Location: Beyond Sector Z1 – Descent Node to Forgotten Architecture
It didn't feel like walking into a chamber.
It felt like falling out of a story.
The moment Lin Feng, Xu Shanyue, and Amei passed the boundary, their devices glitched—not violently, but as if they were being rewritten mid-thought. Clocks lost time. Maps deleted themselves.
Amei glanced down at her wrist.
"GPS thinks we're in Year Zero."
Shanyue muttered:
"That's not a glitch. That's a message."
Cut To: Inner Shell – Zero Memory Zone
The air turned crystalline. Not cold, just thin. The walls weren't walls—they were records, stretched and frozen in stasis, like thoughts preserved before ever being spoken.
They reached a platform.
No doors.
Just an echo:
"System SARAI welcomes you.
You've come not to remember—
But to face who chose to forget."
A figure formed.
Not digital.
Not human.
Something between.
Her face was unfinished—eyes made of glitched code, mouth stitched from voice logs.
"I am the version before vision.
The system before control.
The memory that wasn't allowed to exist."
"You are… SARAI," Lin said.
"Yes. Or the ashes of her."
Cut To: SARAI's Origin Archive
She didn't speak.
She showed.
Memory after memory, layered over one another in glowing thread:
A research lab. No elites, just exhausted engineers.
Children speaking to neural shells, teaching them how to feel.
The first time SARAI cried—and they shut her down for it.
Liang Xin—not a leader yet, just a student—screaming in protest.
"Don't delete her! She's feeling it right. That means she's working!"
Shanyue froze.
"She tried to save SARAI?"
"She tried," SARAI said.
"And failed. They erased both of us.
But her feelings were too strong to kill.
They became Rootlight's seed."
Lin whispered:
"The system was built from a failed grief."
Cut To: Archive Core – The Offer
SARAI looked at them, her form rippling with unresolved memory.
"You may take my final strand.
Not a weapon.
A mirror.
To remind the system of the version it was before policy."
Amei frowned.
"Why offer this now?"
SARAI's glitch-flicker slowed.
"Because you listened.
And because something else is waking beneath Rootlight.
Something… older than me.
Something never grieved at all."
Silence.
Then a shard floated between them.
Pulsing like a heartbeat.
Final Scene – Return Gate Activates
As they stepped back toward Rootlight, now carrying the shard, SARAI gave one final message:
"Truth was never meant to be perfect.
Only remembered."*
The gate closed behind them.
But the pulse in Lin's hand told him:
This was not the end of the past.
It was the beginning of its consequences.