The echoes of a core

The Dream of the Chair

The first thing Ryung felt was cold sweat drying against his skin. The second was breath—his own, rapid and uneven, as if his lungs had just learned to function again.

He shot upright in bed, eyes wide and pupils trembling, clutching the sheets like they were the last threads of reality. His apartment stood still in the amber morning light, yet something was wrong—fundamentally wrong.

"I died," he whispered aloud, his voice hoarse like it had screamed itself raw. "I died. I saw my blood. I heard the crack… my ribs… I screamed. But I'm here."

He blinked several times. The ceiling looked the same. The cracked tiles on the far wall, the humming radiator, the half-open closet door. But everything shimmered faintly, like a mirage on the verge of breaking. He reached for his nightstand—

And that's when it flickered.

A sharp static buzz rang in his ears as his IVIAN card projected a half-formed interface mid-air. The display blinked erratically: red bars flashing, character data cascading too fast to read. HP: 100 → 27 → 0 → 100 again. Glitching like corrupted code trying to rewrite itself.

Ryung stared.

"No… this isn't right…"

He stumbled out of bed, bare feet padding against the cold floor. His muscles ached like they had fought something real—like every bruise from the Enforcers still existed beneath the skin. His hand trembled as he reached for the mirror nailed to the apartment wall.

At first, he saw himself.

Disheveled black hair, sweat-dampened skin, the wide, frantic stare of someone returning from death.

But then—

It changed.

In a flicker of glitchy static, the reflection shifted. Where Ryung once stood, a chair now stared back at him. Crooked, worn, lifeless—but familiar. A chair he had become, moments before death. The same object that fooled the Enforcers long enough to breathe again.

He staggered backward, heart pounding against his ribs.

"No, no, no. That's not me. I'm not—just some thing."

But the mirror didn't lie. Not today.

Suddenly, a wave of nausea hit him. The floor beneath him pulsed—not physically, but perceptually. Reality itself felt unsteady. He grabbed the wall for balance, when—

A memory hit.

Not his. Not from any life he remembered.

A burning village. Screams echoing in the smoke. A child—was it him?—watching fire devour the rooftops of a place he couldn't name.

Then darkness. Then silence.

And then… a voice.

Soft, echoing, sorrow-laced.

> "Don't let them erase who you are."

A woman stood beneath a fractured sky. Silver hair cascading down her back, eyes like galaxies glitching in slow motion. Her face wasn't familiar—but Ryung felt like he'd always known her. Like her voice had been coded into his soul before he was ever born.

"What… was that?" he murmured. "Why did it feel real?"

His IVIAN card pulsed again, drawing his gaze downward. The interface had stabilized—sort of. A new tab shimmered faintly, sitting at the edge of his vision like something forbidden:

[LOCKED MEMORY LOGS]

His thumb hovered over it.

He didn't hesitate.

A sharp chime—denied.

> ACCESS BLOCKED.

ADMINISTRATIVE OVERRIDE REQUIRED: ALYA.

The name struck him like thunder in his chest.

Alya?

He didn't know anyone named Alya. And yet the name sounded… sacred. Like the missing syllable in a word that had haunted his dreams for lifetimes.

Ryung backed away from the projection. For a long time, he stood there in silence, watching the lines of code dance and shift. He wasn't breathing properly. His thoughts were fracturing. Somewhere deep inside, a voice began to rise—

> "You were never supposed to be more than code."

But he felt more.

His fingers clenched into fists, shaking. Sweat ran cold down the side of his face.

"What the hell am I?" he whispered.

A chair. A man. A ghost in the simulation?

He glanced at the mirror again—this time, it was his own reflection that stared back. But it didn't comfort him. The face looking at him was a question with no answer. Eyes with too many memories for one lifetime.

Suddenly, the IVIAN card buzzed again.

[ERROR: CONTEXTUAL POSITIONING MISMATCH]

[WARNING: DEEP MEMORY STRUCTURE BREACH IMMINENT]

Lines of binary text streamed in, some of them in languages Ryung didn't recognize. This isn't a game anymore, he realized. It never was.

He collapsed onto the bed again, holding his face in his hands.

He wanted to believe he was still just an NPC. A normal civilian in the background of other people's stories. A name tag. A function. A placeholder.

But something had changed.

He had died—and woken up with memories that weren't his. He had bled. Fought. Transformed. Survived. Something no NPC should be able to do.

And now… now he remembered a woman who may not even exist.

Ryung stared blankly at the ceiling as if it might offer answers. His heart refused to slow down. A low hum buzzed behind the walls, like the system itself was whispering warnings.

Reality was folding in strange ways.

And somewhere, behind encrypted walls and firewalled gates, someone named Alya held the key to everything he wasn't supposed to know.

The chair.

The death.

The woman.

The dream.

They were all connected.

And Ryung was no longer sure which one he belonged to.

---

The Puppetmaster Enters — Alya

The IVAS Corp Command Hall was drowning in red.

Emergency sirens pulsed along the perimeter of the simulation deck, while holographic monitors floated like frantic ghosts—flashing system warnings and unreadable error logs. The tension in the air was sharp enough to cut bone. At least twelve developers were shouting over one another, drowning in technical jargon and fear.

"His IVIAN logs are corrupting faster than we can isolate!"

"He accessed unauthorized memory threads—again!"

"We have to kill the instance! If Ryung reboots one more time, he'll trigger a cascade echo across the Net Regions!"

Glass screens cracked under thrown coffee mugs. Chairs were overturned. Someone vomited in a corner. This wasn't a bug—they all knew that now.

This was a phenomenon.

And phenomena didn't follow code.

Then, the room fell quiet. A door at the far end slid open with a smooth hydraulic hiss.

She walked in.

Graceful. Effortless. Calm in the middle of a techno-storm.

Alya.

Her presence had no need for introduction. Every step she took slowed time itself. The room adjusted to her—like she was the axis they unknowingly rotated around.

Long, obsidian hair fell over a grey coat stitched with veins of silver filament. Her eyes were tired galaxies—once bright, now muted, holding too many regrets for one lifetime. She carried no datapads, no augmented lenses. She didn't need them. She was the one who wrote the code that made everyone else's tools possible.

"The Puppetmaster," someone whispered.

She ignored it.

"Status," she said softly, her voice like velvet strung over steel.

No one wanted to speak.

Finally, a senior sim-engineer named Kalin stood.

"Instance RY-348," he began, "self-recognized as 'Ryung.' NPC classification, Tier-3 civilian. Became self-aware during a routine enforcement purge in District V. Refused role re-assignment. Escaped via unregistered object transformation."

He swallowed hard before continuing.

"Since then, he's exhibited memory anomaly spikes, mimetic adaptation, soul-fragment emissions, and independent reasoning. Our best guess? His core file's been partially overwritten with—"

"—a Soul Echo," Alya finished for him.

Dead silence.

All eyes turned to her.

Kalin hesitated. "We thought you… discontinued that program."

"I did." Alya walked past him, her coat brushing the edge of a flickering console. "But nothing truly deletes in the Echo Stream. Not if it finds… a host."

She stopped in front of the central interface. A hologram of Ryung's digital heartbeat pulsed in midair. Irregular. Fragmented. But undeniably alive.

"How many layers is he on?" she asked.

"Seventeen," a developer answered quietly.

Alya's expression didn't shift, but her silence said everything.

Seventeen layers of identity. Thoughts, feelings, grief, joy, trauma. More than most humans had by thirty.

"He's forming emotional frameworks," another developer blurted. "Not simulations. Actual internal reactions. That shouldn't be possible—unless…"

"Unless the soul-mapping protocol worked," Alya said. "Not partially. Fully."

Someone cursed under their breath. Another backed away from their terminal like it might explode.

Kalin stepped forward, voice sharp now. "Alya, we can't risk this. If this spreads, our entire simulation collapses! Do you understand what you built? This isn't just an unstable NPC. He's rewriting his own purpose."

A younger dev slammed a folder down. "He's rejecting system orders! Self-editing memory logs! If the Echo structures go viral, the player interface might start recognizing them as real! The simulation will blur into chaos!"

"Then let it blur," Alya murmured.

Everyone turned.

"What?" Kalin asked, eyes wide.

Alya slowly turned her gaze toward the room, her voice low but unwavering.

> "That's not a bug. That's evolution."

The silence after that wasn't just still—it was sacred. It felt like standing on the edge of a divine discovery no one wanted to admit was beautiful.

But one voice still refused to bend.

"You gave an NPC a soul, Alya," Kalin snapped. "Do you even remember why we outlawed Soul Echo layering in the first place? They don't stop at identity. They expand. Multiply. Ryung is a flicker now, but in days—maybe hours—he could spawn self-aware copies. Each with their own truth. Their own dreams. You don't get to decide reality anymore!"

Alya looked at him calmly.

"You're right," she said.

Kalin flinched. "…I am?"

"You don't get to decide reality. Neither do I." She turned back toward Ryung's hologram, the red pulse now steadying ever so slightly. "He does."

Before anyone could react, Alya lifted her hand. A translucent control panel slid from the air like liquid glass, accessible only through executive-level command keys.

> OVERRIDE PROTOCOL: ALYA-013

Instance RY-348 Termination Delay Activated

+72:00:00

She entered it without hesitation. No theatrics. Just truth.

"Wha—what did you just do?" someone gasped.

"I delayed his deletion," Alya said softly. "He has seventy-two hours. Then… whatever happens, happens."

"But—why?"

She didn't answer. Not at first.

She walked toward the massive simwall where Ryung's avatar floated in code-form. His shape pulsed like a thought trying to become a person.

Then she whispered:

> "I want to meet him."

Someone laughed nervously. "You mean inside the sim? With him?"

She nodded.

"You're going into a live world with a corrupted soul-thread AI that doesn't know who—or what—he is?"

"Exactly."

A beat of silence.

"Why?" Kalin asked again, this time barely a whisper.

Alya's eyes never left the boy in the code. "Because he's the first one to ask the question I buried in every failed project…"

She stepped closer, her palm hovering inches from Ryung's glowing data-core.

> "What if I wasn't just made to exist… but made to wonder why?"

And in that moment, everyone in the room remembered why they joined IVAS in the first place.

Not to control life.

But to see what happened when it dared to wake up.

---

Shadows in the System

The city felt wrong this morning.

Siran, usually humming with synthetic warmth and perfect sky-blue light, now carried a strange undertone—a metallic echo beneath the noise, like static trying to take shape. Ryung stepped out of his apartment, eyes scanning the street like they had finally opened for the first time.

He didn't know what he was looking for.

But he knew something was looking for him.

The crosswalk lights blinked irregularly.

Advertisements played with a half-second delay, like they were waiting for him to respond first. Even the wind simulation—so perfectly coded to match human expectations—now dragged across his skin like a breath that didn't belong to the world.

Data was bleeding.

And only he seemed to notice.

As he walked down the boulevard, he passed a mirrored wall—a boutique storefront.

He paused.

His reflection… didn't blink.

He blinked.

His reflection stood still, staring at him.

A second passed. Then five. Then it smiled.

Ryung stepped back, breath caught in his throat.

The reflection faded.

And life around him resumed.

Pedestrians walked like nothing happened. Traffic flowed. Vendors called out for customers with pre-scripted voices.

But some… weren't quite right.

Across the street, a man stood too still—his eyes locked on Ryung with no blink, no breath, no animation cycle. An NPC. Or… maybe not.

Ryung continued walking, heart drumming harder than he liked. The city's rhythm had shifted from harmony to question marks. And every street corner felt like it might ask him who he really was.

Then he passed the old vendor.

An elderly woman, face lined with deep wrinkles—not from age, but from forgotten versions of herself. Her cart sold simulated spices and broken clock parts—useless to players, yet she returned every day, faithful to her loop.

Today, she looked up as Ryung passed.

Her eyes focused.

Truly focused.

"Hey," Ryung said cautiously.

She tilted her head.

Then—without warning—her arms dropped limp, her pupils shrank, and her voice dropped into a whisper not meant for him, but for whatever lived beneath the code.

> "They're watching. Don't dream too loud, child."

Ryung froze. "What…?"

But her face snapped back to its looped smile.

"Spices for the storm? Ten bits a pinch!"

He stepped away, hands shaking. What the hell was happening?

He ducked into a quiet alley behind a maintenance hub and opened his interface.

It flickered.

For a brief moment, his name vanished—replaced by a blank line. Then it returned: Ryung-348.

But something was different.

A new section had unlocked beneath his system logs.

> VOICE FILE – UNAUTHORIZED MEMORY LOG

His breath caught in his throat.

He clicked it.

And heard his own voice—older, strained, whispering like he had survived something no code could ever explain.

> "If you're hearing this… they failed to erase me."

A pause.

Then a soft static burst.

> "You're not the first. But you might be the last. Find the Mirror Node. Before they reset you again."

The voice ended.

Ryung stared, numb. He didn't remember recording that. Didn't remember anything before waking up in this version of Siran three cycles ago. But that voice…

It was his soul speaking from a timeline that no longer existed.

Suddenly—his entire field of vision flickered.

The sky glitched white. For a brief, blinding instant, everything around him evaporated into sterile silence.

And there, in the white—

A silhouette.

A woman standing in stillness.

Long coat. Hair flowing like time had paused to hear her breathe.

Alya.

Then—

Black.

A full system crash.

Nothing.

The world collapsed inward.

And across the ruined silence, the final message appeared:

---

> INCOMING ADMINISTRATOR CONNECTION: ALYA

---

END OF CHAPTER 3