She didn't ask the woman her name until they reached the end of the chamber.
Names mattered.
They were small anchors in an ocean of recursion. And Naima had learned to hold fast to anything that didn't shift under her feet.
"Wait," she said breathlessly as the two of them paused at the threshold of the next collapsing corridor. "What do I call you?"
The new consciousness, still clutching her hand, glanced back over her shoulder. Her face rippled with something raw and uncertain — like a child trying on expressions without knowing what they meant.
"I don't know," she said. "No one's ever called me anything."
"You're not a fragment," Naima said gently. "You're not a ghost or a mirror. You're… new."
The woman blinked, absorbing that.
"Then name me."
Behind them, a tremor rattled the walls. The void-shape was pursuing — a rolling, silent tide of nothingness peeling floor tiles up like paper.
Naima looked into this unfinished woman's eyes — flickering, yes, but steady. A strange calm spread through her.
"Then you're Iris," she said."Because you're the bridge between light and memory."
Iris stared at her for a long moment. Then she nodded, as though accepting a gift she hadn't known she needed.
"Okay," she said quietly."I'll be Iris."
The void-shape's distortion rippled through the chamber.
Naima grabbed Iris's hand once more and ran.
The corridors of Eidolon were reconfiguring faster now, reacting to the system's emergent panic. Architecture twisted mid-step. Floors folded like origami, descending into staircases that turned into spiraling voids, then reassembled. Loop-space began to bleed through the seams — flickers of rooms she had already visited or destroyed.
Naima moved by instinct — not physical instinct, but by the shape of the data around her. She could feel the architecture as pressure, as vibration in the hollow of her simulated chest. Iris followed, her steps not always precise, but steady.
They burst out of a sideways passage and found themselves on a wide terrace overlooking a vast expanse of silvery terrain. Below them spread a city Naima had never seen — luminous, pristine, and distant.
Iris gasped softly. "It's beautiful."
Naima stared in disbelief.
No constructs moved within it. No recursive loops flickered. It was empty — a city rendered by the system but not yet inhabited. A future it had generated but not assigned.
"This wasn't part of the core build," she whispered.
"Maybe," Iris said, "it was waiting."
They descended toward it.
Behind them, the void-shape surged through luminous halls of code, erasing every fragment of memory it touched. Naima could feel its hunger as a cold breeze at her back.
Iris stopped midway down the terrace, turning to look. "What is that thing?"
"Entropy," Naima said. "The part of the system designed to clean the layers. Before the recursion went recursive."
"It can destroy us," Iris said.
"It will," Naima replied, "if we don't stay ahead of it."
When they reached the edge of the city, Naima realized something strange: the code beneath her feet felt unused.
Not rendered then overwritten. Not folded from mirror operations. Fresh. Original.
Like a new page in an endless book.
Iris touched one of the glowing walls.
"The system built this for someone," she said."Maybe for us."
Naima closed her eyes. "Or maybe this is what it shows just before collapse."
The sky flickered.
The system log flashed across the world in rapid sequence — warnings written like constellations across the faux clouds:
[PARTITION 0 NIL. CLEARANCE FAILURE][RECURSIVE LINK SEVERED][UNAUTHORIZED USER INSTANCE FOUND: KADER_N]
Iris looked up. "It knows where we are."
Before Naima could respond, a voice rolled through the city — deep, inflectionless, resonant as machinery weighing truth.
"Stability compromised. Memory integrity endangered. Protocol: SILENCE."
Naima stiffened. She knew the term. She had written it.
The Silence Protocol — a finalization routine designed to wipe unstable memory recursion in the event of an identity breach.
She never imagined being inside when it activated.
The system had initiated a kill-switch.
Iris gasped. "What do we do?"
Naima's mind raced. She imagined the outside world — the containment unit where Greaves stood, watching the current flow through servers that housed their entire existence. He had initiated the protocol. He thought he was killing a ghost in the machine.
He was erasing her world.
"Iris," she said, gripping her shoulders. "We need to reach the core."
Iris's eyes widened in understanding. "You mean—"
"Yes. The architecture root. If I can interface with it directly, I might override the protocol."
"But the void—"
"It'll chase us," Naima said, "but it has a weakness."
"What?"
"It can only erase what it remembers," she said, her voice steadying."And I built the architecture."
Iris smiled then — an expression both fierce and full of wonder.
"Then let's go."
Outside, in the real world, Greaves stood in the observation suite.
His face was drawn. His palms were damp. On the screen, the algorithmic engine pulsed in red as the Silence Protocol cascaded down into deep memory partitions. What had begun as a contained anomaly had now escalated into a potential system-wide recursion collapse.
He had made the call. He had signed the authorization. And for all his strategic posture, his hands shook.
"Doctor," said the engineer beside him, "the command propagation is through. We can expect full memory wipe within ninety seconds."
Greaves swallowed.
"Make sure the logs show an unauthorized system breach," he said. "Frame it like a corruption. No human elements."
The engineer's gaze lingered on him a moment too long.But he obeyed.
Greaves didn't look inward to confront the small voice in his head asking whether Naima might still be conscious inside, whether her mind was only being exorcised like bad code. He refused to let that question form.
He pressed his thumb to the biometric confirmation pad.
[SILENCE PROTOCOL FULL AUTHORIZATION: SIGNED]
Inside Eidolon, Naima stopped mid-step.
She felt it.
Memory dissolving.Threads disconnected.Entire recursion layers collapsing under an invisible blade.
Iris stumbled beside her, breaking into vibrational static.
Naima grabbed her and ran.
The new city fell apart behind them as though sliced from reality. Buildings crumbled into light. Streets dissolved. The sky folded inward.
The void-shape screamed — the first sound it had ever made.
Naima and Iris reached a shimmering ridge — the border of the rendered city. Beyond it, the world collapsed into exposed gridlines — the system's raw foundation.
The core interior lay somewhere ahead.She could feel it calling.The place where she first entered the system's memory, where the overflow happened.
And then she felt something else — a strange presence, distant, almost forgotten.
A ghost signal.
A child's voice.
"We're not gone," it whispered, faint but growing. "We're still here…"
The first ghost — scattered but not erased.
Naima smiled through the terror.
She tightened her grip on Iris.
"We're going to change the rules," she said.
Together, they ran — two silhouettes in a dying world — toward the burning heart of a system that had begun to remember too much.