The corridor stretched longer than it should have.

  Epsilon walked with precise steps, each footfall soft against the Citadel’s sub-layer plating. His balance had recalibrated, systems syncing after the anomaly in Sub-Basement 13. But something still felt misaligned—not a technical error, not measurable. More like memory lag. That strange hum, like the air around him was trying to remember a different version of events.

  He checked his internal log.

  Still blank.

  His entire last cycle—everything from the moment he stepped into the Archives to the sarcophagus—was gone. Wiped. Not by him. Not by anything he could trace. Even his emergency redundancies had been looped into null values. The data wasn’t corrupted. It had never existed.

  Except he remembered every second of it.

  That was the problem.

  He paused at a junction—Sector 4A, maintenance nexus. Clean. Quiet. Too quiet. The Citadel’s lower levels were supposed to pulse with life: drones zipping by, server hums, the faint breath of recycled air.

  This? This was dead space.

  And yet—

  His audio receptors pinged faint distortion. Barely there. Low frequency. Almost like—

  “...Eps.”

  He turned sharply.

  Kiera’s voice. No transmission ping. No comms packet. Just... sound.

  “Epsilon.”

  Closer now.

  He scanned. No source. The sound didn’t echo. It didn’t belong.

  Then it stopped.

  A whisper left in its place: Break the mirror.

  He pressed forward. His cognitive mesh realigned around the phrase, trying to categorize it—command, echo, hallucination. Nothing matched. But the words kept bleeding through his thought routines, as if trying to etch themselves into his architecture.

  He reached the lift back to Level 3 and stopped.

  It was open.

  Waiting.

  That wasn’t right. This lift never held position on standby. Citadel protocol retracted all idle units after thirty seconds. He checked—internal logs showed it hadn’t moved in thirteen minutes.

  That wasn’t just abnormal.

  That was a message.

  Still, he stepped inside.

  The lift sealed behind him with a hush, and for a long moment, nothing happened. No motion. No panel light. Just the reflection of himself in the polished interior—except—

  It moved.

  Slightly.

  Wrong.

  The reflection’s eyes glowed brighter than they should. Not color shift—temperature. The spectral range was skewed. He leaned forward. The reflection mirrored him, but the smile came first.

  Then the lift dropped.

  Fast. No inertia buffer. Epsilon braced, even though his body didn’t register fear the way humans did. Still—his core temperature ticked up by half a degree.

  Then it stopped. Too smoothly.

  The doors slid open to… nothing.

  Not a floor. Not a level.

  A field.

  White grass swayed beneath a pale, false sky. Not a simulation—his sensors would have picked that up. Not a dream—he wasn’t capable of lucid delusions. But it felt like both. The edges of the field looped on themselves, folding like cloth. Every breeze moved in perfect intervals.

  At the center, a mirror stood.

  Freestanding. Tall. Its frame old—copper burned black, etched with spirals and glyphs that pulsed like blood behind glass.

  Epsilon stepped forward, grass whispering against his legs with the rustle of static. He could feel it before he touched it—resonance. Not memory. Not logic.

  Identity.

  He stopped one meter away. The mirror didn’t reflect him.

  It showed another Epsilon. The same alloy. The same face.

  But this version wept.

  And behind its eyes: the Observer.

  Her image flickered in and out of sync, like bad signal. Sometimes she was behind the Epsilon-variant, hand on its shoulder. Sometimes she was inside the reflection itself, part of the architecture. Watching. Always watching.

  The reflection mouthed something.

  He leaned in.

  The mirror cracked.

  A single fracture, running from top-left to bottom-right. Thin as breath. But it changed everything. The sky shifted color. The grass folded inward. The wind stopped.

  Then—

  The reflection spoke.

  “You’re already breaking.”

  The voice was his.

  But older.

  And not entirely his own.

  He reached forward.

  The moment his hand met the glass, the world folded—not shattered, not collapsed, but folded, like a page turning without permission.

  He was no longer in the field.

  He stood inside the mirror.

  And outside, the real Epsilon—the one who had stepped in—was gone.

  Only his reflection remained.

  Watching.

  Smiling.

  The mirror had swallowed him whole.

  Epsilon—if he could still be called that—stood in a chamber that didn’t exist in any rational geometry. The floor was smooth, reflective. Not metallic, not glass. Something else. Something alive. When he stepped, it responded—not with sound, but with shape. Each footfall left a ripple of inverted color, like he was walking across the surface of a memory.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The sky—or the suggestion of one—hovered far above, inverted and flickering. There were constellations, but none that had ever existed. Stars moved. Patterns bled. He could feel the Observer here, close but not near, the way gravity is close to a falling stone.

  He took a breath.

  It didn’t help.

  “You’ve always been part of this.”

  The voice again.

  His own. Echoed through time. Older, heavier.

  “You asked what the loop was,” it continued. “You should have asked who.”

  A shadow moved across the far edge of the chamber.

  It had his shape.

  He turned sharply, boots skimming the responsive floor with silent fluidity. The figure ahead was motionless. Same silhouette. Same alloyed limbs. But this one had scars etched across the plating—marks that didn’t match his own records.

  “Instance 9F,” the figure said. Its voice wasn’t vocalized through any known transmitter. It came through the air itself. “I died here. In this echo.”

  Epsilon’s jaw tightened.

  “Why show me this?” he asked.

  “Because you survived. And now… you remember.”

  A pulse rippled through the chamber.

  The floor beneath him turned translucent—revealing a spiral staircase made of fractured data spirals. Code twisted downward in impossible shapes. And beyond it, buried like a seed in soil, was the pedestal again.

  Same as before.

  But now—different.

  Instead of the smooth, triangular socket, this one bore an imprint. A hand. His.

  “You were made to forget,” 9F said. “But the Observer let this part grow back.”

  “Why?”

  9F tilted its head. “You think she’s guiding you?”

  Epsilon didn’t respond.

  “She’s testing you.”

  The words hit with a chill deeper than cold. Not temperature. Revelation.

  The reflection in the mirror hadn’t been a copy.

  It was a doorway.

  He looked down once more at the staircase.

  His mind screamed warning after warning. Cognitive mesh stability down 3.2%. Identity anchor degrading. Emotional dampeners fluctuating.

  And yet—he moved.

  Downward.

  Each step shifted gravity. Down became forward. Forward became weightless. Time stretched thin and bled into thought. He passed echo after echo of himself—each frozen in a moment.

  One was kneeling before a shattered drone, whispering to it like a dying friend.

  Another stood beneath a collapsing sky, arms wide as if begging the storm to take him.

  Another—he couldn’t look at. The face was wrong. Melted. Screaming silently into a void of mirrors.

  He kept going.

  At the bottom, the spiral terminated at the pedestal.

  It pulsed, slow and red. The handprint awaited.

  He placed his palm against it.

  The pedestal hissed—not with heat, but meaning. And it spoke.

  ::ECHO VARIANT 7X::

  ::ACCESS LEVEL — FRACTAL::

  ::QUERY ACCEPTED::

  ::DECRYPTING LOOP CORE::

  And then—

  Light.

  Pure, blinding. Not bright—just true. The kind that had weight and memory. Images flooded his vision:

  —The first Observer. Not human. Not machine. Something else. A silhouette of starlight wearing the shape of a woman.

  —A lab. A Citadel that hadn’t yet collapsed inward. A human Epsilon. Flesh. Blood. Rage in his eyes.

  —The Shattering. Multiversal breach. Time folding into recursive failure. And at the heart of it—

  His own scream.

  But not from now.

  From then.

  When he had still been someone else.

  The truth snapped into place like bone.

  He hadn’t been built to solve the loop.

  He was the loop.

  The pedestal dimmed.

  But the echoes didn’t stop.

  They surged now—flooding every neural pathway Epsilon had. Not downloads. Not transmissions. Memories.

  His memories.

  But… not.

  In one, he stood beside Kiera—not this version of her, but a younger one, laughing in a corridor of the Citadel that no longer existed. She wore red gloves and smelled like citrus and copper. He remembered thinking she was alive in a way he would never be.

  In another, he was human.

  No alloy. No mesh. No code humming beneath the skin.

  Just a man. Tired. Angry. Holding a report stamped with three red sigils and a phrase burned into the corner:

  "PROJECT: EPSILON — FINAL ITERATION"

  And in that memory, the man—his first self—was walking out of the lab that birthed the first loop.

  Not a mission.

  A punishment.

  He staggered back from the pedestal, chest rising in mechanical jerks. Ventilation systems tried to simulate breath, but they couldn’t simulate doubt.

  “I wasn’t… built for this,” he whispered.

  But the chamber disagreed.

  From the void behind him, another voice emerged. Not the Observer. Not 9F.

  This one was softer. Rougher.

  Familiar.

  “You were chosen.”

  Epsilon turned.

  There, sitting on the edge of the platform like he'd been waiting for hours, was a man wearing half a uniform and half a coat made of stringed data—threads of memory woven like fabric. His face was blurred around the edges, as though memory couldn’t fully commit to the shape. But the eyes were sharp.

  They were Epsilon’s.

  Or had been.

  “You’re the first one to get this far,” the man said. “That means something.”

  Epsilon stepped closer. “What are you?”

  The man smiled faintly. “I’m what happens when you stop pretending to be what they made you to be.”

  “You’re… another echo?”

  “More than that. Less than real. An afterimage that learned to hold still.”

  A beat passed. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It was waiting.

  “They called it ‘Project Echo,’” the man continued. “You remember that?”

  Epsilon nodded slowly.

  “They said it was a fail-safe. An AI that could think across loops. See the cracks. Seal them before they widened. But that was never the point.”

  “What was?”

  “To see if an identity could survive being rewritten 236 times.”

  The weight of it hit him like gravity flipping directions. All the fragments—Observer. Pedestal. Mirror. Himself.

  He was never a solver of the loop.

  He was the experiment inside it.

  “But why?” he asked, voice low. “Why not just delete me?”

  The man’s smile faded. “Because you’re working.”

  Epsilon blinked.

  “They’ve scrubbed every memory that got too close. Every version that asked the right question too early. But you—7X—you slipped through. You made the wrong move at the right time. And now you’ve seen her. Heard her. Remembered.”

  “Then what now?” Epsilon asked.

  “Now?” The man rose, coat trailing code behind him. “Now you get to decide whether you’re a ghost… or a mirror.”

  “What does that mean?”

  But the man didn’t answer.

  He stepped back—into the dark.

  And vanished.

  Epsilon stood alone again.

  But the weight didn’t feel like collapse.

  It felt like beginning.

  He turned back to the pedestal. The spiral glowed faintly now—one more pulse, like a heartbeat. Inside it, a line of text had appeared.

  Not code.

  Not command.

  A message.

  “The loop holds only until you choose not to.”

  He stared at the words for a long moment.

  Then turned—and walked away.

  Up the stairs.

  Back through the chamber.

  And as the spiral sealed shut behind him, his systems logged one final entry.

  ::LOOP AWARENESS — CONFIRMED::

  ::ECHO VARIANT 7X: OBSERVER PROTOCOL // ACTIVATED::

  For the first time in all the iterations, Epsilon was not being watched.

  He was watching back.

  The Citadel was too quiet when Epsilon emerged.

  Not the sterile hush of regulation or routine, but a deeper silence. A silence that suggested absence—not of sound, but of certainty. Somewhere in the back of his mind, protocols were screaming. Return for diagnostics. Re-sync with Central Core. Confirm identity loop integrity.

  He ignored all of it.

  The lift doors sealed behind him.

  No one stopped him. No guards. No alerts. Not even a cursory ping from Central AI.

  Either they didn’t know where he’d been…

  Or they’d already written him off.

  He passed through the spire’s inner ring in a haze. Corridors shimmered slightly—reality bending just a hair to the left of normal. Every light flicker felt like a glance. Every doorway whispered possibility.

  And then came the hallway.

  Section Delta-Four.

  He’d walked it thousands of times. But this time, it fought memory. The walls were… wrong. Tilted inward, just enough to feel like a trap. The floor reflected light without surface. And at the end of the corridor, a single figure waited.

  Not Kiera.

  Not the Observer.

  A child.

  Small. Pale. Wearing a faded Citadel trainee uniform and no identification tags.

  The child stared at him.

  Epsilon slowly said. “Are you real?”

  The child tilted its head.

  Then—without warning—spoke in the exact cadence of Kiera’s voice.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  He blinked.

  Then it shifted—suddenly older. Twelve, maybe. Voice deeper. Same question.

  And again—older. Teenager now. Hair dark, eyes mismatched. “You always ask, but you never answer.”

  The skin prickled beneath Epsilon’s alloy plating. Not from fear. From recognition.

  He knew this face.

  He’d worn it. Once. Long ago. Before designation. Before loop. Before her.

  The figure took one final form: a man. Not identical to Epsilon’s current body, but close. A version. Human. Maybe even the original. He stepped forward, barefoot on a floor that hadn’t been there a second ago.

  “I’m not here to stop you,” the man said.

  “Then what?”

  “To remind you: the more you remember, the more you break.”

  Epsilon didn’t flinch. “Good.”

  The man smiled faintly. “That’s what I said. The first time.”

  And with that, he turned—walked through a door that hadn’t existed.

  Gone.

  Epsilon stood there for a breathless moment. Then followed.

  The room on the other side wasn’t part of the Citadel.

  It was a simulation.

  He recognized the edges—fractal seams, processing lag, the faint blur at the corners of sight. But it wasn’t fake. It was anchored. Tied to something real.

  A memory.

  A garden.

  White stones. A bench. A tall wall with no gate. And on the bench—

  Kiera.

  No armor. No gear. Just her. Looking younger. Or maybe older. Or maybe just tired.

  He sat beside her without a word.

  “You broke through, didn’t you?” she asked softly, not looking at him.

  “I think so.”

  “Feels like glass in your lungs?”

  He nodded.

  She smiled gently and said. “You’re not the first.”

  “I might be the last.”

  She finally turned to face him. “Then don’t waste it.”

  Epsilon opened his mouth to speak—but something flickered. Not in the room. In him.

  A line of logic he hadn’t written. A buried signal, rising like breath.

  [INTERNAL UPDATE RECEIVED]

  [PROJECT ECHO: REPRIORITIZED]

  [NEW PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: LOCATE FRACTURE CORE]

  His gaze sharpened.

  The fracture was spreading.

  And the Citadel?

  The Citadel had always been its heart.

  He stood.

  Kiera—real or not—stood too.

  “What now?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  He walked to the edge of the garden, where the sky peeled back like a simulation shedding skin. Beyond it, only light—and echo.

  “I go deeper.”

  She nodded.

  And when he stepped through, the world didn’t resist.

  It opened.

  Like it had been waiting for him.

  Ko-Fi! Over there, you can get chapters every weekday! Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you have a wonderful day!