The silence was not empty. It was pressurized.
Cattleya opened her eyes to a world devoid of color, sound, or dimension. She was floating in a medium that felt like liquid mercury”dense, cold, and utterly indifferent. Below her, there was no ground; above her, no sky. There was only the "Zero State," the raw, unformatted memory buffer where the system stripped away the layers of personality and narrative history before assigning a new loop.
She was alone.
"Rusty?" she called out. The word didn't travel; it vanished into the surrounding void as soon as it left her lips.
She looked down at her hands. The blue filaments of light that had once defined her form were fading. She was becoming something else”not a sub-routine, not a prototype, but a smudge of residual data on a clean slate. Th
