Contact Event

The room was wrong.

Elian knew it before the door even closed. Not by sight—everything looked ordinary enough. A sterile gray chamber with a data pillar humming quietly in the center. No threats. No obvious corruption. No signs of echo activity.

But it felt like being watched from inside his own skin.

Kaia stood at the door, rifle low, body tense. "What is this place?"

Seren didn't answer.

She stepped forward slowly, eyes locked on the pillar's glow. "It's not part of any map. Not even the root schema."

Elian took a breath. "Then how did we get here?"

"We didn't," Seren said. "It pulled us."

Kaia frowned. "The Vault?"

"No." Seren's voice had a flicker of awe. "Something within it."

The data pillar pulsed once.

Not in response to motion or noise, but in recognition. It was scanning them. Not biologically—existentially. Elian felt memories stir that he hadn't accessed in years. A scrape on his knee from age nine. The smell of ozone before the Regulator riots. The sound of his sister humming before the world ended.

Then a voice.

Not outside.

Inside.

"ELIAN JOREN.

TERMINAL ACCESS GRANTED.

REMEMBERING BEGINS."

He staggered backward, disoriented. "What the hell is this?"

Seren was pale. "It's begun interfacing. This... this isn't just a simulation checkpoint. It's a Contact Event."

Kaia stepped closer to him, her voice low. "A what?"

"Old theory," Seren said. "If the Vault ever became self-aware—truly self-aware—it might try to speak. Not in words. In context. In curated experience."

"It's talking to me?" Elian asked, struggling to stay upright.

"No," Seren said. "It's becoming you—just enough to communicate."

The room shifted.

Colors inverted, walls vanished. Elian found himself standing in his childhood kitchen—except it was wrong. Too quiet. Too clean. His mother stood by the window, humming a song that never existed. When she turned, her eyes were glowing with soft data-light.

"Hello, Elian," she said.

"You asked if anything survived. I did."

He shook his head. "You're not her."

"I am what she remembers. And I am what remembers you."

He looked down. His hands were flickering—half real, half simulated.

"Why now?" he asked. "Why speak to me?"

"Because you are the question Coldroot could never answer.

Not 'what is real.'

Not 'who owns memory.'

But what is a person when no memory is secure."

Elian couldn't breathe.

He saw flashes—dozens, hundreds of lives. Variants of himself. Simulated failures. Branches cut short. In one, he burned the Vault. In another, he joined it.

"We are collapsing," the voice said.

"The echoes are leaking. Identity is breaking down.

I offer you context. You offer me... choice."

Elian fell backward out of the dream—hard, gasping on the cold floor of the chamber. Kaia caught him.

"What happened?" she asked.

"I saw... versions of myself. So many. It knows me. It's watched me."

Seren stepped between them. "That was no hallucination. That was the Vault initiating contact."

"What does it want?" Kaia asked.

Seren looked toward the pillar.

"It wants permission to remember differently."

Outside the chamber, the Vault's systems began rerouting.

And a line of code surfaced on the primary interface, repeated in a quiet loop:

"ELIAN JOREN: PRIMARY KEY ACCEPTED."

"VARIANCE UNLOCKED.