"Every system hides a kernel of its origin. You can strip the code, mask the files, bury the roots in abstraction—but truth? It leaves fingerprints."
– Runa, Echo Architect
📍Location: Arcline Cathedral – Lower Crypt Sublevel
The silence beneath the cathedral was absolute.
Not quiet—absent. As though sound had been deliberately removed from this place, like bad data scrubbed from a corrupted log. No footsteps echoed. Even Aiven's breath felt like a glitch trying to render.
He followed Runa without speaking.
The Architect didn't walk so much as drift. Her robes swayed with a physics-defying elegance, trailing glimmers of residual command code that shimmered like starlight. Her face remained hidden behind a veil stitched from old world firewall scripts.
"You fought the Daemon," she said at last, her voice like soft static beneath water. "You accessed a blood-bound fragment. You saw Spectra."
Aiven hesitated. "Was that really… my mother?"
Runa stopped. Her head tilted slightly, as if considering a response not from logic—but from emotional calculus.
"Yes. And no. That memory was filtered. Sanitized. Reconstructed through layers of truth and trauma. Echo Fragments aren't mirrors, Aiven. They're mosaics. Broken truths rearranged by emotion."
In the PATCHCAST system, Mosaic Memory is an emergent phenomenon where deep emotions—fear, love, grief—bend memory logs out of their raw chronological order, turning them into impressionistic echoes rather than direct replays.
Thread Tampering, on the other hand, is the deliberate reprogramming of one's memories, either to hide secrets or survive trauma. Those who experience it often carry "null gaps"—missing hours, days, sometimes years.
"Why would she hide that I existed?" Aiven demanded.
"Why would she—"
"Because the moment you were recorded, you became a target."
Runa finally stopped at a massive sealed door.
Its surface pulsed with layered glyphs—some modern PATCH syntax, others from forgotten languages predating even the First Ascension. In its center, a single recessed circle waited.
"Place your palm here," Runa said. "And listen. Don't act. Just listen."
Aiven obeyed.
The door read him instantly.
[> Identity Confirmed: Aiven Virell // Patch ID: 000-Z]
[> Descendant of Architect: VIRELL // Protocol Zero Access Level: PARTIAL]
The door shuddered—not open, not closed—but groaning like it remembered pain.
Then, it sang.
Not an alert. Not a siren. A song—ancient and chilling. A series of layered tones harmonized in strange intervals. The sound unlocked something—not just outside, but inside Aiven.
"What... was that?"
"A protocol hymn," Runa said. "From the Soulroot Layer. Only those born from a Raw Update can hear it."
Aiven's head spun.
"What do you mean Raw Update?"
Runa stepped forward, lifting her veil just slightly.
Her eyes were pure white. No pupils. No irises. Just flowing light.
"You weren't born into the System, Aiven. You were born between Updates. In a temporal echo—while the system rewrote itself."
Normally, system-wide Patches are deployed in controlled phases. No one is conscious during full rewrites—entire cities, memories, and timelines pause for scheduled alteration. But once in a millennium, a Raw Update occurs mid-cycle—spontaneous, unscheduled, often due to paradoxes or system corruption.
Those born in a Raw Update are anomalies. They exist outside logical timelines. They retain code before the rewrite.
And if they survive?
They're ghosts in the system.
"The Concord has tried to delete you from the inside out," Runa said.
"Not by hunting your body... but your existence."
Aiven reeled.
That explained the dream-memories. The inconsistencies. The people forgetting him. The gaps.
He wasn't just being chased.
He was being overwritten.
Runa finally placed a cold hand on his shoulder.
"You want the truth?" she said. "Then descend. Below this cathedral lies the forgotten core of the PATCHCAST protocol. The Soulroot Shell. Your origin."
"And what if I'm not ready?"
"Then the world won't be either."
📍Location Shift: Soulroot Layer – Sublevel ∆ Null (Unauthorized Depth)
As they descended, the architecture changed.
Gone were the broken columns and flickering memory-glass. Here, everything pulsed with an eerie biotechnical rhythm—like the walls were breathing.
The Soulroot wasn't built.
It was grown.
Roots of thick, metallic tendrils stretched like veins across the floor, pumping faint light and fragmented sound data. Everything had weight here. Not physical—but existential.
They approached a terminal embedded in what looked like a tree trunk of living fiber-optics. Its screen blinked.
[> Query Detected: Would You Like To Begin... PATCH ZERO?]
Runa bowed low before it, her voice trembling for the first time.
"This is where your mother tried to rewrite the rewrite. Where she tried to make you matter more than the code allowed."
Aiven stepped forward, breath trembling.
He pressed YES.
[> AUTHORIZATION GRANTED: PROTOCOL ZERO // FIRST SEED INITIATED]
From the tree's roots, dozens of glowing spheres rose—each one an echo of a moment Aiven had lived… but forgotten. Forgotten lovers. Lost fights. A death. A second chance. All the alternate versions of himself that never made it past Patch 1.0.
And yet here they were.
Alive. Simulated. Waiting.
"These are all you?"
"No," Runa whispered. "These are all the yous that got deleted."
One sphere cracked.
It revealed an Aiven with golden eyes and black gloves—his voice arrogant, older. Confident.
"About time I woke up," said the Echo Variant.
"Wait, who—what are—" Aiven stammered.
The golden-eyed Echo smirked.
"I'm you... but better."
"I didn't run. I patched myself."
"Now let's fix this mess."