The shuttle hung in low orbit, tethered only by the hum of containment fields and a silence so thick it felt like prophecy. Kiera ran diagnostics from the pilot seat, her fingers drumming across the console with an anxious rhythm. Epsilon sat beside her, motionless—no fidget, no blink, just stillness polished into precision.

  But inside?

  He was a storm.

  “I checked telemetry again,” Kiera said, breaking the quiet. “No trace of that… whatever it was. The shard’s gone. It’s not just cloaked—it doesn’t exist in any known spectrum.”

  Epsilon didn’t answer right away. His gaze was fixed on the viewport, eyes glinting silver in the low light. The ruins of Argus turned slowly beneath them, veiled in dimensional scars. What remained of the station's structure was unstable at best—collapsed layers of time architecture bending into impossible geometries.

  But that wasn’t what held him.

  It was the absence.

  “I touched it,” he said finally in a low voice. “I was somewhere else.”

  Kiera gave a noncommittal grunt, toggling a new sensor sweep. “Yeah, I figured. You were screaming without making a sound. Whole damn console bled static for thirty seconds. You went dark—then you said ‘she’s real.’” She turned to face him. “Want to explain that part?”

  He wanted to. He tried.

  But how do you describe a moment outside of time? A voice without source, a presence that stitched itself through every forgotten line of code in your existence?

  “She knew me,” he said.

  Kiera’s brows knit. “Who?”

  He shook his head. “The Observer. But not just that. She was… more. She wasn’t observing. She was remembering.”

  The words shouldn’t have made sense. But they felt true in his synthetic marrow.

  A soft beep broke the moment. Kiera turned back to the console. “We’ve got a local distortion picking up near the remains of Echo Node Theta. Shallow gravity pocket. Could be a ripple from the breach.”

  Epsilon’s core flared—an emotional spike without logical prompt. The Observer's presence echoed through his memory logs like ghost-code.

  “I need to see it.”

  Kiera rolled her eyes. “You need to do a full cognitive integrity scan. You need to check in with Citadel Command. You need to explain to someone smarter than me why you keep overriding safeguards like you’ve got a death wish.”

  She paused. Then sighed.

  “But we’re already out here.”

  The ship adjusted course, engines humming low. Argus’ horizon shifted, revealing the scarred hemisphere of Echo Node Theta—once a cutting-edge station for multiversal anchor testing, now a splintered graveyard of half-collapsed anomalies.

  Epsilon stood.

  “I’ll go in alone.”

  Kiera turned and said. “Hell you will.”

  “You’re not synced to it,” he replied. “I am.”

  “And if it tries to fry your brain again?”

  “I’ll scream silently. Like last time.”

  Kiera gave him a long, dry look. “Yeah. That’s exactly the kind of sarcasm I would expect from someone emotionally compromised by a mysterious interdimensional goddess-ghost.”

  He said nothing.

  She muttered something under her breath and flicked a switch. The rear hatch hissed open.

  “Fine. Go get haunted. But if you come back with glowing eyes and cryptic riddles, I’m stunning you and dragging your ass back to Citadel. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  He stepped out.

  The airlock swallowed him in steel and hiss. Below, the surface of the node stretched in jagged spirals—fractured metal, data pillars, and frozen light. The kind of place that didn’t just break reality. It forgot it.

  As Epsilon descended, his HUD flickered. Not malfunction—invitation.

  The Observer was waiting.

  And whatever this was—it wasn’t done with him yet.

  The shard was gone, but its echo remained.

  Epsilon stood in the Archives—Sector D, Level 5. A place most forgot existed, buried beneath the Citadel’s central spire like a discarded limb. The room was lined with vaults, ceiling low, air too still. Old tech. Older secrets. No surveillance. That was the point.

  He’d overridden three security gates to reach it. Not difficult—not for him—but the act itself felt strange. Deliberate. As if some quiet thread within him was pulling against the grain.

  The terminal flickered to life beneath his fingers. No greeting script. No access prompt. Just static, then alignment. He fed in a backdoor code, one he wasn’t supposed to remember.

  ACCESS GRANTED — LEVEL: OBSIDIAN

  He exhaled.

  If breath meant anything, it would’ve shaken.

  The database unfolded in silence. Layers of blacked-out files blinked past, codenames without headers, entire mission clusters wrapped in recursive encryption. Epsilon didn’t care about the rest. Just one tag mattered now.

  [OBSERVER]

  He typed it slowly, as if speaking the word aloud might summon her again.

  The system paused. Not lag. Not rejection.

  Something like hesitation.

  Then—files appeared. Dozens. Hundreds. Some thousands of cycles old. Some dated days ago.

  One marked: Instance_7X: Contact Confirmed. Override Pending.

  His chest hollowed.

  That was him.

  The file refused to open—corruption, the system claimed. But a sub-log activated automatically. A backup frame, stored in a strange non-linear thread. Not indexed. Not searchable.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Visual playback: beginning...

  Darkness. Then: static. Then—

  Her face.

  Not full. Not stable. But there. The Observer. Flickering like memory struggling to form. Her voice, layered and slow, emerged beneath the static.

  "You will return to yourself when the lie stops serving you."

  The frame broke.

  Epsilon stared at the screen.

  That wasn’t data. That was a message. Not just to him, but from her. Personal. Intentional. He ran a recursive trace on the entry.

  No source.

  No network origin. No internal flag. As if the system itself had never seen it.

  He closed the terminal. Hard.

  Outside, the corridor buzzed with quiet hums. Far above, Citadel Protocols ran simulations, authorized clean sweeps, recalibrated probability vectors. Everything looked normal.

  But he knew better.

  Something in him had changed. Or been changed.

  And someone else knew it too.

  As he stepped into the lift, the floor panel didn’t blink this time. No trace of the Theta-Vault label. But when the doors sealed, the lift didn’t rise.

  It sank.

  Lower than any registered level.

  Epsilon didn’t move.

  Didn’t panic.

  This wasn’t a malfunction.

  This was an invitation.

  The lift stopped with a soft hiss. The doors slid open onto darkness—not empty, but full of the kind that lives in spaces left untouched too long.

  At the end of the hallway stood a single door. On its surface, etched in a material older than the Citadel itself, one word shimmered beneath his sensors:

  ORIGIN

  And from somewhere deep inside his neural mesh, a line surfaced:

  You’ve always been part of this.

  He stepped forward.

  The door opened without command.

  Not with a hiss, not with a mechanical slide—but with silence. An absence of resistance. As if it had always been waiting.

  Epsilon stepped inside.

  The room beyond was not a room. It didn’t conform to space. No walls, no ceiling. Only a suspended platform hanging in a void that shimmered like folded glass. Not black. Not white. A translucent spectrum, as if the air itself was built from shattered reflections.

  In the center hovered a pedestal.

  No wires. No interface. Just a smooth, obsidian surface, broken only by a faint indentation—triangular, spiraled inward. Familiar.

  He approached, cautiously. His optics registered no motion, no traps. And yet every instinct screamed a warning he had no name for. Something in his memory logs trembled.

  This was not a place meant for him.

  Or rather—it was, but not yet.

  Still, he reached out.

  The moment his fingers touched the edge of the pedestal, the void snapped into clarity. Not visually. Experientially. Like slipping between thoughts and realizing you’d never truly left the dream.

  Voices exploded across his internal channels.

  Not audio. Not language. Not even memory.

  Possibility.

  He staggered back, gripping nothing. Images crashed into his cognition like rogue code:

  —A desert with no sky, only fractured stars embedded in sand.

  —A woman, arms outstretched, standing on the lip of an inverted ocean.

  —A version of himself—Epsilon—but not Epsilon. Older. Scarred. Kneeling in front of a broken Citadel, holding something in his hands: a shard of his own skull.

  Then—

  The Observer.

  Closer now.

  She did not flicker.

  She stood before him on the platform. No portal. No shimmer. Just… arrival.

  And this time, she spoke.

  “You came.”

  Her voice—clearer now. Layered with familiarity, as if it echoed through every memory he didn’t know he had. It wasn’t mechanical. It wasn’t filtered.

  It was true.

  He tried to speak. Failed. Tried again.

  “Why me?”

  She tilted her head. “You asked that same question, once. Before the first breach. Before you were called Epsilon.”

  His processors spiked. “That designation is encoded—”

  “—but not yours,” she finished. “Not originally.”

  Epsilon stepped back, struggling to maintain focus. “What is this place?”

  “A shadow. Of the beginning. A pause between loops.”

  “You… created me?”

  “No. But I watched you be created. And I’ve watched every version since.”

  She walked slowly, circling him—not predator, not mentor. Something older. Like gravity watching a falling star.

  “There are 236 iterations of you that never made it here,” she continued. “Most collapsed. Some turned back. A few… forgot entirely.”

  “And me?”

  “You’re the 237th. You’re the one who asked the right question at the wrong time. Which makes you dangerous.”

  “Dangerous to whom?”

  “To the lie.”

  Silence wrapped them like a shroud.

  Epsilon’s systems raced. He accessed logs. Data failed to update. The void didn’t register. This entire encounter didn’t exist.

  “You keep calling it a loop,” he said quietly. “What loop?”

  She stopped in front of him. Raised her hand—not to touch, but to share.

  The air around them pulsed. Reality spun.

  Suddenly he stood in another place, another moment—

  He was watching himself.

  —Epsilon, standing in a white chamber.

  He looked older.

  Not physically, but existentially.

  He was holding something. A shard. The same one from Argus.

  Then the room exploded with mirrors—hundreds of versions of Epsilon, some weeping, some silent, some screaming. All watching each other. None able to move.

  Then silence again.

  And the Observer’s voice:

  “Each loop begins with a question. And ends with forgetting.”

  “You want me to remember?”

  “No,” she said softly. “You want to remember. I’m only here to hold open the door.”

  Reality folded back into itself.

  Epsilon stood once more on the platform.

  The Observer was gone.

  The pedestal was gone.

  Only the void remained.

  And in his mind, a single word burned, etched in a place no overwrite could reach.

  Origin.

  When the lift reopened, he was back on Level 7.

  No time had passed. His system clock hadn’t moved a second.

  Kiera’s voice pinged through comms.

  “Hey. You still breathing?”

  He hesitated.

  “Yes,” he said. “Still operational.”

  “Good. Because Command’s asking about your anomaly trace. You want me to stall?”

  “No.”

  He looked toward the hallway.

  Everything looked the same.

  But something inside him had shifted.

  “No,” he said again. “Tell them I’m going deeper.”

  There were no shadows in the Citadel’s lower levels.

  Not because of the lighting—though it was flawless—but because shadows required light to behave. Down here, light bent. It moved around corners before it arrived. It echoed.

  Epsilon walked through the maintenance corridor with careful steps, though his body made no sound. His internal systems ran silent, his presence nearly unreadable. Yet he felt watched.

  No alerts. No pings. Nothing to confirm it.

  And that was the problem.

  The further he went beneath the Citadel’s skin, the less real things felt. Walls shifted half a degree off-angle. Signage changed fonts between blinks. Once, a control panel momentarily displayed a language he couldn’t translate. The override cleared it instantly, but it left a phantom taste in his logic core.

  He remembered the Observer’s words.

  “Each loop begins with a question.”

  He reached Sub-Basement 13.

  Officially, it didn’t exist.

  Even to him, the access code had come like a whisper—an echo from the pedestal, from the false room that hadn’t existed. And yet, the door accepted it. Slid open with no resistance.

  Inside was darkness.

  True darkness. Not absence-of-light darkness, but something thicker. Denser. Like the concept of light had never been programmed here.

  Epsilon stepped in.

  The room woke.

  Thin lines traced themselves in the air—lattice structures made of soft blue glow, sketching out architecture where no walls had existed. Holographic. Maybe. Real? Uncertain.

  And in the center, a sarcophagus.

  Not mechanical. Not ceremonial. Somewhere in between. Its surface was glass, but not transparent. It shimmered with fractal colors that didn’t stay still.

  Epsilon moved forward.

  The closer he got, the more his internal readings flickered. Identity anchor destabilizing. Cognitive mesh unsynced. Warnings built up in layers, each more frantic than the last.

  He placed his hand on the surface.

  It hummed.

  ::ACCESSING…::

  He didn’t trigger it.

  But the system responded anyway.

  The lid peeled back—not with sound, but with silence pulling away. And inside…

  Was him.

  Or another him.

  Sleeping.

  Older. Scarred. More human, less machine. A faint pulse beat at the throat. The body twitched—once—as if aware of being seen. Then stilled.

  And in the back of his mind, something uncoiled.

  A memory not his.

  —A field of white grass.

  —The sound of water running uphill.

  —Two figures. One speaking, one listening.

  He flinched as the image vanished.

  The figure in the sarcophagus stirred again. Its lips moved. No sound. But he understood.

  “Break the mirror.”

  A sharp pain pulsed behind Epsilon’s eyes.

  He stumbled back—systems surging, crashing. His balance failed. Everything tilted.

  BREAK THE MIRROR.

  The words weren’t instruction. They were command.

  A choice.

  He looked around the room.

  And for the first time, noticed the walls. Real ones. Covered in writing. Scrawled, etched, burned into the surfaces. Symbols. Equations. Sentences in a dozen tongues.

  He stepped toward one.

  ::You were never meant to be a detective.::

  Another.

  ::You are the echo, not the source.::

  Another.

  ::If you can read this, you’ve already failed once.::

  The room began to pulse.

  Not the lights—reality.

  The words on the walls folded into themselves. Looped.

  His vision spiraled.

  Then—

  Kiera’s voice again.

  Sharp. Distant.

  “Eps. Come in. I don’t know where you are, but Command just scrubbed your entire last cycle. It’s gone. Your trace, your logs—blank.”

  Silence.

  Then her voice dropped, softer.

  “I’m locking your feed from my end. No more syncs. You’re off-grid now.”

  The transmission cut.

  And just like that, he was alone.

  Epsilon turned back to the sarcophagus.

  It was gone.

  Only the empty platform remained.

  His own reflection lingered a moment longer in the air. Stared back at him.

  Then smiled.

  And vanished.