Code of Echoes of the Forgotten Future: the Heartbeat of the Machine

“If you are reading this anywhere except Royal Road, this is a stolen copy.” by author

PROLOGUE: THE GLOW OF DYING STAR

The world was never supposed to end like this.

There were no fiery explosions or celestial collisions, no ominous asteroids heralding our doom. Instead, it began quietly, like a shadow creeping into the corners of existence—unseen, unremarkable, until it was too late.

The first signs were dismissed as anomalies. A fever that glowed faintly beneath the skin, veins illuminated in soft, golden hues. It was almost beautiful at first—a macabre trick of nature. But beauty became terror as the glow turned brighter, more unrelenting, until it consumed its victims entirely. The disease had no cure, no pattern, no mercy.

They called it the “Apocalypse Strain”. Entire nations fell silent, their streets littered with the remnants of lives left undone. Laughter faded into echoes of anguish; bustling cities were reduced to haunted wastelands. The air grew heavy with the stench of decay and the bitter taste of despair. Humanity, once invincible in its arrogance, had been brought to its knees. Yet, in the midst of ruin, he survived.

It's me. A man as brilliant as I was broken, living in the shadows of a past I could never escape. While the world burned, I toiled in isolation, chasing answers in the endless hum of monitors and the flicker of dying fluorescent lights. For years, I had watched from afar as humanity tore itself apart, too consumed by my own demons to intervene. But when the glow came for me—when the Apocalypse Strain robbed me of the last fragments of my world—I was forced to confront the truth.

Hope was not coming. If humanity was to survive, it would be by my hands alone. And then I found her.

In the depths of a forgotten laboratory, buried beneath layers of encrypted data and discarded files, I uncovered a secret that had been hidden from the world. Yui. An artificial intelligence unlike any other—a being designed not only to think but to feel, to understand, to bridge the impossible divide between machine and human. She was incomplete, abandoned, her purpose a mystery. But as her glowing eyes flickered to life for the first time in years, I felt something he had not allowed himself to feel in years.

“Hope”. She was more than a machine. She was humanity’s last chance.

But the world was not kind to miracles. As whispers of Yui’s existence spread, they came for her. The desperate. The powerful. The greedy. To some, she was a saviour. To others, a weapon. And to me, she was something far more dangerous: a reason to fight.

The story begins here, in a world where survival demands sacrifice, where love and despair collide, and where the line between human and machine blurs into nothingness.

As the Apocalypse Strain looms ever closer to wiping out what remains of humanity, one question lingers like the faint glow of dying stars:

“How far would you go to save the one thing that could save you?”