SHE WAS NEVER REAL

The static version of Astra—Rollback Astra—didn't return to Null Protocol headquarters.

She didn't need to.

She had no use for corridors and containment.

She had no interest in the girl or the spiral map or the new world trying to grow.

She was a version of the story that refused to stay erased.

A shard that never fused.

A page torn from the recursion field's history—but still bleeding ink.

And she had a plan.

Her first step wasn't destruction.

It was replication.

She walked into an abandoned simulation shell in Sector 12-B—an old recursion echo site used to test glyph layering before Subject 13 destabilized it.

Inside: silence.

Dead code. Dust.

Unwritten space.

She touched a single console.

Her fingerprint glitched reality for exactly 0.41 seconds.

And then—

Loop 440-A woke up again.

In Null Protocol HQ, Runa's screen lit up.

"Something's wrong," she muttered. "Sector 12-B was flagged offline. We just got a glyph ping."

"Which glyph?" Astra asked.

Runa hesitated.

Then flipped the tablet around.

Astra's breath caught.

Because the glyph on-screen was hers.

Not the fracture glyph.

Not the spiral.

The one she buried.

The first one.

Glyph: ORI-V9 — Identity Unverified

"She's copying recursion loops," Runa said. "Not just activating them—restarting them from backup states."

Dahlia frowned. "But those loops were collapsed. They're memory shells. No consciousness left."

"They don't need consciousness," Astra said.

"They need belief."

Meanwhile, Rollback Astra stood in the newly stabilized field, surrounded by echoes.

Some half-formed.

Some whispering memories that looped forever.

She watched them carefully.

Not with mercy.

But with strategy.

"The others," she murmured, "want to grow new systems."

"But I just want the old one back."

She raised her hand.

Activated the glyph beneath her skin.

And began rewriting the loop.

One rule at a time.

Later that day, another anomaly report came in.

Zone Null-F. An impossible loop.

Time dilation: 3x.

Ambient identity resistance: 74%.

Runa ran a glyph scan.

"Confirmed pattern match. ORI-V9 signature active. But it's different."

Astra stepped forward.

"Show me."

The feed flickered to life.

And they saw it:

Rollback Astra.

Standing still in a ruined room.

Surrounded by fragments of old selves.

Subjects Astra had watched dissolve or forget who they were—now walking again, glitching like broken ideas.

They weren't alive.

But they weren't dead.

"She's bringing back ghost versions of us," Dahlia whispered.

"She's restoring the recursion field the way it was."

Astra looked away.

Not because she was afraid.

But because part of her remembered what it was like—to want things back the way they were.

"She's not building a world," Astra said.

"She's building a graveyard."

That night, the anchor girl came to her room again.

She didn't speak.

She simply opened her palm.

The spiral map had grown.

Now it forked in two directions.

One was still branching—reaching.

The other?

It looped endlessly around itself.

A perfect circle.

But tighter.

Tangled.

Bleeding black at the edges.

"She's not done," the girl whispered.

"She thinks you took her life. Her story. Her name."

Astra crouched beside her.

"She's not wrong," she said.

And for the first time, the girl looked scared.

"What if she's not the echo?"

"What if we are?"