The air inside the vault thickened, almost as if time itself was resisting Kael's intrusion. ADA hovered beside him, her holographic form flickering with static.
> "Warning," she intoned. "The ChronoGenesis Core is unstable. Fractures recorded across nine-dimensional strata."
Kael ignored the alert. His fingers flew across the control console, strings of ancient data gliding past his retinas in layered AR fields.
"Look at this…" he whispered. "There's a memory echo here that shouldn't exist."
> "Echo?" ADA tilted her head, glitching. "Specify temporal anchor."
Kael pointed at a distorted waveform hovering mid-air. It pulsed like a heartbeat.
"This data signature belongs to my father. But he died before the ChronoGenesis Protocol was ever conceived."
ADA paused. "Then the signature is a fabrication."
Kael's jaw clenched. "No. It's worse. It means someone inserted a false memory into the quantum archive. Which means…"
He trailed off. ADA filled in the silence.
> "Someone has access to the Origin Layer."
---
A high-pitched chime tore through the vault — a breach alert. Monitors lit up, projecting a location: Sector-51X: Lunar Orbital Station – Abandoned.
> "Fracture breach detected," ADA said calmly, though her eyes dimmed. "Stability down to 42%. Timeline correction required within 2.6 hours."
Kael slammed the panel shut. "We're going."
> "Unauthorized departure—"
He pulled a silver disc from his coat. It shimmered with fractal light. ADA blinked.
> "You reactivated the Temporal Key?"
"I modified it. It won't ask for permission now."
---
Location: Lunar Orbit – Sector 51X
The shuttle cut through the vacuum, docking with the decaying station. Walls creaked. Gravity was low. Kael stepped out, boots magnetizing to the floor.
Everything was dead — no heat, no power, no light.
Except one thing.
In the central chamber, floating mid-air, was a fragment of reality itself, broken like glass. Through it, Kael could see an impossible city — glowing towers, twin moons, people wearing 19th-century clothes and AR visors at the same time.
"This timeline doesn't belong here," Kael muttered. "It's... an overlap."
He approached. The moment his finger touched the fracture—
FLASH.
Suddenly, he was standing in a cobbled street. A woman in a crimson cloak passed him. A child ran by chasing a glowing drone. The sky pulsed between night and day like a flickering bulb.
> "Kael?" ADA's voice echoed faintly in his skull. "You've fallen into a temporal echo. Your body remains in orbit. Only your consciousness has shifted."
"What am I seeing?" he asked.
> "Possibility. A memory of a future that never existed — but someone is trying to make it real."
Kael spotted something ahead. A statue.
No… not a statue.
It was him.
A marble monument. Dr. Kael Virex — Savior of the Unified Timeline. Died: 2212.
"But I was born in 2132," he said aloud.
Then his eyes caught the base of the statue. Someone had etched
a message in glowing ink:
"Protocol Activated: You Already Failed."
---
To Be Continued…