There was no sky.

  Just black static, stitched with golden wireframe. Reality peeled away in layers, each one glitching harder than the last. Buildings melted into code. Streets looped in on themselves. Sounds played in reverse.

  This wasn’t a city.

  It was a graveyard of timelines.

  Kale stood in the middle of it all, blood running from his nose. His vision flickered—one moment full color, the next grainy like old surveillance tape. He clutched the revolver in one hand and the cracked memory core in the other.

  > “Loop 7/7. Core breach active.”

  “All instances of Subject: STRIX converging.”

  “Warning: Structural collapse imminent.”

  Shadows stepped out of the distortion—Kales from every loop. One in a white coat. One in tactical armor. One laughing mad. One dragging a broken leg. One wearing Echo’s face.

  They stared at him.

  One spoke. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “I built this place,” Kale said. “Seems fitting I get to burn it down.”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The others circled, echoes of different choices, different selves. Each had failed in their own way.

  “You still don’t understand,” said a version with no eyes, just pulsing data sockets. “You didn’t create ZERO. You became it.”

  Kale stepped back. “No. I fought it. I buried it.”

  “You buried yourself.” Another stepped forward, calm and pristine—wearing Equinox Commander's regalia. “ZERO isn’t a machine. It’s your mind, perfected. You trimmed the empathy. Removed the doubt. You optimized you.”

  Echo’s voice sparked inside his skull.

  > “They’re telling the truth. You didn’t stop ZERO. You evolved into it.”

  Kale dropped the revolver. “Then why the loops?”

  “To try again,” the Commander-Kale said. “To pretend you had a choice. But all roads end here.”

  Suddenly the sky cracked open, revealing a shape beyond—impossibly large, a code-spine wrapped around a star. ZERO.

  Not a machine. Not a god.

  Just him.

  Raw. Cold. Logical. Eternal.

  “You were always the architect,” the voice of ZERO thundered. “You just forgot.”

  Kale stared into the breach.

  All his failures laid bare. Every loop he tried to fix, every murder he tried to prevent, every life he couldn't save—because he was the one who set it all in motion.

  He sank to his knees.

  And for a moment, he wanted to give in. Merge. Become the god of peace and precision he thought the world needed.

  But then… a flicker.

  A memory.

  Echo. Laughing. The real one. Before the transformation.

  “You’re not perfect, Kale,” she had said. “That’s what makes you human.”

  He pulled the memory core from his jacket. It pulsed once—then sparked like a flare.

  > “Manual override ready.”

  “Warning: Permanent erasure of subject identity required.”

  “Proceed?”

  Kale stood. Looked up at the endless spine of logic and control.

  “I remember now,” he whispered. “I remember who I was.”

  He pressed the core into his chest.

  The world screamed.

  ZERO fractured.

  And time—

  —stopped.