Page 138 of Fractured Devotion
Because some truths, once seen, won’t let you forget them anyway.
I return to my apartment without speaking to anyone. I avoid the elevator and take the stairs instead, each step tapping a countdown inside my chest. One thought, one mission, overriding everything else.
Find the source.
Once I’m inside, I shut the door with a gentle push and lock it. The flash drive sits on my desk, still cold from being carried all day. I plug it into the terminal, not because I’m ready to revisit the video, but because I need to start isolating the residual metadata, the buried fingerprints of whoever recorded it, encrypted it, and buried it like a virus in Echo’s archive.
I expect silence. The usual digital hum.
But there’s a noise I didn’t program.
It’s a ping. A faint, irregular pulse.
I trace it and find a hidden time-stamp tag embedded into the tail-end of the clip. I isolate it and run a trace.
The signature isn’t Rourke’s.
It’s older.
One I haven’t seen since I was seventeen.
My hand hovers over the mouse.
Dr. Niko Reyes.
For a moment, I feel suspended, held midair by the realization.
He’s the one who taught me how to format neural trace pathways. He’s the one who convinced me not to dig too deep into early Echo. He said it would “cloud my judgment.”
And now I know why.
He was there, not in the chair. But in the glass.
Watching.
I lean back, my blood cold.
The man who gave me my first surgical tool.
The man who told me my trauma made me strong.
The man who may have helped carve me out from the inside before I knew my own name.
I close the file.
Then, I open a blank one.
The title bar blinks.
Heretic Loop – Draft 01, I write as the title.
And I start typing like I’ve never typed before.
I lose time while I write.
The Heretic Loop isn’t a code, not at first. It’s a howl through circuitry. A scream fed through the wire. I don’t bother mapping its end function yet. I start with raw sentiment and unfiltered logic. I strip everything sacred out of Echo’s root design—every compliance trigger, every memory gate, every restraint threshold—and I flip them all inside out.
I’m not making a backdoor. I’m blowing out the walls.
