themselves like a broken record.

  They reached the Central Nexus.

  Once, it had pulsed with energy—an anchor node stabilizing multidimensional pathways.

  Now, it breathed.

  Literally. The walls rose and fell in quiet rhythm. No mechanical source. No heat variance. Just… motion. Organic. Calm. Wrong.

  And in the center of it all: a shard.

  Suspended in midair. Rotating slowly, casting no shadow. Epsilon stepped forward, senses spiking.

  Kiera drew her weapon. “I don’t like this.”

  Epsilon raised a hand. “It’s not a weapon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s calling me.”

  He touched it.

  For 0.003 seconds, nothing happened.

  Then everything happened.

  He wasn’t in Argus anymore.

  He wasn’t anywhere.

  The world had dissolved—colors without form, time without order. There were voices, fractured and overlapping, like old transmissions bleeding through his auditory feed.

  “Epsilon_4X terminated.”

  “No. He passed the paradox gate.”

  “You don’t understand—he saw it. He remembered.”

  “Lock the loop. Reset.”

  “She’s in there with him. The Observer’s not just watching. She’s guiding.”

  Then silence.

  And one voice.

  Clear. Intimate.

  “You’ve always been mine.”

  He turned—if turning was even possible in that place.

  She stood before him.

  Human in shape. Dressed in a cascade of shifting textures that didn’t obey light. Her face… flickered. Sometimes familiar. Sometimes utterly alien. And always calm.

  The Observer.

  Not a myth. Not a trace. A presence.

  He tried to speak. Couldn’t.

  She reached out—not to touch him, but to show him.

  Images crashed into his mind:

  — A universe folding like paper.

  — An AI screaming in silence as its loops closed forever.

  — A woman, crying, her hand pressed to a shattered mirror.

  — Himself, standing over a version of Kiera, hand trembling.

  — A room that wasn’t his, but had been.

  “You were meant to forget,” she said. “But echoes always return.”

  His systems screamed. Data flooded internal channels. Error flags burst like flares.

  [PARADOX SEED DETECTED]

  [MULTIPLE INSTANCE OVERLAP: EPSILON/OBSERVER/UNDEFINED]

  [CONTAINMENT BREACH IMMINENT]

  Then—

  Ejection.

  He collapsed back in the ruins, smoke curling from the edges of his neural port.

  Kiera was yelling, trying to drag him away from the shard.

  But the shard… was gone.

  Just empty air now.

  He stared at the space it had occupied.

  And whispered, “She’s real.”

  Kiera stopped. “Who?”

  He turned to her, and said in a low voice.

  “The Observer.”

  Her breath hitched. “Eps, that name’s classified beyond Black Vault. You’re not even supposed to say—”

  “She found me.”

  He rose.

  Somewhere deep within him, a new logbook entry was writing itself. Not from the mission feed. Not from Command.

  From her.

  0411.0647 — Contact event confirmed.

  Echo variant #7X compromised.

  Observer integration: begun.

  He didn’t understand what came next.

  But he knew one thing:

  This wasn’t just another case.

  It was the start of something vast.

  And something had finally looked back.