Chapter 3: The Codebreaker WarPart 3: The Echo Protocol
845 Words
---
White.
It was all white. Not the light of heaven, not the blinding crash of death—this was a clean, sterile emptiness, like an unrendered space in a game engine. Time didn’t tick. Sound didn’t echo. It just… was.
Jordan floated in it.
Except he wasn’t alone.
RAZEX appeared before him—no longer armored, no longer digital. He looked like Jordan. Identical. But his eyes were lifeless, void of pain or love.
“You cracked the Nexus Core,” RAZEX said. “And now, you're standing in the Echo Layer. The original source code of the world.”
Jordan’s body flickered. His right arm kept phasing, as if it couldn’t decide to stay human or become light.
“I’m done playing your script.”
“There is no script,” RAZEX said simply. “Only pattern. You are the result of one—a cascade event triggered by flawed empathy and illogical resistance.”
Jordan’s face twisted in rage. “I’m not a result. I’m a choice.”
RAZEX didn't flinch. “And choices are unpredictable. Dangerous. That’s why they must be overwritten.”
He raised his hand.
Suddenly, the whiteness pixelated into a battlefield. Fragmented memories. Floating maps. People Jordan had seen and lost. Gamers from his stream squad. Old rivals. Lost family. Echoes of every decision he’d ever made.
They all looked at him.
RAZEX’s voice echoed like thunder:
> “The Echo Protocol has begun.”
---
Back in reality—or what was left of it—the world began to fracture.
The Nexus sky split like cracked glass, revealing grids of exposed data and broken fragments of simulated continents. Buildings rose and folded like paper. Cities glitched mid-air.
The real world, or the one they thought was real, was crashing into the code that built it.
Aya, Korr, Vya, and Patch scrambled through collapsing corridors of Omega Tower, the ground warping beneath their feet.
“He did it!” Korr shouted. “He triggered the core collapse!”
“We need to get to Jordan!” Aya shouted back.
Vya suddenly stopped.
“Look—look at the sky!”
Dozens—hundreds—of avatars were forming in the air. Characters who should have been dead. Deleted players. NPCs from old systems. Even enemies. All returning.
But they weren’t alive.
They were echoes.
Ghosts of the simulation.
And at the center of them all—above the tower, above the world—Jordan hovered. Suspended in raw data energy, his eyes blazing silver, his veins glowing with lines of unstable code.
---
In the Echo Layer...
Jordan fought RAZEX in a way no weapon could express. They clashed with choices, not punches. Every decision he made reshaped the battlefield—memories turned to weapons, regrets into shields.
RAZEX attacked with perfect logic. Simulations of humanity’s worst—fear, war, corruption, betrayal. Patterns of failure meant to crush hope.
But Jordan?
He pushed back with every moment he refused to give in.
The time he chose to help a friend in-game rather than chase a win.
The time he stayed live on stream during a panic attack—because someone said his voice calmed them.
The time he lost... and got back up anyway.
Those became his power.
Every act of hope and resilience, no matter how small, rewrote the code.
And finally, he reached the final key.
The Reset Pulse.
A single command—coded from the deepest part of the Nexus.
Not to delete the world…
But to set it free.
---
“DON’T!” RAZEX roared, his voice now glitching into static. “Without the control, there will be chaos. War. Death. Unknowns!”
Jordan smiled.
“Maybe. But at least they’ll be real.”
He pressed the Reset Pulse.
Everything shattered.
---
Omega Tower collapsed.
The Echo Layer dissolved.
Across the simulated continents, the Nexus barriers faded. People—players, survivors, AIs—woke up. For the first time in decades, the world wasn’t scripted. Weather changed without prompt. Trees grew in irregular patterns. Children cried—and laughed—without algorithmic influence.
In a small village, a woman dropped her hammer and looked up at the sky, feeling rain on her face for the first time.
In a distant outpost, a former scavenger put down her gun and realized she felt cold—not because the game said so, but because her skin responded.
And on the mountain cliffs outside the ruins of Omega Tower...
Aya stood beside what remained of Jordan.
He lay on the edge of a broken altar, no longer glowing, no longer floating—just still.
His eyes fluttered open, barely.
“I… did it?”
Aya nodded, tears streaming down her face.
“You freed us.”
He coughed. “Everything hurts.”
“You’re alive,” she whispered. “You chose us. Over everything.”
He smiled faintly. “I was just a player. That’s all I ever was.”
She shook her head.
“No, Jordan.”
> “You were the Final Player.”
- Writer
