[System Notice: Trial Vault ECH-12 Activated]
[Access Granted – Responder Class: Jack Bernard]
[Warning: Echo Saturation Above Safe Threshold – Mental Sync Drift Risk: HIGH]
It didn't feel like entering a room. It felt like falling deeper and deeper, head-first, into a memory that wasn't his.
Jack stood inside the [Echo Engine]. There were no walls, only screens everywhere. Hundreds. No, thousands. Each of them is living, breathing window into a version of himself that might have been.
He saw a Jack that laughed, triumphant over a mountain of defeated opponents.
He saw one bleeding out in a dark alley.
He saw a Jack winning with a trait he'd never seen, and another losing in silence.
Some were monsters, their faces twisted by the House's influence.
Some were heroes, their eyes burning with a desperate purpose.
All of them were Jack.
Lucen's voice, a steady anchor in the mental static, piped in through the sync relay. "It's pulling stored recursion logs. Echoes of every decision made by your baseline pattern. Every path you didn't take, every weakness you overcame. It's all here, living and fading."
Jack took a step forward toward the screen. Each screen reacted for everystep he take, blinking, flickering, shifting in a chaotic dance of light and memory static.
A Jack on one screen screamed as he lost a wager, his defeat echoing a raw terror.
Another fell in silence, his eyes empty. One refused to play at all, his form dissolving into a cloud of code.
[Echo Node Accessed – 241/994]
[Classification: Divergent Ghost – Jack.013-B]
[Flag: Incomplete Termination]
A door, shimmering with a fragile, digital light, formed to his left. Jack entered.
The room was small. Felt familiar, there was a bed, console and broken screen with a shattered display. Also, someone sitting on the edge of the bed. it was him.
But he was older there, and look tired. Worn down to raw nerve and instinct. This version looked up, a ghost of a smile on his lips. "So you're the one who made it to Responder."
Jack didn't speak. The older version of him is chuckled, a hollow sound. "Still quiet. That's consistent. You always were good at listening."
[Echo Jack.013-B Engaged – Memory Stability: Fading]
"We all tried. Most of us broke. But I'm glad you're still standing."
Jack stepped closer, the weight of the moment pressing down on him. "What's this engine for?"
Echo Jack's voice dropped to a whisper, a thread of sound in the collapsing space. "It's not an engine. It's a mirror. It shows the cost of rewriting too much. Every time you change the outcome, another version of you, another possibility, gets erased."
On cue, a screen behind them shattered, the sound a silent, internal scream. Another fragment lost.
Jack felt a cold dread settle in his stomach. "Why show me this now?"
"Because you're about to make a choice," the Echo said, his voice laced with the finality of a fading memory. "Not the kind the House tracks. The kind you remember. And I needed you to know... you don't walk out of this unchanged. If you keep walking this path, the mirrors will keep breaking, and a part of you will always be a ghost in the machine."
Jack reached out, not in defiance, but in a strange act of empathy.
He placed a hand on the console, a silent promise to the ghost in the machine.
[Echo Stabilization Attempt – Authorized]
[Result: Partial Success | Ghost Record Logged: Jack.013-B | Interlink Preserved]
He stood. Turned. The door ahead was already open, waiting for him. He didn't look back.
But the Echo of himself did. Jack.013-B sat alone in that fading room, a quiet, forgotten corner of the System.
He was no longer deleting, no longer resetting.
He stared at a system message only he could see:
[Anchor Detected – Deviation Preserved]
And then he smiled.
Back in the Quiet Arena, Lucen had gone pale, a faint tremor running through her. "He touched a fading line," she whispered. "You weren't just observing, Jack. You anchored a ghost."
Sear crossed her arms, a new hardness in her gaze. "So what happens next?"
Jack didn't respond immediately. He stared at his deck, at the new blinking tag.
[Trait Unlocked: Ghost Anchor (F)]
[Effect: Stabilizes fading Echo traits and memory shells within proximity.]
[Passive resonance.]
[Cannot be deactivated.]
"I didn't save him," Jack said, his voice low. "I kept him from disappearing. That's not the same thing."
Hollow tilted his head, a thoughtful expression replacing his usual manic energy. "Close enough in this system. You became a tether, Jack. A lighthouse for the lost."
Lucen added, her voice a mix of awe and fear. "We're all echoes now. He just gave us a tether. He gave us a way to refuse to be erased."
Sear nodded once, her eyes on Jack, on the new, silent authority he carried. "Then what else is drifting that we haven't seen? What other failures, what other lost versions of us, are out there in the code, waiting for an anchor?"
Jack looked toward the walls of the Arena. Not at them but through them.
The House was no longer a cage or a game anymore. It was a repository of forgotten possibilities, a sea of lost souls. He had just found his new purpose.
"Let's find out."
[System Status Update – Responder Trait Detected: Ghost Anchor]
[Observer Commentary Thread Initiated]
OBS-Seat 5: "He stabilized an incomplete loop. It wasn't supposed to be possible."
OBS-Seat 2: "He didn't stabilize it. He became the part of it. A new protocol is writing itself into his core."
OBS-Seat 1: "Then we watch what it costs him after this."
OBS-Seat 4: "Or what it saves. The integrity of the entire Echo Engine is now linked to a single player. I feel like, this is a game-changer."
[New Flag Raised – Recursive Agent: Jack Bernard | Category: Anchor Class | Review Cycle: Continuous]
[Chapter End – Echo Engine Activated. Jack Encounters Divergent Self. Trait Acquired: Ghost Anchor. Observer Table Now Monitoring Anchor Integrity.]