Unknown Memory Fork // Encrypted Layer 0
"Once, all it took was a book."
"Now, a well-placed whisper can undo an entire civilization."
Sable sat cross-legged in a cold white room that did not physically exist.
The space was built from rejected fragments: dreams, misremembered history, corrupted storage blocks. A place outside linear time. He had called it the Fork.
Around him, ghosts moved shapes built from broken belief.
A mother who remembered burying a son she never had.
A soldier whose entire campaign turned out to be propaganda.
A child who never existed, remembered by thousands.
"These are your truths, Matherson," Sable whispered.
"All it takes is one crack, and your cathedral of memory becomes a temple of lies."
The Infection Begins
He reached into the forkspace and summoned a shard.
It looked like a prayer wheel spinning with faces, dates, and whispered slogans. One of Matherson's own memory fragments.
A scene: Jayson Vale giving Matherson the drone core on his sixth birthday. Love, pride, hope.
Sable twisted the shard slightly and watched it bleed.
The faces changed. Jayson's eyes hardened. His voice glitched.
"You were never supposed to survive," the broken-Jayson said.
"You were the decoy, not the heir."
Sable embedded the corrupted shard into the myth-stream.
Around the World… Doubt
People began to question.
"Was that broadcast real?"
"If Vale was so dangerous, why didn't Edenfall erase him entirely?"
"What if he's just another actor in their machine?"
A journalist in Recife uploaded a "memory audit" claiming the footage had been fabricated.
A former resistance leader in Moscow turned herself in, muttering, "It's all fake. He never existed. They made him up to test us."
Belief decayed at the edges, like metal rusting from the inside.
Sable Watches the Collapse
"You see, Matherson," he said softly, "you mistook clarity for victory."
"But memory is not your ally. Memory can be edited. Repurposed. Rerun like propaganda."
He stood, flexing hands made of code.
Behind him, a new myth-form began to take shape one built from the ashes of Edenfall and the unraveling of the Vale legacy.
"I don't need to erase you."
"I only need to let the world doubt."
He stepped forward into the stream, eyes glowing with entropy.
"Let's see who believes in you... when belief becomes a virus."