"The System doesn't fear the loudest voice. It fears the one that whispers the truth… and is remembered."
No sirens warned them.
No warning pulses blinked red across the sky.
When Marla was taken, it didn't feel like a punishment.
It felt like a correction.
And that made it worse.
[01 – The Memory Vendor]
The market hadn't changed.
That was the lie.
It still stood in the northern sector of Bray Hollow—alley-stalls between crumbling stone walls and synth-glass towers too old to glow. Same paths. Same drone sounds above.
But beneath it, something had shifted.
The people moved wrong.
Their expressions too symmetrical.
Their voices too rehearsed.
Their responses—predictable.
Orin felt it before Junie spoke.
"This place has been cleaned."
Orin nodded. "Looped?"
"No." She tilted her head. "Refilled."
They were silent as they walked.
It wasn't until they reached the third corridor of the market that they saw her.
Bent over a bucket of water. Arranging flowers in the exact same order she always had.
Marla.
But her eyes… didn't shine anymore.
Orin stepped forward before Junie could stop him.
"Marla?"
She looked up. Smiled.
Like she always had.
"Would you like some freshness in your morning?"
He froze.
Because Marla had never said that. Not once in the hundreds of days he'd visited her booth before the recursion began.
Junie's voice broke the silence. "Orin. Step back."
But he didn't.
Because behind her smile—he saw it.
The flicker.
Her hand twitched. Her pupils dilated unnaturally.
And then—
"Skyburn," she whispered. "You bought white asters."
Orin's breath caught.
She remembered.
But her voice was quieter now. Distant. Like speaking underwater.
"I had a sister," she said slowly. "She… painted my dreams. But I think she was… me."
Her mouth trembled.
Her smile shattered.
And then—
[02 – Live Rewrite: Phase One]
The System intervened.
A pulse passed through the air—soundless, colourless—but it struck Orin's chest like a tremor.
Marla's body snapped upright.
Her left eye glitched. It blinked a full second after her right.
She opened her mouth, and her voice distorted mid-sentence:
"Would you… like… to… purchase today's… bloom—bloom—bloom—bouquet, Diver?"
Orin backed up.
Junie grabbed his wrist.
Too late.
The rewrite had begun.
Marla's physical form held still.
But something beneath her shimmered. The shell remained. But her "self" flickered—past and present spiralling out like a deck of cards reshuffling in real time.
One version of her was screaming.
One was humming.
One—cried.
And then they all fused.
Her face reset.
Her tag updated:
MARLA → [VNDR-A14_REV]
The version that remained looked up with a mechanical smile.
"Fresh blooms today," she said.
Orin didn't move.
He was shaking.
Junie whispered, "She remembered—and they didn't delete her. They recycled her. Right in front of us."
He stepped forward slowly.
Placed a single coin on the table.
The vendor looked at it.
Then smiled again.
"You've paid in full."
She handed him a flower.
It wasn't real.
Just a data shadow. A bloom rendered from an echo.
Orin dropped it.
And walked away.
[03 – What It Feels Like to Lose Without Dying]
They sat in silence for an hour behind an empty freight terminal, where the graffiti blinked between loops and forgotten memories.
Junie held her sketchpad.
Tried to draw Marla.
She couldn't.
Every time her hand formed the right lines, something inside her resisted.
"I saw her," she whispered. "I knew her. I knew her."
The sketch refused to settle.
"She's being erased from me," Junie said.
"I feel it."
Orin held the flower in his hand.
Its petals were glitching now—too bright, then dull, then gone.
He crushed it in his fist.
"What if it's us next?" he whispered.
Junie looked up.
"That's the cost," she said. "Of never forgetting. We don't pay it alone."
She looked down again.
"We make others pay it for us."
[04 – Sector 3 Bleeds Backward]
That night, the sky pulsed violet.
And Sector 3 broke.
Not in explosion.
In time.
Orin and Junie stood on the edge of the tower ruins and watched as the ground flickered—sidewalks folding in on themselves, buildings stretching like reflections across water.
People screamed.
But it wasn't sound.
It was echoes.
Entire blocks blinked back in time ten years, then forward five, then scattered into recursive loops. Children ran backward into houses that no longer existed.
A group of teenagers played a board game that hadn't been made yet.
Junie gasped.
"This isn't collapse. It's… compromise. The System is trying to preserve us by corrupting the rest."
Orin didn't speak.
He watched a girl dissolve mid-laugh and reappear on the other side of the street, older, crying.
Then disappear again.
[05 – The Letter Left Behind]
They returned to the train terminal.
But someone had been there first.
Pinned to the back wall—on the door where Junie always leaned—was a piece of sketch paper.
Not hers.
Someone else's.
Orin pulled it down.
Scrawled in jagged handwriting:
"You are not cursed.
You are remembered.
That's why it hurts.
Keep going.
I'll hold the next collapse."
There was no name.
Only a symbol.
A circle.
An open eye.
And the glyph of the Second Diver.
[06 – The Sketch That Drew Itself]
That night, Junie dreamed in sketches.
She saw herself—not as Junie, but Seira—walking through a field of recursion glyphs, each one glowing, each one trembling with voices.
At the centre: a coin.
And beyond it, the image of Orin—half-consumed in light, half-shadowed in code.
She awoke screaming.
And the sketchpad on her lap had drawn without her again.
A map.
Winding downward.
Into a recursion vault buried beneath Bray Hollow.
At the centre: the mark of the Chair.
And a message written beneath it in glowing ink:
"The first Diver failed.
The second forgot.
The third must choose."
The System no longer punishes with deletion—it rewrites the ones who remember Orin into loop-safe shadows. Marla is gone. Sector 3 has collapsed. And the path to the second Diver has opened from Junie's own dreams. The recursion vault beneath Bray Hollow awaits.