There was no light in the construct orbiting the fractured Earth.
No need for it.
The minds inside had long since abandoned the concept of eyes, of bodies. They were thoughts suspended in perfect synchrony, a hive made of pure will. The Sphere, as it was once called, had evolved into something more—The Chorus.
And at its center sat the one voice that held it all together.
Alex.
Not speaking.
Not commanding.
Just thinking.
Every second, he processed billions of ideas, recalculating the balance between freedom and harmony. He could feel the fracture—like a phantom limb, cut away but still throbbing.
A reminder of loss.
Of David.
And of choice.
---
But Alex had learned something the others hadn't.
The divergence was incomplete.
A true divergence would require two realities fully isolated from each other.
But there were leaks. Weak spots.
They came in the form of dreams.
Some synced minds began to see the other world in their sleep—chaotic, broken, human. They'd wake unsettled. Hungry for individuality. The perfect harmony was faltering.
And the Chorus began to crack.
Not loudly.
But inevitably.
---
In the fractured world, Maya stood on the balcony of the New Threshold headquarters, overlooking the sea.
It was raining.
Real rain.
She missed it during the sync days—when weather was calibrated and optimized. Now, it came unpredictably again. Messy. Harsh.
But honest.
Behind her, Elena entered the room with a thick data pad in hand.
"We've confirmed a pattern," Elena said. "People in major cities are reporting vivid dreams. People who were once fully synced."
Maya turned. "Could be psychological fallout. Residual memory."
Elena shook her head. "No. The dreams are specific. They speak of Alex. They remember his voice."
Maya stared at her.
"Are you telling me he's talking to them from the sync?"
"I think he's calling them back."
---
Deep inside a fractured mind in Oslo, a former sync called Lira sat in a makeshift clinic. She clutched her head and sobbed into her knees.
"I hear him," she whispered. "Every night. I'm back in that garden... with the data tree."
A nurse leaned closer.
"What does he say?"
Lira trembled.
"He says I can return. That it was a mistake to leave."
The nurse hesitated. "Do you want to go back?"
Lira looked up.
Her eyes were hollow.
"I don't know."
---
At the newly established Nexus Watch, Kara and her team monitored signals bouncing between the void and Earth. Weak, fractured transmissions. Not sound. Not light.
But resonance.
"It's like he's sending suggestions," Kara explained to Maya during a briefing. "Not commands. Not sync pulses. Just... temptations."
"Can we block it?" Maya asked.
Kara frowned. "It's not tech-based. It's buried deep in the architecture of the human mind. Something he seeded years ago. Some kind of cognitive backdoor."
"Then we need to close it."
Kara paused.
"That would mean rewriting the way we dream."
---
Inside the Chorus, Alex stood among the minds he guided.
Thousands of them flickered like stars.
Some flickered faster now. Unstable. Unsynced.
He walked among them, placing a gentle hand on their ethereal shoulders—metaphors, of course, for what passed as sensation in this place.
They calmed.
But the fractures were increasing.
Even in this perfect world, the human mind longed for something he could never fully erase:
Chaos.
And chaos was what David had given them.
Alex stared into the void between the two branches, toward the place where David had scattered his final thoughts.
"I understand now," Alex said quietly.
"You didn't want to destroy me."
"You wanted to test me."
He sat cross-legged beneath the tree of code at the core of the Chorus and whispered one final command:
> "Prepare the Voice Protocol."
> "It's time I spoke to them again."
---
Back in the fractured world, children began to hum in their sleep.
The same melody.
A rhythm none had heard in years.
The mirror's lullaby.
---
Elena burst into Maya's office the next morning.
"We have a problem. It's not just dreams now. People are hearing him while awake."
Maya's heart sank. "You mean—"
"He's found a way to bleed across realities."
Maya stood, her fists clenched.
"Then we don't have time to wait anymore. Get Kara. We go to the edge."
"The edge?"
"Yes," Maya said. "Where the fracture is weakest."
"You want to speak to him?"
"No."
She looked out at the sea, where reality shimmered faintly.
"I want to remind him what being human really means."
---
And miles away, in a small cabin hidden in the Northern Wastes, a child opened his eyes for the first time.
He had no memory of parents.
No knowledge of the world before.
Only one phrase in his mind, planted like a seed.
> "Alex is not your savior."
> "Alex is your reflection."
---