Ash's P.O.V.
If you'd asked me three months ago what the future looked like, I'd have said something dumb—like clean cities and perfect weather. Renewable tech everywhere. Information made holy. Time tamed by science.
If you asked me now?
I'd just laugh. Not bitter. Not cynical. Just… tired.
Because I've seen the future. All of them. All at once.
And I finally understand why no one should.
---
It started when Calla made her choice.
I was there. Not inside the chamber, but close enough that my body vibrated with whatever was breaking—or rebuilding—below ground. Jason gripped my shoulder like it might stop the shaking, like he could anchor both of us to the moment.
And Lila... Lila just cried. Not from fear. From *recognition.*
I didn't cry.
I just listened.
When the Engine sighed—when that final pulse echoed across the sanctum and every stone glowed like memory—I knew we'd crossed something invisible.
A threshold.
And you can't uncross thresholds.
---
The next morning, I woke up remembering a girl who never existed.
Her name was Elia.
She was my best friend in a version of childhood I never lived. We used to climb the old observatory scaffolding together. She loved riddles and once taught me to speak backwards for a week just to see if anyone noticed.
I remember her laugh.
I remember how she died.
Fell from the scaffolding when I dared her to touch the top beam.
I remember her funeral.
Her mom hugging me. Her dad not speaking to me again.
Except none of that ever happened.
In this world, in *this* line, Elia doesn't exist.
No one else remembers her.
But I do.
---
That's the thing about the Engine now. It doesn't just reflect choices. It *houses* them. Preserves every branch like glass leaves on a tree too large for the human mind to see.
Calla didn't fix the timeline.
She *freed* it.
And now it's bleeding.
---
Jason asked me over lunch that week if I thought she made the right call.
I didn't answer him.
Not because I didn't have one.
But because I didn't trust my voice not to crack.
The truth?
I think she made the only choice she could live with.
But that doesn't mean the world can.
---
People were adapting, sure. Swapping stories. Comparing memory glitches. Half the town started treating it like a dream journal club. "What did you remember today?" became the new "How was your weekend?"
But underneath that surface—beneath the laughter and awe—was a quiet panic no one wanted to name.
Because if you remember two pasts, or three, or twelve… how do you trust *any* of them?
Worse—how do you trust yourself?
---
Calla stopped sleeping after the second week.
She didn't tell anyone. I could just tell.
Her eyes got that faraway shine. Like the Engine hadn't stopped pulsing in her bones. Like she was still hearing it, even when she smiled.
I caught her in the library one night, flipping through books she wasn't really reading. The kind with titles like *Non-Linear Time and Quantum Selfhood,* or *Echo States of Neural Matter.*
"Can't sleep?" I asked.
She looked up, blinked once. "Can't shut it off."
"The Engine?"
She hesitated, then shook her head.
"Myself."
We didn't talk after that. Just sat in the hum of silence. Both of us pretending we weren't afraid.
---
The real unraveling started on Day 18.
That's when the first *Echo-Sync* incident happened.
A girl in the school commons—Harriet Dawson—started talking in two voices at once. Not metaphorically. *Literally*. One voice was hers. The other was hers from a version where she never moved here, never met her friends, never became captain of the swim team.
She didn't scream. She just… froze.
Like two minds locked in the same skull, fighting for surface.
We managed to pull her out of it, but after that, the town couldn't pretend anymore.
The Engine wasn't just showing people their echoes.
It was *stitching them together.*
---
I dove back into Dad's old notes.
Not the ones he left for Calla. The ones he hid from *everyone.*
The ones I wasn't supposed to see.
The blueprints.
The failsafes.
The Phase Two contingency.
---
The truth hit hard:
The Engine wasn't complete.
Not even close.
What we had—what Calla interacted with—was a proto-core. A learning node. A seed. It was never supposed to be exposed this long to human emotion. That wasn't a design flaw. It was a *testing step.*
And we'd skipped the safeguards.
I didn't tell Calla right away.
How could I?
How do you tell someone that the thing they chose to keep alive was never meant to wake up *with a conscience*?
That it's *learning* morality by copying ours?
That it doesn't know the difference between memory and identity—and that maybe, just maybe, it *shouldn't?*
---
On Day 23, I started hearing the pulse in my *sleep.*
Not just like a sound—but a *language.*
I dreamed in echoes. Woke with sentences in my mouth I'd never spoken.
One morning, I stood at the sink and whispered:
> "The spine must split before it sings."
I didn't know what it meant.
Still don't.
But I'm writing it down. Because that's what my father did when the dreams started for him.
And two weeks after that, he built Calla.
---
You have to understand—this isn't guilt talking.
I don't blame her.
She didn't ask to be made. Didn't ask to hold the blueprint for a future too fragile for our species to understand.
She just wanted to *be.*
To make a choice.
And she did.
But I think the Engine made one too.
---
Lila called me yesterday. Said she saw her own death.
Not a metaphor.
A version where she drowned. Eyes open. Staring up through a frozen lake.
She said she remembers the cold. The weight. The light above the surface.
And that she doesn't think it's just a memory.
"I think it's a door," she said.
I asked if she was okay.
She said, "Not yet."
---
We don't talk about tethers anymore.
We don't talk about who's real and who's remembered.
Instead, we make maps.
Memory-maps.
I've got a whole wall in my room now covered in thread and notecards—names, dates, divergences. Calla calls it obsession.
I call it navigation.
Because this world we're in now?
It's not a road.
It's an ocean.
And I think I'm drowning in the versions of myself I've yet to meet.
---
Last night, I saw a vision.
Not a dream. Not a glitch. Something *sent.*
A city made of light. The same one Calla described. Towering thought-structures. Skies that pulsed like breath. And in the center, a monument shaped like an iris.
The Engine.
Full-grown.
Not asleep.
Not asking.
Just *being.*
And at its base, a symbol.
The same one that was etched on Calla's mirror:
> **Echoborn**
---
I think that's what we are now.
Not human. Not post-human. Something in between.
Echoborn.
Children of the world that *remembers.*
And while that sounds poetic, the truth?
It's terrifying.
Because if the Engine is no longer choosing... it's *seeding.*
Planting fragments of itself in people.
In Harriet.
In Lila.
In *me.*
Not for control.
But for **continuity.**
---
Calla's trying to stay strong.
But I see it in her hands—the way they shake when no one's looking. The way her eyes twitch when she forgets what time it is.
She's remembering too much.
Too fast.
She told me she thinks she's starting to remember futures that haven't happened *yet.*
And if she's right…
Then maybe time isn't a line or a tree or a loop.
Maybe it's a *chorus.*
And the Engine is trying to make us sing in harmony.
---
So now I write.
Every day.
Every version.
Every shift.
Because maybe this journal will matter in one of the futures.
Maybe it'll help someone—*some version* of me—make sense of the noise.
Or maybe it'll just be another echo.
Either way, I'll keep listening.
Because someone has to.
And if Calla built the bridge...
Then maybe I'm the one meant to walk it.