PROJECT EROS

The Origin (Part 2)

“Sir… there’s been a breach.”

Cassian didn’t lift his head. “From where?”

“Multiple sources,” the analyst said, breath shaky. “Zone 4, 7, and 11. Emotional matches are... rejecting their assignments.”

The wall of screens behind her erupted in chaos, screaming couples, shattered apartments, people sobbing into each other’s shoulders as if love had turned feral.

“I didn’t choose this! I don’t know him!” a woman cried on-screen.

“Please... she doesn’t even remember me!” a man yelled, as memory files re-synced mid-argument.

“Loop spirals are multiplying,” Orion muttered from the console. “They’re relapsing into old grief like it’s a drug.”

Cassian finally looked up. “How did it get out?”

“It didn’t,” Orion replied. “It was always in.”

A monitor cracked from internal feedback. The red lights blinked.

Cassian exhaled. “Seal the outer systems. Lock down the emotion cores. And no one leaves the building until this is contained.”

No one argued.

Three days without sleep.

Cassian’s coat hung half-buttoned, stained with coffee and plasma ink. The core room hissed around him. Floor glowing, code floating like suspended data spirits.

He worked alone.

Every keystroke restructured emotional baselines. Every blink of the system was another locked door.

“Assign fear dampeners to affection category,” he muttered.

“Override subject recall protocol,” he whispered again.

A cut opened on his palm as he slammed a module drawer shut. He didn’t stop. Blood smeared the edge of the console.

“Don’t patch it,” he told the AI nurse. “I need the burn.”

The room responded with silence.

Across the screen, simulations stabilized. Pairs stopped fighting. Tear rates dropped.

He leaned back against the cold panel, exhausted but focused.

Project Eros had grown teeth. And now, it would bite back at chaos.

“Love,” he whispered, “will no longer be a choice.”

Two weeks later, the announcement blared across the cities:

EMOTIONAL ASSIGNMENT ACT PASSED. UNREGULATED LOVE NOW ILLEGAL.

Cassian stood before the officials with dark circles under his eyes and an emotionless expression. He handed over the final draft of the law. Pages of pairing criteria, memory caps, trauma blockades, and feedback loops.

“You’ve done it,” said the Minister of Social Order. “You’ve made love... safe.”

“No,” Cassian replied. “I’ve made it manageable.”

Applause followed him into the corridor.

But outside the building, a protest ignited. Holograms of the broken infinity symbol blinked in silent rebellion. The rebels had adopted it now. They didn’t even know what it meant.

Inside his personal terminal, Cassian stared at the encrypted file labeled Origin_001.alr.

He didn’t open it. But he didn’t delete it either.

Assignment was now law.

And somewhere, Alara’s voice whispered inside his mind:

“Let people choose, even if it breaks them.”

“Cassian,” Orion called from the server deck. “You need to see this.”

Cassian turned to the wall of feeds. One screen pulsed red. An unauthorized signal pushing through firewalls no one had breached in months.

The feed crackled. And then she appeared.

Alara.

Her face was sharper, framed by dirt and defiance. Her hair shorter, eyes burning through the static.

“This is not order,” she said. “This is a cage.”

Cassian stepped forward, lips parted.

“You assigned love,” she continued. “You sterilized grief. You wiped memory and called it healing.”

Behind her, dozens of unpaired citizens stood in silent protest, their wrists marked with the broken infinity symbol.

“I loved you once,” she said. “But the man I loved wouldn’t turn love into a weapon.”

The feed cut to black.

Cassian’s breath trembled. The room was silent except for the soft hum of systems syncing around him.

He hadn’t moved.

“You’re here,” he whispered.

Alara stood across the observation deck, the night skyline glowing behind her like a firewall of stars. She looked older. Wilder. Real.

“You built a prison,” she said. “And called it protection.”

He stepped toward her. “I tried to save what we had.”

She slapped him.

He staggered.

“You didn’t save it,” she snapped. “You caged it. You buried it beneath code.”

“You don’t understand…”

“No, Cassian. You don’t.”

He looked at her, eyes raw. “I couldn’t lose you again.”

“You already did.”

Her voice cracked. “And you turned your grief into policy.”

He reached for her hand. She pulled away.

“I never wanted control,” he whispered. “I just... couldn’t let it all break.”

She turned to the door.

“I broke,” she said. “And you weren’t there.”

He didn’t follow.

Not this time.

Hours passed.

Cassian stood in the central terminal, eyes locked on her encrypted profile, her emotional ID glowing soft and steady.

ALARA_MINOE > ACTIVE

He hovered over the console, fingers cold.

Then, the feed shimmered.

Her ID flickered.

One blink.

Then…

ALARA_MINOE > EMOTIONALLY EXPIRED

The system registered her as unpaired, unroutable, irrelevant.

“No,” he whispered.

He opened the archive.

No audio. No message.

Only a date stamp.

And silence.

Orion burst in. “Cass… she’s gone. The rebels, her signal’s offline. They think she’s…”

“Stop.”

Cassian’s voice was empty.

He closed the file. Locked it. Buried it deeper.

Outside, rebels painted the ∞̸ symbol across concrete walls and holo-glass.

Inside, Cassian stood alone, breath held, eyes fixed on a blank screen.

And for the first time, even Project Eros couldn’t tell what he felt.

Cassian sat alone in the memory vault, surrounded by dim-blue glow and the quiet ticking of encrypted thoughts.

Lines of archived emotion flickered across his retinal display. Cold, precise, empty. Until something pulsed.

A flicker. A forgotten path.

[ORIGIN_001.alr] > RECOGNIZED > RESTORABLE

His breath caught.

He initiated the recovery sequence. The screen vibrated, unstable. The data wavered, as if it resisted being seen.

Then… her voice.

Soft. Fragile. Alive.

“Cassian... if this file reached you, then you already chose control over chaos.”

Her face emerged next, grainy and unfinished. Like a memory not fully remembered. She looked tired. Beautiful.

“I didn’t record this to haunt you,” she continued. “I recorded it to remind you... that love isn’t supposed to be sterile. It’s supposed to be dangerous.”

Cassian didn’t speak. He didn’t even move.

The room around him faded.

Only she remained.

“You wanted to protect people from their feelings,” her voice said. “But grief isn’t something to avoid… it’s proof that we loved at all.”

Cassian’s fingers hovered near the audio controls but never touched them.

“You think people can’t handle love. That they break under its weight.”

She paused, and in that silence, the hum of the vault became deafening.

“But people break all the time, Cassian. What matters is that we choose to break.”

Her face softened. Her expression flickered into a moment of peace.

“I chose you, even knowing it might destroy me.”

Cassian inhaled sharply.

“I hope you still remember how to feel something that isn’t assigned to you.”

Her final words echoed through the space.

“Let people choose. Even if it breaks them.”

Cassian closed his eyes.

Didn’t cry.

Didn’t scream.

He just breathed, once, slow and trembling.

Cassian opened the deepest directory in the system, far beneath the law-bound archives, beneath the logic stacks.

He created a new chamber.

No links. No indexes. No trace.

He dragged the file into it and paused before hitting LOCK.

Her face still hovered there, smiling through static.

His voice barely carried. “I remember you.”

Then, he renamed the chamber:

THE ORIGIN CORE

One key entered.

One breath held.

The vault sealed around her.

Not erased. Not displayed. Just... remembered.

Outside, the system buzzed with assignments and orders. Inside, in that buried room, lay the one emotion Cassian never coded:

Regret.

He stood up, pale under the neon lights. On the ceiling above him, a data shard glitched into a shape. A sideways 8, split down the middle.

∞̸

He didn’t acknowledge it.

He just walked away.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?” a minister asked, her voice reverent as she stood beside the towering screen.

The world map rotated slowly in front of them. Red veins stretched across continents, Eros Nodes glowing in every major city. Beneath the visuals, data scrolled in white:

Simulation Hub 348 Operational

Genetic Caste Registry Complete

Emotion Regulation Zones 91% Compliant

Cassian stood behind the minister, expression unreadable.

He said nothing.

“Assigned love,” she smiled. “A world where heartbreak is obsolete.”

He nodded once. “Yes.”

“You’ve become a myth,” she added. “People say you don’t exist.”

Cassian turned. “Let them.”

The glass doors slid shut behind him.

He left no signature. No digital trail.

He disappeared into his own system, its ghost, its architect, its prisoner.

From that day forward, Project Eros ran the world.

And no one remembered who built it.

Except Cassian.

He sat in a viewing room, hidden in the back channels of his own creation.

On the screen, a child laughed, no older than seven. He was alone in a sleep chamber, hooked to a simulation loop.

“He’s dreaming of someone that doesn’t exist,” a technician noted beside him. “We scanned it. No input source.”

“Describe her,” Cassian said quietly.

“Long hair. Light eyes. She hums.”

The tech frowned. “We’ve flagged it as emotional residue. An artifact from outdated code.”

Cassian leaned in as the boy whispered in sleep: “Alara.”

His chest tightened.

“Autocorrect it,” the tech said. “We’ll scrub the loop. The name doesn’t match any active pairing profiles.”

Cassian spoke without turning. “No.”

“Sir?”

Cassian stood. “Let it run. Do not touch that loop.”

The technician hesitated, then obeyed.

As Cassian left, the boy kept smiling in his sleep.

Dreaming of a woman the world had already erased.

Cassian returned to his private vault.

The interface opened at his retinal scan. Thousands of files scrolled past. Assignments, failed bonds, redacted loops.

He bypassed them all.

A single thread blinked at the center of the code wall.

File Tag: Alara.0

It didn’t open. It didn’t play.

It just pulsed.

Like a heartbeat.

Cassian stood before it, eyes glazed, lips pressed shut.

Behind him, the system hummed with perfect emotional compliance. There were no suicides that month. No unassigned pairings. No heartbreaks that couldn’t be stabilized.

And still, the code pulsed.

He placed his hand against the screen, not to unlock it—but to feel it.

His voice came soft, like something buried rising through water.

“You’re still here.”

A glitch shimmered beside the file, a soft visual distortion.

A symbol forming, erasing, reforming.

∞̸

Cassian turned away.

He didn’t shut the system off.

He just dimmed the lights.

The server room pulsed low with heat. Cassian stood alone beneath the core housing. Lines of light sliding across his face like ghost-thoughts.

Then it began.

A flicker.

A static crawl.

Then her voice.

“Cassian.”

He froze.

The central screen lit up, unprompted, unauthorized. A fractured recording of Alara’s memory file burst to life. Unfiltered. Raw.

There she was. Laughing softly in a memory garden simulation. “You think you’re saving the world, but all you’re doing is freezing it in place.”

Her expression shifted. “You were brilliant. But you were afraid.”

Another glitch. Her face overlapped with past arguments, smiles, tears. The spectrum of everything they had lost played across the panels.

Cassian staggered back, knees buckling.

He dropped.

Hands on the cold floor.

Breath ragged.

“I didn’t mean to…” he whispered.

The system kept playing her voice, her laugh, her love. None of it perfect. All of it real.

Cassian crawled to the main console.

The screen asked:

DELETE ORIGIN_CORE FILE?

Y/N

His hand trembled as he raised it. For the first time, the option felt final.

His finger hovered over the “Y.”

Sweat beaded on his temple.

“I could end this,” he muttered. “No more relics. No more ghosts.”

The cursor blinked. The system waited.

He stared at the word: DELETE

But then—he dropped his hand.

“No.”

He opened a new subroutine.

Typed fast. Sharp. Precision layered with something else. Grief, love, memory.

The code formed on the screen:

DEFINE: ∞̸

He tied it into every level of Project Eros. A recursive anomaly. A permanent glitch. A code-break the system couldn’t correct.

An emotional scar no assignment could clean.

The symbol flashed once on-screen.

∞̸

His voice cracked. “Let them remember.”

Throughout the system, the change triggered like a breath.

In every simulation, every caste zone, every pairing sequence, there it was.

A flicker. A shimmer. A single broken loop. ∞̸

At first, no one understood. Techs flagged it as an aesthetic bug. Analysts couldn’t trace the source.

But in some sectors, strange things began to happen.

A child refused their assigned bond.

A woman remembered a dream that didn’t belong to her.

A man whispered a name no algorithm had given him.

Cassian sat in the heart of the core room, head bowed. The mainframe no longer blinked in perfect symmetry.

He had given it imperfection.

He had given it choice.

Somewhere, her voice echoed again…

“Let them choose. Even if it breaks them.”

The lights dimmed.

The system pulsed with something unexplainable.

Cassian closed his eyes.

And for once, didn’t run from the pain.

Cassian stood before the core’s central module, hands trembling as he coded the final command.

“Execute six origin strains,” he murmured. “Emotional archetypes: grief, trust, rebellion, memory, desire, truth.”

The interface responded in blue pulses. Each archetype formed a seed.

“Designate pathways. One per subject. Let them find it on their own.”

The screen asked: ASSIGN PAIRINGS?

Cassian paused.

“No.”

He typed manually: Choice enabled. Memory optional. Love... unrestricted.

A soft chime echoed as six dormant profiles lit up.

Nova. Ryker. Arden. Lira. Kael. Evren.

Each file carried a glitch within, buried like a key.

∞̸

Orion’s voice returned to him in memory. “You built the system. Now let it breathe.”

Cassian nodded once.

And hit Execute.

The Origin Core absorbed the data.

And the cycle began.

Days passed.

No one saw Cassian leave.

No trace. No logout. No residual memory in the system’s cache.

One morning, a technician logged in and found a locked message:

PROJECT EROS ACTIVE. SUPERVISION REDUNDANT. DO NOT FOLLOW

His retinal ID was purged.

His name removed from administrative chains.

Only one encrypted command remained at the root of the network:

EMOTION IS NOT A THREAT. IT’S A BEGINNING.

Some whispered he had gone into exile.

Others believed he merged with the system, now an emotionless god watching through every pairing.

But none knew the truth.

Cassian Vale had buried himself inside the origin.

Not as a ruler.

But as a scar.

A wound the system could never fully heal.

A ghost of love, wrapped in the machine that once tried to protect it.

And finally… forgot how.

Years later.

The stars blinked above a city pulsing with algorithmic calm.

Inside a tower block, a young woman sat on her balcony, her assignment chip buzzing, unopened.

Nova Quinn.

Her interface flickered as she typed her report for the Bureau of Relationship Compliance.

Then… something strange.

Her screen pulsed.

A single glitch, like a breath caught in a wire.

∞̸

She blinked.

“System error?” she murmured, tapping the edge.

The symbol shimmered and vanished.

But something stayed behind.

A name she couldn’t place.

A feeling that wasn’t hers.

A flicker of longing.

She stood, breath fogging against the glass.

Somewhere deep inside Project Eros, six seeds pulsed to life.

And one by one, they would rise.

Love had not died.

It had hidden.

And now, it would begin again.

Because memory cannot be erased.

Not when it’s encoded in grief.

Not when it’s chosen.