The door closed behind him with a sigh—not a mechanical click, but a sound like a memory being sealed away.
Lin Xun stood inside the Root.
The walls were not walls. They pulsed.
Veins of light—white, red, blue—ran through the smooth, obsidian surfaces, forming patterns like synaptic webs. It felt alive. Like he was inside the nervous system of something that thought.
Or remembered.
Or judged.
He stepped forward.
Each footfall echoed like it fell across time.
⸻
The Root
This was no server room. No bunker.
This was architecture built to forget—and to trap those who remembered.
Memory ribbons hovered mid-air, looping like translucent film strips. Some twisted endlessly. Others sputtered with static. Some snapped in half mid-frame, disintegrating into strings of meaningless code.
Each was tagged with an alphanumeric designation:
SUBJECT 003 – INTEGRATION FAILURE
SUBJECT 017 – RESISTANCE CLASS-B
SUBJECT 000 – FINAL ITERATION [TANG YUYAN]
SUBJECT ZERO – MULTIPLE CONFLICT MARKERS DETECTED
He froze.
The last one pulsed in crimson.
He reached out, hand trembling.
And the room responded.
⸻
The Multiplicity Vault
A platform unfolded from the floor, its surface forming a wide circular table made of shifting light. On it, versions of himself appeared.
Not holograms.
Recordings.
Fragments.
Some stared back with fear.
Others with rage.
One version leaned over the table, his face hollowed by time, whispering something Lin couldn't hear.
Then the sound kicked in—harsh, digitized.
"I accept the reset. Make me forget."
The words hit him like a punch.
The voice was unmistakable.
It was his.
But different.
Worn. Broken.
He watched the version of himself kneel before an unseen figure—perhaps a system admin, or an interface.
His hands shook. His lips bled.
"I tried," the man said. "I saw too much. It broke me. I don't want to remember."
The room flickered.
⸻
System Intervention
A voice emerged. Cold. Not synthetic—but something worse.
Familiar.
The Curator's.
"You requested amnesty through erasure."
"That request was granted. With conditions."
Another Lin—this one in a hospital gown—screamed, thrashing against restraints.
His face turned to the camera and it was Lin now. The Lin who watched. The Lin who remembered.
He stepped back.
"Why resist now," the voice asked, low and surgical, "when you begged to forget before?"
⸻
Fragments of the Others
The table reshaped again.
Now he saw brief loops of the other "Lins."
• One in tactical gear, shooting without hesitation, a Ledger compliance operative.
• One standing before a crowd, preaching that the system brought "purity through pain."
• One cradling Tang Yuyan's unconscious body, whispering, "I got here too late."
• One… burning files. Crying. Alone.
Each faded.
Each left a stain.
Lin dropped to his knees.
How many versions of him had this place created?
How many times had he tried?
Failed?
Forgotten?
⸻
Tang Yuyan's File
A ribbon descended.
SUBJECT 000 – FINAL ITERATION
He touched it.
Yuyan's face appeared—distorted, static-ridden.
"If you're seeing this…"
Her voice skipped. Repeated.
"…then one of you made it past the loop. Maybe you're not broken yet."
She looked straight at him.
"They kept rebooting you. Every version that got too close… wiped. We kept meeting, didn't we? And you kept forgetting."
"But some part of you still remembers me."
The image glitched again.
Her face split into a thousand glass slivers and reassembled.
"The Root isn't where they control the system. It's where they hide what it cost."
⸻
The Final Vault
A door at the far end opened.
Behind it, no lights. Just dark.
Lin stepped through.
Inside was a chair.
And another Lin—comatose, wired, tubes threading into his skull.
The name tag above the pod:
Subject Zero – Clean Cycle Pending
The system spoke again.
"Overwrite him."
"Take the clean cycle."
"Become what we need."
Lin stared.
He could sit. Let the memory end.
Forget Yuyan. The truth. The blood.
He'd done it before.
Many times.
But now—he remembered too much.
⸻
Choice
He turned away from the chair.
Faced the memory vault.
Faced the sin that was not his—but lived inside him now.
"I didn't want to remember," he whispered.
Then louder: "But I do now."
The system said nothing.
Only flickered.
And behind him, the other version of himself—the comatose Lin—exhaled.
Eyes twitching.
One word, weak but audible:
"Run."