Clyde's breath came in short gasps as he staggered through the neon-lit corridors of the abandoned data center. His mind still reeled from what had just happened—another reset, another forced rewrite of his reality. But this time, something was different. He remembered everything.
The voices, the entity, the collapsing void. It was as if his consciousness had slipped through the cracks of the system meant to erase him.
The flickering emergency lights overhead cast eerie shadows across the server racks. The air was thick with dust and the low hum of machinery, but something else lurked beneath the surface—a presence. He could feel it watching him.
His fingers twitched towards the small data drive he had swiped from the lab before escaping. It was labeled L.R.P. - Phase III. Legacy Rewrite Project. The key to everything.
A soft chime echoed through the air. Clyde froze. His breath caught in his throat as lines of code scrolled across a floating holographic screen in front of him.
[Unauthorized Memory Access Detected]
[Entity Reconvergence in Progress]
"Shit," Clyde whispered.
A sharp static noise rang through his skull. His vision blurred, distorting like a corrupted file. He fell to his knees, clutching his head as fragmented voices whispered in overlapping tones.
"You should not be here."
The servers around him whirred to life, screens flickering wildly as distorted figures formed within the glass. Faces. Familiar, yet wrong. Ghosts of erased memories. They mouthed silent warnings, their eyes hollow with unreadable sorrow.
And then——
A distorted figure emerged from the darkness between the racks. Unlike the entity from before, this one seemed… fractured. Its form barely held together, as if resisting deletion. Its red eyes locked onto him, but its voice was different. Less hostile.
"Help… me…"
Clyde's heart pounded.
"Who are you?" he asked, stepping back cautiously.
The figure flickered, its form glitching. More distorted whispers echoed from the screens around him.
"I was… like you… a mistake… a fragment that… wasn't erased…"
Clyde's grip tightened on the data drive. If this thing was another remnant of the failed rewrite, it meant the system wasn't perfect. There were holes in the code—weaknesses.
He might not be alone in this fight.
But before he could speak again, the alarms blared.
[Entity Reconvergence Complete]
A deep, menacing hum filled the air. The shadows around him shifted. And then, a familiar, terrifying presence emerged.
The original entity. The one that had reset him before.
Clyde had seconds to act.
"Run," the fragmented figure rasped.
This time, he didn't hesitate.