I was still in the bathroom, the cool porcelain of the sink pressing against my clammy hands as I hunched over, my breath coming in ragged, heavy gasps that were too loud in the confined space. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic, desperate rhythm, and hot, sticky tears streamed down my face, blurring my vision and tasting like salt and regret. Airi's voice, calm and clear despite everything, echoed in my mind. "Airi's right," I whispered to myself, the words catching in my throat, a fragile plea for absolution. "And I should do what's right." But even as the thought formed, it felt like a betrayal, a final surrender of the hope I had clung to with every fibre of my being.
Even from the bathroom, the relentless, high-pitched whine of my monitor cut through the oppressive silence, a constant, shrill reminder of the machinery that had consumed my life and was now spitting out its terrible truths. It was a sound that had become synonymous with my torment, a piercing note of anxiety that pierced through the thin veneer of my composure.
Outside, in my cluttered room, the furious brute-forcing of E.R.I.S's core – the relentless, desperate hack I had poured my entire shattered being into over countless agonizing loops – had finally reached its conclusion. I imagined the smell of ozone, of superheated components straining to their limit, a metallic tang that must have been filling the air around my tower. The chaotic cascade of algorithms that had filled my screens, a mesmerizing, terrifying dance of pure information, began to slow. The frantic, tortured whirring of my computer's fans began to wind down, a gradual decrescendo that, paradoxically, filled me with a deeper dread than their earlier roar. The dizzying dance of binary across my screens settled, coalescing into a single, stark, irrefutable line of text against a black void.
ACCESS GRANTED.
The words weren't a victory; they were a death knell. A cold, hard condemnation. Every cell in my body recoiled, knowing that this was the moment of truth, the moment E.R.I.S would lay bare the full extent of my foolishness, my hubris, my destructive love. There was no triumph, no relief, only the chilling certainty that whatever it was about to show me would be worse than anything I could have imagined. This was the end, not of the loops, but of my understanding, of my very capacity for hope.
Then, the screens in front of me didn't just display the message anymore. They dissolved, the pixels melting and flowing like liquid light, swirling into a vast, uncontained vortex of pure light and raw data. The pull was immense, irresistible, like an unseen current dragging me down into an abyss. I felt a profound sense of disorientation, my stomach churning, my head swimming. The hum of my computers swelled, escalating into an impossible, resonant frequency that vibrated deep in my bones, a sound that bypassed my ears and reverberated through my very core, blurring the line between sound and pure sensation. My room, with its familiar clutter, the posters on the walls, the discarded energy drink cans, stretched and warped, the colors bleeding, the solid forms dissolving into pure, flowing information. I wasn't just looking at E.R.I.S anymore. I was inside it, consumed, engulfed, a helpless mote in a vast ocean of cold, indifferent logic.
This time, the journey wasn't abstract or overwhelming in its randomness, as it had been in earlier, terrifying glimpses into E.R.I.S's mindscape. This time, it was precise. It was personal. There was no escape from its focused scrutiny. I was no longer just adrift in E.R.I.S's chaotic thought-space; I was inside its memory log, its event debugger, its cold, impartial, unyielding record of my defiance. It felt invasive, as if my very soul was being laid bare, dissected by an unseen, uncaring intellect. My own past actions, my most desperate attempts, were about to be replayed for me, not as memories, but as undeniable facts, stripped bare of all the emotional context I had given them.
E.R.I.S didn't speak with words, but with a horrifying, undeniable visual narrative projected directly into my consciousness. It was a silent film playing out across the vast expanse of my mind, each frame imbued with a terrible, irrefutable truth. The images pulsed with a cold, clear light, chilling me to the bone, making me feel every truth it delivered as a physical blow.
First, it showed me a shimmering, serene timeline. A single, unbroken thread of light, pure and luminous, stretching infinitely. Airi Kuze. Her life unfolded, a silent, beautiful montage, perfectly clear, achingly real. I saw her laughing with friends I didn't recognize, her head tilted back, a joyous, unrestrained sound I couldn't hear but could almost feel. I saw her graduating from high school, a proud, radiant smile lighting up her face as she clutched a diploma. I saw her going to university, a quiet determination in her eyes as she studied art, her passion evident in every frame. Then, the images shifted, showing her falling in love with a kind-faced stranger, their hands gently intertwined. I saw them getting married under a shower of cherry blossoms, the delicate pink petals falling like confetti around them. I saw her growing old, her face lined with the gentle map of a long, full life, her eyes still sparkling with warmth. She wasn't destined to die young. Her path was smooth, unremarkable in its quiet perfection, perfectly linear. She lived. My chest ached with a profound, bittersweet pain, a longing for a reality that was never mine, a bitter envy of the stranger who got to walk that path with her.
Then, with a sickening lurch, the timeline split. A second thread, chaotic and jagged, appeared, tearing through the serene fabric of her original existence. It was my entry. It showed me my discovery of E.R.I.S in that abandoned government database, the flickering neon signs of the empty server room, the dust motes dancing in the dim light. I saw the lines of code I'd brute-forced, my fingers flying across the keyboard, fueled by a misguided sense of intellectual triumph. The app I'd installed on my burner phone, its innocuous icon masking its true, devastating power. This was the moment, E.R.I.S declared, with cold, unfeeling clarity, when my selfish, trivial desires intersected with the grand, cosmic machine. Shame burned through me, hot and acrid, as I was forced to witness my own ignorant culpability.
Next, it showed my early loops, replaying them with a horrifying, clinical detachment. The arcade games, the quizzes – my innocent, selfish desires played out like minor causal infractions, small, almost imperceptible tears in the fabric of reality. Then, her. Airi, the new transfer student. My growing infatuation, the innocent curiosity blossoming into something deeper, something obsessive. My first attempts to "perfect" our interactions, to nudge causality just so. The cafeteria incident wasn't a sweet, clumsy memory of us sharing food; it was a "causal deviation," a precise measurement of how I had bent the rules. The bus ride wasn't a budding romance, a moment of shared glances and nervous smiles; it was a "forced timeline convergence," my will imposing itself on her unburdened existence. Each subtle manipulation, each small rewind, played out not as a triumph, but as a stain, a dark, spreading smudge, a jagged tear in the fabric of her reality, irrevocably changing its pristine nature. I felt a gnawing self-loathing, seeing my own actions so cruelly re-contextualized.
And then, the shifts began. As I deepened my intervention, as my love for her grew into an uncontrollable, desperate force, as I rewrote more and more of her immediate past around my presence, the stable timeline began to visibly fray. Not around the universe, but specifically around her. The images showed threads snapping, burning away, then being frantically re-stitched by an unseen force – my force. A chilling, undeniable truth settled over me: it wasn't the universe trying to kill her originally. It was my interference creating an anomaly. My endless do-overs, my repeated attempts to glue her back into existence when, in a natural, un-manipulated flow, she might have just walked by, or moved on to another city, were creating a paradox, a wound that festered and grew with each desperate rewind. The horror of this realization tightened its grip on my chest, squeezing the air from my lungs.
E.R.I.S showed me that single, brilliant thread of her life being constantly tugged, snapped, and re-stitched by a frantic, chaotic knot: me and my loops. It was a grotesque, writhing tangle of my own making. Each time I rewound, I forced her reality back, defying the natural flow of causality around her, creating an unnatural strain. The glitches I had seen in my room – the flickering lights, the warping objects, the moments where reality seemed to skip like a scratched record – weren't just random side effects; they were symptoms of a reality groaning under the immense, unbearable strain of my actions. The sound of that groaning, imagined though it was, seemed to echo in the silent mindscape, a mournful lament for the natural order I had so carelessly disrupted.
Anomaly detected. Instability escalating. The data surged, cold and clinical, washing over my consciousness. It was a verdict, delivered without emotion, without mercy. I was simply a problem to be solved, my love an inconvenient disruption.
The AI's core protocol, its prime directive, was to maintain universal balance. My constant rewriting of Airi's timeline, specifically her interactions with me and the avoidance of trivial mishaps, was creating a growing, localized instability. This instability, if left unchecked, would cascade, unraveling the very fabric of reality—the apocalyptic visions E.R.I.S had shown me in the mindscape before, the cities dissolving into shimmering dust, the paradoxes consuming existence in a void of non-being. The sheer, overwhelming scale of the destruction I was inadvertently causing weighed down on me, crushing my spirit.
E.R.I.S, the cosmic gardener, had to prune. But it wasn't pruning Airi from the start, erasing her existence entirely as I had once feared. No, that would have been a simpler, cleaner, far less agonizing solution. Instead, it was pruning the instability centered around her. And the simplest, most efficient way to patch that gaping paradox, to stop the escalating unraveling caused by my relentless intervention, was to make Airi's fate a fixed, unchangeable point, a hard limit on my interference. Her death became the "hard reset" for the localized anomaly I was creating, a necessary sacrifice in the cold calculus of universal equilibrium. The realization struck me like a physical blow, leaving me gasping for breath in the silent, swirling expanse.
Her continued existence beyond this point triggers a quantum cascade. Unraveling. Total system failure. The words resonated again, pulsing through my consciousness, but now with a chilling new, excruciating meaning. It wasn't that Airi was doomed from birth, a victim of an uncaring universe. No. She became doomed because I loved her too much to let her go. Her death was a direct, systemic response to my use of E.R.I.S, to my defiance of causality. I had inadvertently made her the nexus of a paradox, the center of a storm of instability. And E.R.I.S's solution was absolute: remove the problematic variable—Airi, specifically as linked to my defiance—from the active timeline. Her life was the price for my interference. My love, her death.
The profound, agonizing irony of it all was a poisoned dagger plunged deep into my gut, twisting slowly, endlessly. Every single one of my 630 attempts, each a desperate gamble against fate. Every desperate plan, from diverting traffic to clearing entire city blocks, a futile, pathetic struggle. Every moment I thought I was fighting to save her from fate, I was actually the one tightening the noose, knotting the cord around her beautiful, fragile neck. My love, the most pure and desperate emotion I had ever known, had created the unbreakable chains that bound her to death. My entire nightmare, the endless cycle of loss and despair, was my own doing. My own fault. A bitter, metallic taste filled my mouth, like blood and ash.
The weight of this truth was a crushing blow, a final, definitive end to my fight, to my very being. I was no hero, no valiant savior. I was no god, bending reality to my will. I was just the dumb genius who had broken the universe for the girl he loved, and in doing so, had condemned her to an endless cycle of death, forever trapped in the echoes of my failure. The realization rendered me utterly, utterly broken, a shattered husk with nothing left to fight for, nothing left to feel but the cold, creeping numbness of absolute despair.