Everyone heard it.No matter where they were, no matter what they were doing, the sound cut through reality like a blade. A sharp, internal crack—as if the concept of observation itself had fractured.
The sky didn’t change colour.
The ground didn’t shake.
But people stopped.
Cars rolled to a halt. Conversations died mid-word. Across the city, across the world, consciousness hesitated as one.
Then the screaming began.
Not from mouths, but from everywhere else. The static exploded into a deafening roar, drowning thought, drowning identity. I saw the Custodians one final time—not as overseers, but as panicked constructs tearing themselves apart.
Their forms glitched violently, fragments blinking in and out of existence.
“The archive cannot sustain this level of deviation,” they howled.
I watched as structures I couldn’t fully perceive collapsed—vast frameworks of categorization and control dissolving into raw noise. Archived minds surged free, not fully intact, but no longer contained.
Reality stuttered violently.
People collapsed, clutching their heads, memories flooding back all at once—lifetimes they hadn’t lived, choices they hadn’t remembered making. Some screamed. Some laughed. Some went horrifyingly still.
I felt myself splitting, overlapping with versions of me that had died, complied, begged, and broken. It was agony—and clarity.
Then, abruptly—
Silence.
The static cut out like a switch flipped.
The Custodians vanished.
The world resumed motion.
Traffic flowed. People blinked, disoriented, unsure why they’d stopped.
The archive was gone.
Or so it seemed.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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