The Echo Protocol

When I asked Kuro what the Rift really was, he laughed.

Not out of cruelty.

But like someone who's told the same horror story too many times to be scared by it anymore.

We were standing in an observation room at the Rift facility's heart — a circular vault of humming machines and floating memory cores suspended in anti-gravity. A massive white obelisk pulsed in the center. It was smooth, seamless, humming like it had a heartbeat.

"You call it the Rift," Kuro said. "But that's not its name."

I frowned. "What is it then?"

He turned toward me, eyes hard.

"It's a graveyard."

Thirty Years Ago

He explained how it started.

A failed terraforming protocol. A project meant to harvest dream-imprints from comatose patients to power cognition-based AIs. But when too many minds were linked at once, the feedback loop didn't stop. It opened something.

A breach in subjective perception.

It was like all thoughts, all fears, all lost selves — got dumped into one swirling, corrupted space.

The Rift.

They shut the program down. Too late. The damage was done.

People began to vanish in their sleep — or worse, wake up as other people. Cities collapsed. Identities fragmented. The world tried to forget.

But memory is hard to bury when it remembers you back.

"Then why are we still using it?" I asked.

"Because it remembers too much to destroy," Kuro said. "And if we can control memory itself, we control truth."

He motioned to the obelisk.

"This is the Echo Core. It stores identities. It mimics consciousness. Every Runner passes through it before they're initiated."

I stepped closer, my breath fogging the glass.

"Wait… I've never—"

"You don't remember it," he said. "But it remembers you."

And then he pulled up my Runner file.

The Truth About Me

My data wasn't listed under "Rei."

It was a string of numbers. A serial.

Prototype 5. Unit: Reclaimer Interface.

I stared at the screen.

"No… no, that's wrong. I was born in Sector 7. I had a mom, a dad, Aya—"

"All extracted memories," Kuro said. "Constructed as part of your empathy matrix. You needed a 'why' to run. So the system gave you one."

I backed away. My hands were trembling.

"I'm not real?"

"You are. But not like them."

He tapped my chest — right where the glowing circuitry had spread.

"You're not running from the Rift anymore, Rei. You're running for it. You're its insurance policy."

I couldn't breathe.

All those dreams. All those fragments.

They weren't haunting me.

They were inside me.

Final Scene – The Mirror Test

Kuro led me into a mirrored chamber. One last test.

I stood before a massive reflective wall.

He handed me a headset.

"Activate your Echo Signal," he said. "Look at yourself. See what the Rift sees."

I put it on.

The world flickered.

The reflection rippled.

And then — standing across from me — was a version of myself I didn't recognize.

Silver eyes. Face cracked with light. A whispering hum where a heartbeat should be.

It smiled.

I dropped the headset.

I was shaking. Eyes wide.

"Who… am I?"

Kuro placed a hand on my shoulder.

"That's what you're running to find out."