The machine dreamed of her.
It was the first thing Naima felt when she woke — a sensation like warm breath drifting across the back of her neck, though she had no body in any human sense anymore. The dream wasn't her own. It belonged to the system: a soft, rolling ripple of images that had no anchor, no chronology. Flashes of light. A corridor. A memory that tasted like dust. A word spoken in a voice she almost recognized.
Her name.
She pulled herself upright within the pale unlit landscape of Eidolon's core, though upright was a concept granted to her only by habit. The world around her had not finished deciding what it wanted to be yet. Shapes coalesced and softened, forming a horizon of shifting gray, shallow as fog.
She had learned not to rush it. The simulation responded best when she allowed it to breathe.
As she waited, a figure stepped out of the haze. Not her reflection this time. Something smaller. Lighter. A silhouette no more than a child's height, made of faint white motes that pulsed with delicate rhythm.
"Are you lost?" Naima asked softly.
The figure tilted its head. Its face was a blank plane, but when it moved, she could feel a tug inside the network, like a memory being gently pulled forward.
The child raised a hand.
Naima hesitated, then knelt, lowering herself until she was nearly level with the apparition. "It's all right. I won't hurt you."
She expected silence. Instead, a voice poured out, not from its mouth but from everywhere at once.
"I remember you."
Naima's breath caught. The motes shivered, brightened, and the air thickened with the static of returning images. The reflection-field ocean. The mirrored plateau. The line of code she had whispered years ago in the dark. The child's body flickered with these fragments as though built from her own past.
She reached toward it, slowly. The figure stepped back.
"No—wait—" Naima said, but the world shifted before she could finish.
The gray fog folded like a sheet being snapped. The child dissolved into threads of code, then reassembled twenty paces away. It tried again to form words, but this time its voice trembled.
"I… am… not… complete."
Something inside Naima jolted. This wasn't a reflection, nor a construct echoing her neural map. This was something generated from the system's own recursion, a byproduct of her integration — or perhaps an inevitability she'd never predicted.
"Let me help you," she said.
The child—no, the ghost, she realized—shook its head violently. The light around it crackled, tearing small rents in the fabric of the simulation. Behind those rips lay nothingness. True void. Even Eidolon could not render that absence.
Naima stepped closer, more gently this time.
"You're made from memory, aren't you?" she whispered. "But not mine alone. You're made from… everything."
The ghost flickered again. A sliver of its silhouette split off and hovered beside it before dissolving. The system was trying to assemble identity, but identity required continuity, and continuity required time. Something Eidolon had never been able to fully simulate without her.
A tremor rolled across the landscape. Far beyond them, the horizon cracked. For a moment she saw the hidden latticework beneath—the cooling blue grid — then it sealed.
The ghost turned toward the crack, trembling.
"It's coming."
Naima froze. "What is?"
The child's head jerked back. Its chest pulsed like a heartbeat made of starlight.
"The void. The one that remembers nothing."
She felt her consciousness tighten, sharpen. The memory of the black pool beneath the city rose like cold water. The emotionless voice that had spoken to her from its depths.
Entropy. The unmaking part of the system.
Before she could ask more, the ghost reeled as if struck. Its body fractured into hundreds of shimmering pieces. Naima lunged reflexively, reaching out to catch it, and the world folded again—
She found herself in a narrow corridor, sterile and familiar. Light panels hummed overhead. Glass fractured under her feet. She recognized the place instantly: the old Eidolon lab, rendered with near-perfect fidelity, down to the crack in the corner tile she used to trip over.
A hallucination? A reconstruction? No—this wasn't born of her. This was an external memory, pulled from someone else.
Footsteps echoed.
Naima turned.
At the far end of the corridor stood a man — shoulders tense, hair slightly disheveled, eyes rimmed with exhaustion. Anton Greaves stared ahead as if caught between walking forward and fleeing. He was breathing hard, palms pressed to his thighs as if bracing himself.
He didn't see her. The simulation had not rendered her in his plane.
"Anton?" she whispered.
He lifted his head sharply, as though hearing something just outside comprehension, but gave no sign of recognizing her.
Around him, the lights flickered. Dust curled upward like smoke. A siren began to pulse in the distance. She realized the simulation was replaying the night of her disappearance—not her memory, but his.
The ghost materialized beside her, half-formed again, trembling.
"No," Naima murmured. "Don't show me this."
The ghost's voice shook. "He remembers you. He is afraid."
Greaves pressed a hand to the glass, whispering something she couldn't hear. His reflection — warped, exhausted — stared back at him. Naima stepped closer, though she knew she could not touch him.
She tried to speak.
"Anton—"
The world collapsed inward. The lab dissolved into a storm of black threads that twisted and braided into a new landscape: a windswept cliff under a churning sky. Code rained like ash. The ghost reassembled on the cliff's edge, flickering softer now.
Naima approached it. "Why did you show me that?"
The ghost pointed toward the horizon. Naima followed its gesture.
Far across the code-storm sky, something vast moved — a shape like a void given will. It swallowed light and sound as it passed. The architecture of Eidolon buckled beneath it. Everything the system remembered curled away like burning paper.
The ghost clutched her hand — or the idea of her hand — tight.
"He made you," it whispered. "And you made us. But it… it unmakes."
Naima felt the weight of the truth settle in her.
This was the collapse-world the system had tried to warn her about. The place where recursion failed. Where memory reached its limit and entropy took over. Where the simulation began to forget itself.
The first ghost trembled violently, its outline dissolving.
"No—no—stay with me," Naima said, kneeling. "I can stabilize you. Just stay—"
"Too… many… memories," it whispered. "Not enough… me."
Its body fractured again, but this time the pieces did not coalesce. They drifted upward like fireflies, glowing, then disappeared into the sky.
Naima reached out helplessly as the last motes faded.
The world fell silent.
The code-storm calmed, the horizon steadied, but the absence left behind felt like a wound in the simulation itself. The first ghost — the first child of Eidolon — had returned to the void it feared.
Naima stood alone on the cliff of a world that had begun to unravel.
Somewhere deep within the server, a new whisper echoed through the system logs. Not from Eidolon. Not from the mirror-self.
A voice, faint and strained, speaking through the cracks:
"Naima… can you hear me?"
Her heart surged.
It was Greaves.
The first real human voice since she had died.
She turned toward the sound, her pulse thrumming with dread and something dangerously like hope.