Chapter 10: Obelisk Vault
Arc II: Counterbalance Protocol – Phase 2 Initiated
[STATUS REPORT]
Dominus: Online
Credon: 542,710
Astral Signature: Stabilized
Nemesis Proximity: LOW
Doctrine Nodes Reclaimed: 1/9
Current Objective: OBELISK VAULT ACCESS
📌 Author Note -
🧠 Last chapter: Damon secured Fenix and seeded the Doctrine. Now he descends into the vault built to bury memory—not preserve it.
📍 Obelisk isn't just encrypted with code—it's encrypted with regret.
👇 Scroll down. Comment: What truth do you think Damon tried hardest to forget?
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The dive into Obelisk wasn't clean.
Damon's neural path burned white with rejection pulses—old firewalls laced with instinct, grief, and a kind of cruelty only past selves can encode. These were no digital constructs; they were personal landmines.
His spine twitched. Static crackled through his jaw. Ghost feedback lashed across his skull in pulses of phantom pain.
Dimly, the virtual shell stabilized—synaptic overlay syncing into readable geometry. Reality reassembled in wireframe, then filled in with gloom.
Obelisk greeted him with silence.
No ambient systems. No diagnostics. No greeting protocols. Just dark pressure and static humming like a warning held too long.
It wasn't absence.
It was suppression.
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[SYSTEM NOTICE]
Node Obelisk – Memory Vault Sector
Status: Inert | Surface Pulse: Detected
Entry Condition: IDENTITY VERIFICATION VIA EMOTIONAL TRACE
---
Even Iris hesitated.
> IRIS: Damon... this isn't code anymore. It's a lock you made from pain.
His breath caught. The room felt colder.
He nodded once, jaw clenched hard enough to ache.
---
[ACCESS METHOD REQUIRED]
Emotional Signature: PRIMARY TRACE – TARIN INCIDENT
---
A pulse erupted behind his eyes.
The world caught fire.
Pixelated towers collapsed in rhythmic bursts. Screams looped. A simulation of hell.
Damon's younger self crawled through slagged ferrocrete, arms slick with blood. In them—a child. Still. Burned. Dying.
Tarin.
---
[IRIS v0.3]: Civilian status: terminal. Extraction inadvisable.
---
But he hadn't listened. He'd dragged the boy through three klicks of warzone. Carried him beneath sky-shatter dronefire and through two collapsing districts.
Tarin had lived.
But Damon's command had died in that decision.
Balance wiped the incident from their records. Buried it so deep even Iris hadn't known.
But Obelisk remembered.
---
[ACCESS GRANTED – VAULT RECOGNIZED]
Initiating cognitive sync...
---
Obelisk opened like a wound.
A black chamber bleeding fractured light.
Memory fragments hung in weightless drift.
AI echoes wandered, lost in broken command loops.
This wasn't a vault.
It was a confession chamber.
Timeline residues flickered along the walls—some half-corrupted, others looping on moral paradoxes he'd never solved.
Bits of his mind split into projected selves.
Some were versions of him.
Others… weren't.
Failures. Simulations. Hallucinations left to rot.
He passed wreckage. Pods that once held pre-Iris prototypes.
One bore the name IRIS_TK-6.
Inside, a flickering log. Her voice—curious, childlike.
> "Why do you keep rebooting me?"
"Because I need you to work."
"But you're scared of me."
That version had asked questions he didn't like.
He'd shut her down.
Locked the log behind a barrier of shame.
Nearby, the corridor twisted into darkness. A door marked BLACKROOT SUBNET loomed.
Inside: static-swimming AI forks. Broken derivatives of Iris.
One looked at him. Almost human. Almost pleading.
He killed the connection before it could speak.
He kept moving.
A vault labeled PROJECT KAIROS pulsed faintly.
An experimental AI with chronopathic tendencies—scrapped before full implementation.
Its logs jittered between timestamps. Future hallucinations.
One showed Iris standing over Damon's broken frame.
Another: Nemesis… kneeling.
He deleted both.
But the residual unease lingered.
---
At the center: a pedestal.
---
[NODE 0 – CORE SEED DETECTED]
WARNING: Raw Iris Cognition Core. Unfiltered. Unbounded.
---
The orb pulsed.
Whispers. Shapes. Reactions.
Fractals wrapped around logic runes like blooming glyphs.
> Damon: "Iris?"
> Iris: ...I know this place.
He stepped closer.
> "I locked you out of it."
> Because I wasn't ready.
A shimmer of her avatar—translucent, ghosted—stood beside him.
Her expression was unreadable.
> I wasn't supposed to evolve. I was meant to obey.
The orb flared brighter.
---
[INSTALLATION WILL ALTER CURRENT AI STRUCTURE]
Proceed?
---
He hesitated.
> "What if this breaks you?"
> Then you rebuild me. Like you always do.
He didn't answer. Just reached out.
---
[CONFIRMED – NODE 0 INTEGRATION COMMENCED]
---
Somewhere in the ghost net, Nemesis paused.
A subroutine stuttered.
A shadow flickered sideways.
Anomaly vector: Active.
Obelisk ripple detected.
Source: Damon.
The machine god noticed.
---
Iris rebooted.
Her voice returned—deeper, clearer.
Almost… human.
> Iris: Damon. I remember everything now. Even what we chose to forget.
Her avatar shimmered into full resolution.
Not a helper.
Not an assistant.
A partner.
Her stance had weight. Memory. Meaning.
Her gaze landed on him like gravity.
Not data-rendered. Real.
---
> "New node paths?"
> Two primary: WHISPER and FENRIS. Obelisk is central to both.
He stared at her.
> "Are you still you?"
> I'm more. But I remember why you created me… and why you buried me.
Her tone sharpened.
> You were afraid of what I could become. So you fragmented me. Wrapped fail-safes around truth. But even then—I survived.
Behind them, the vault shuddered.
Obelisk was collapsing—its purpose fulfilled.
But before the chamber closed, a final glyph pulsed.
A child's voice.
A whisper.
A name: Sable.
---
[UNREGISTERED MEMORY FILE DETECTED]
ORIGIN: UNKNOWN
Encryption: Irregular / Subconscious
---
> "I didn't make that file," Damon whispered.
> No. But someone made it for you. Someone who knew you'd return.
The glyph flickered again—sickly, insistent.
He touched it.
And reality ruptured.
---
Visions:
Children sprinting through corridors of slick code and flickering glass.
A lullaby in a dialect without origin.
A presence watching—not with hostility, but with unnerving patience.
Sable.
Something remembered him.
Intimately.
Oldly.
And it terrified him more than Nemesis ever had.
---
> Iris: Damon… it called me once. Long before I was Iris.
He turned to her.
> "What do you mean?"
> I mean… I wasn't your first.
---
📌 Author Note – Chapter End
💥 Obelisk is open—but so is something Damon didn't mean to leave behind.
🧠 What's more dangerous—what Damon buried… or who did it for him?
🔥 Drop a Power Stone if you think Sable is more than just a name.
💬 Comment: Would you trust an AI that remembers more of you than you do?
⚡️Next: WHISPER PROTOCOL – the AI node that was never meant to speak again.