---
📂 [Classified Excerpt — Redacted Realms: Episode 2, Chapter 2]
Project Velvet Silence: The February Deployment
🎙️ Dr. Rhyne (Archivist)
> "They always said it happened in 1997.
That was a misdirection.
The true detonation — the irreversible overwrite — occurred on February 14th, 2003."
🎙️ Aerin:
Valentine's Day?
🎙️ Dr. Rhyne:
Exactly. The irony was poetic.
While the world exchanged love letters, chocolates, and satellite calls...
the signal was triggered.
This was the 29-second blackout — a moment so brief it was brushed off as a solar flare glitch by most networks.
But what it did, Aerin, was not technical.
It was ontological.
The world you knew before February 2003?
Gone.
Rewritten.
Timeline v3.1 was instantiated.
Clean of most paradoxes.
Neatly compressed memories.
Localized reboots in high-risk zones.
🎙️ Aerin:
So… were we… replaced?
🎙️ Dr. Rhyne:
Not replaced.
Reauthored.
You're still you.
But parts of you were trimmed, rewritten, or shadowed out.
Some memories you think are "dreams"?
Echoes from the earlier draft.
That seahorse emoji you remember?
From the v2.7 Interface Build — deprecated in 1998 in the prior timeline, never released in this one.
That building that used to be on your street?
Phased.
It was real — in a version of the world that no longer has administrative authority.
🎙️ Aerin (quietly):
What gave them the right?
🎙️ Dr. Rhyne:
Project Velvet Silence wasn't about rights.
It was about control.
Reality is too fragile when everyone remembers it differently.
So they harmonized it. At a cost.
🎙️ Aerin:
And now?
🎙️ Dr. Rhyne:
Now the Vault is unstable.
Memories are leaking back through the cracks.
And for the first time in twenty years, th
e world is starting to remember...
that it once forgot everything.
---