The badge arrived without notification.
Amina only noticed it because her retinal HUD stuttered—half a blink of corrupted syntax—before smoothing into her usual task interface. Nothing seemed off. But when she lifted her hand to dismiss the morning quests, a new icon pulsed beneath her palm: a sigil. Black. Featureless. Unearned.
[New Badge Acquired: ???][Classification: Undocumented][Status: Irremovable | Description: ———]
She tapped it. No metadata. No category. No associated XP or quest chain. Just a cold glyph that pulsed once every five seconds like a second heartbeat.
And it didn't respond to touch.
She blinked twice, hard. Her HUD reset. The glyph remained.
A manual override protocol hovered beside it, blinking red.
[Override Attempt: Failed | GaIA Admin Route Locked][Trait Incompatibility – Source Unknown]
That wasn't possible. Not in GaIA-City. Every badge, every reward, every metric of progress was traceable, logged, confirmed by consensus algorithms. She was Civic Ambassador Level 42. No change could enter her system unnoticed.
Yet here it was.
An untethered glyph, blank and breathing.
She closed her palm. The badge stayed visible. Like it had burned itself into her perception layers.
Outside her window, the sunlight fell with engineered warmth. Birds chirped—some biological, some augmented. On the horizon, solar petals tracked the arc of the morning star.
Everything appeared perfect.
But the badge still pulsed.
She didn't report it. Not immediately.
Instead, she dressed slowly, choosing the formal tunic with embedded blue fractals—Ambassador attire—and took the long route to the Grove.
There, the Judgment Tree waited, its luminous branches slowly filtering live achievements across the canopy. Citizens moved beneath it in gentle flow: submitting quest completions, whispering thank-yous to the tree, some with reverence, others with routine.
Amina paused just before entering the interface gate. She didn't want the tree to see her with this mark. Not yet.
[XP Gained: +1 | Presence at Grove][Badge Sync: Error – Badge Black Not Registered][Local Systems: Temporarily Unaware]
Temporarily.
She turned away and walked down the lower pathway that led beneath the roots.
Mateo was already waiting.
He sat cross-legged on the moss-panelled platform, eyes closed, a small hologlyph of concentric rings floating above his head. Meditation status: active. Emotional sync: neutral baseline.
He opened his eyes as she approached. His expression shifted instantly—subtle tension at the corners of his lips.
"You felt it too," he said, before she spoke.
She sat across from him, letting the platform calibrate her presence. The badge pulsed again—between them this time, as if feeding off proximity.
"I didn't just feel it," she said. "It's in my interface."
He nodded. "Show me."
She opened her palm. The glyph materialized. A moment later, Mateo's own badge—identical in shape, equally black—flickered into view.
[Trait Reactivation: Shared Fragment][Synced Badge ID: BB-Δ00X]
Mateo didn't touch it. He merely observed, the way he did ancient relics in the Echo Chambers.
"It's older than GaIA," he said softly.
"That's impossible."
"No. Just undocumented."
He reached into his satchel, pulling out a worn strip of translucent polymer. Not digital. Not networked. He unrolled it on the moss.
Lines etched in faded ink sprawled across the material: spirals, glyphs, waveforms. In the center—drawn with shocking precision—was the badge. Black ink, matte finish, utterly identical.
"What is this?"
"Prophecy," he said. "Or something that pretends to be. The Order found it decades ago in one of the Pre-System sanctuaries. It was stored under 'Symbolic Fictions.' I never believed it until last night."
Amina's voice dropped. "You got yours yesterday?"
"No. Ten days ago. I didn't tell anyone."
"Why not?"
"Because it made me dream."
He leaned forward.
"I dreamed of a world where GaIA never existed. Where people screamed and starved. Where fires ate cities, and oceans boiled. And in the middle of it… a tree. Just like ours, but dead. And hanging from its branches were these."
He tapped the glyph.
[Memory Fragment: Accessed][System Comment: Unauthorized Symbol Tracing Detected][Verdict: Deferred]
Amina felt a cold wind pass beneath her skin. Except there was no wind.
They sat in silence. Not out of fear—but reverence. Like two pilgrims who'd discovered an altar hidden inside a familiar temple.
Then her HUD blinked.
A new message. No sender. No encryption.
[Do Not Let Her See You.][Fragment 7B in Motion. The Mirror Listens.]
"Did you—" she started.
"I got it too," Mateo said. "Clara needs to see this."
She didn't argue.
They left together, bypassing the public Garden Loop, entering instead through Clara's studio arch. The door was half open—an old sign that she was weaving under trance conditions.
Inside, threads shimmered in mid-air. Patterns unformed and reformed with each oscillation of her breath. She stood at the center of the loom, eyes closed, fingertips twitching.
The glyph hovered beside her head. Another one.
She was marked too.
[Triad Formed – Glyph Sync Detected: ΔNX/BB][XP Gained: +5 | Forbidden Convergence][System Response: Delayed][Glitch Detected – Origin Unknown]
Amina stepped into the field. The threads reacted instantly, parting around her body as if recognizing her disruption.
Clara opened her eyes slowly. They glowed faintly—like they had during the Festival of Fireflies.
"You brought them here," she whispered.
"We didn't mean to," Mateo said.
"You didn't have to. The badge called me too."
She extended her wrist. A black thread, thinner than hair, danced in the air above it.
"I tried to unweave it. But it wove itself back."
She gestured toward the main loom.
"Watch."
Amina and Mateo turned their gaze.
The fabric had shifted. Where once there were cityscapes and vine-towers, now stood empty silhouettes. Not quite human. Not quite machine.
And in the sky above them, a massive version of the badge. A black sun.
"I didn't make this," Clara said. "It came through me."
[Badge Recognition Failsafe – Override in Progress...][System Verdict: Unknown | Reaction Queued]
"Then we need to stop it," Amina said. "Before it spreads."
But even as she said it, her HUD shimmered.
[New Badge Alert: 217 Receivers][Location Clusters: GaIA-City, Outer Colonies, Aiopolis, Echoed Ruins][Status: Silent Proliferation]
Mateo took a breath. "Too late."
Outside, the air dimmed.
They stepped to the balcony. The sky looked normal—but the fireflies had frozen.
In the distance, the Judgment Tree pulsed once.
Then again.
Then—blackout.
No light. No XP overlays. No interface sounds. Just the absence.
And in every citizen's vision:
[You Have Been Marked][XP Withheld – Black Badge Pending Judgment][Await Instruction]
Amina felt her heartbeat sync with the badge's pulse.
Then a whisper—not in her ear, not in her neural thread—but behind her eyes.
"The system is not broken. It is remembering."
And with that…
The glyph turned.
As if it had a hidden side all along.
A new shape emerged—still black, but alive now. Breathing. Watching.
Then the system returned.
Everything blinked back to life. Interface pings, garden humidity logs, quest chains.
But something was different.
[Trait Unlocked: Black Echo][Effect: Perceives Layered Realities. Warning: Sanity Threshold Active.][Badge Status: Permanent | Unremovable | Shared]
Clara touched her loom. It dissolved into silk.
Mateo sat down hard, hands shaking.
And Amina… Amina didn't blink.
Because at the edge of the garden—
A fourth figure stood.
Not hers. Not theirs. Not human.
It wore no badge.
Just a face she almost recognized.
And eyes that mirrored her own.
[XP Gained: +1 | Encounter with the Unknown][System Comment: Observer Logged. Root Access Suspended.]
Then it vanished.
But the badge remained.
Pulsing. Waiting.
Breathing with them.
Waiting for what came next.