Scene: Underground Route to Anchor Zero
Metal screams against metal. The train is old, half-autonomous, a Resistance retrofit. Sparks strobe the tunnel walls.
Kim crouches near a shattered control panel, watching static crawl across it like frostbite.
Kim: unchanged bleeding deeper. If they
touched Anchor Zero…
Amari: Then time's warped around it. We'll have to go in blind.
Mark sits apart, staring at the pendant. It pulses with faint, rhythmic light a heartbeat not his.
Mark (Kevin): I saw her, Amari. Not a memory her now trapped in their version of the rootcode
Amari: Then Anchor Zero isn't just a place. It's a lock.
Scene: Entrance to Anchor Zero
They emerge into an impossible space. Concrete dunes rise like tombstones. Wind carries voice whispers in broken code.
A circular vault door towers before them. On it, carve deep: DO NOT RETURN
Kim: That symbol again.
The eye with no pupil.
Amari (to Mark): Only you can open it.
Mark lifts the pendant. It glows — the seal shivers, decays. The door peels open.
Scene: Anchor Zero Inside the Vault
It's not a bunker. It's a city fragment
preserved and floating in an echo chamber of time. Streets curve upward, loop, dissolve into light.
They step through.
Fragments of the past hang in midair. Projections, conversations, screams caught in endless replay.
Amari: This isn't a memory vault. It's a rewrite engine.
A scream slices the quiet.
They turn. A girl younger Ayame, looping endlessly, running from something they can't see.
Mark (desperate): Ayame!
He runs, reaches through the loop. The scene glitches — and she turns.
Not young.
Not afraid.
Real.
Ayame (shocked):Kevin…?
Everything halts.
Scene: Frozen Time Field
Ayame steps forward, the pendant in her palm now glowing in tandem with his.
Ayame: I've been rewriting myself to stay hidden. Each loop a fragment. Each reset, a risk. But now
She looks past him. To the dark forming behind the false sky.
Ayame: They know.
Reality warps. The Witnesses appear half
formed, more *algorithm* than flesh now. Their leader steps forward.
Witness Prime: Origin confirmed. Purge begins.
Scene: Anchor Collapse
The vault begins to dissolve. Buildings fall upward. Code rips like skin.
Amari:We have to extract her. Now.
Kim (hacking):I can't override the field. It's recursive built to fold.
Mark takes Ayame's hand. The pendant burns between them.
Mark (Kevin): What if we don't extract her?
Ayame: Then?
Mark:Then we recode the exit.
Together, they step into the collapsing sky.
Light.
Sound.
And silence.
Scene: Safehouse
Hours Later
Amari and Kim drag a coughing Mark from the emergency uplink pod. He's alone.
Kim: Where is she?
Mark opens his palm.
The pendant is gone.
In its place: a small shard of raw, undamaged memory crystal still glowing.
Mark: She's inside it. And she left a map.
Amari:To where?
Mark (quietly):To what comes next.
TO BE CONTINUED...