CHAPTER EIGHTEEN — Ghosts of a Future That Didn’t Happen
"For a moment, they saw the world as it would have been—without each other."
It happened at 03:46 AM.
The universe stuttered.
Time did not break. It hesitated. A single Planck-second hiccup—a pulse across the latticework of quantum time, somewhere between dream and reality. The source? A failed experiment on Pluto, conducted by a desperate post-human cult attempting to simulate Evergrace neural entanglement.
They failed.
But their failure echoed.
And that echo breached the Evergrace Estate, slipping between firewall layers in the neural dreamscape the twins shared nightly.
And for the first time since their birth—
They woke up… separate.
Section I: A World Without Ren
Yui gasped.
She opened her eyes in a hospital bed—white walls, flickering lights, no symbiotes in her bloodstream, no neural lace. A pulse monitor beeped beside her.
She was twelve.
Alone.
Mortal.
She tried to speak but her throat was dry. Her fingers clutched at the bedsheets, panicked.
No Ren.
No connection.
No warmth humming across her spine.
Just… void.
And then the noise of the world crept in—nurses, machines, arguments in the hallway.
She heard the word "orphan."
Section II: A World Without Yui
Ren was somewhere colder.
A city in perpetual rain.
He was fifteen, alone, hunched under an underpass, fingers trembling as he typed line after line of code into a shattered datapad salvaged from a garbage heap.
His name was on no database.
No family.
No memories but fragments—broken flashes of someone laughing, someone soft, someone missing.
He built algorithms because it gave him purpose. But even as he solved computational puzzles in seconds, there was a hole in his pattern-recognition.
Someone should've been there.
Someone always had been.
Section III: Parallel Pain
The worlds moved on.
Yui escaped the hospital at fourteen. She lived in alleys and libraries, sharpening her instincts, silently correcting the errors of the city—removing dangerous people when necessary, unnoticed.
Ren became a legend in the black-market AI scene by sixteen. But he never smiled. His eyes scanned for faces that didn't exist.
Each of them, unknowingly, eliminated the same types of threats: corrupt elites, abusive foster systems, unstable scientists.
Each of them, unknowingly, drew closer to the same philosophical center.
But without each other, the world never quite aligned.
The Evergrace name was never born.
The stars remained unshaped.
And the world stayed… cruel.
Section IV: Time Tries to Reassert Itself
In the real universe, the Estate AI went red.
ERROR: TWIN ENTANGLEMENT SEVEREDSOURCE: TEMPORAL FRACTURETHREAT LEVEL: MAXIMUMPROTOCOL: TWIN REALIGNMENT INITIATED
Inside the false timeline, something shifted.
Ren—cold, sleepless, hacking into a satellite for fun—froze. A message blinked across his screen.
"You're not supposed to be alone."
He read it once. Then again.
And then he said her name.
Section V: Reconnection
At the same moment, Yui, crouched in a skyscraper vent, blade in hand, stopped breathing.
She whispered his name.
The vent cracked with white light.
The world twisted.
She stood in the rain outside the same underpass where he sat.
He looked up, slowly.
She didn't speak.
Neither did he.
They just stared at each other—for ten seconds, two eternities, all of time.
And then the dream broke.
Section VI: Return
They woke gasping.
In the same bed.
In the real world.
Ren clutched Yui's hand tight. "You were gone."
Yui wrapped her arms around him, forehead pressed to his chest. "Don't let it happen again."
"It won't," he promised. "Ever."
They lay there in silence for hours.
And neither spoke of what they saw again.
But they both remembered.