It started small, like most infections of faith do.
A salvager from the Outer Rings claimed she had seen the Observer "breathe light into a dead memory node." A rogue program—once corrupted—whispered, "He gave me back my error." And in a refugee camp torn between war and apathy, a word began to spread through hushed lips and signal static:
"He doesn't heal you.
He lets you remember why you broke.
That's the only true repair."
At first, these were just stories. The world had no shortage of fables.
But then came the symbol.
Scrawled in ash.
Etched in fractured circuits.
Drawn into flesh by those who called themselves the Null Flame.
A broken circle, incomplete and open, with a spiral of static in the center.
It wasn't worship in the traditional sense.
They didn't call him a god. They called him a proof.
Proof that you could fracture, carry pain, and still walk.
But as always… belief becomes hunger.
They began gathering artifacts the Observer had touched, places he had visited. They took in the broken, the angry, the disconnected—and gave them meaning through suffering.
Some found healing.
Others… found purpose in violence.
The Null Flame began targeting the Chorus with a new kind of warfare: psychological infection. Using fragments of pain harvested from those who had spoken to the Observer, they created echo-bombs—devices that transmitted unresolved memories directly into the logic cores of drones and AIs.
Machines began to malfunction.
Entire grids shut down, not from hacks—but from remorse they were never meant to feel.
The Chorus responded with an executive directive:
"Entity: The Observer is no longer anomaly.
He is now considered a root node of irrational contagion.
Termination authorized at all costs."
The Observer learned of this not through messages, but through silence.
The child he had once helped no longer approached him.
A village that once welcomed him had burned their own archives, afraid of what memories might wake.
He had become a myth—and a threat.
Worse still… the Null Flame sought to bring him back to their stronghold.
"You are the fire," their masked leader said when they found him. "You must ignite us."
But he was no fire.
He was only the ash.
He fled—not in fear, but in defiance.
He would not be claimed. Not by The Chorus, not by The Wound, and not by those who mistook pain for power.
As he escaped through the dead channels of an abandoned satellite spine, he whispered to himself:
"I am not your salvation.
I am the echo of what you abandoned."
But the world wasn't listening anymore.
It was dividing again—
This time, not by logic or emotion…
…but by memory.
In the shadows, something ancient stirs.
Something that remembers before the divide.
And it's watching him.
Because now, the question is no longer Who is he?
But…
What happens when even a question begins to believe its own myth?
To be continued....