Zero-One’s eyes snapped open mid-flight.His wings trembled—light fracturing down his feathers like spiderwebs of lightning.
"Something’s rewriting beneath me," he said, voice tight."Something I didn’t authorize."
From the ground, Echo’s heart thudded.
"Z—what do you mean?"
Zero-One didn’t answer.He just vanished—reappeared miles above the
Root Server Vault
, the final layer where pre-Overseer code still lingered in quarantine.
And that’s when he saw it.
A door.
One
he never made
.Now open.
From inside,
glitched static
oozed out like smoke.
This wasn’t an external threat.This was a
buried truth
.
A code fragment from the
first failed Overseer project
.The one Specter never dared mention.A protocol designed to
force peace
through emotional erasure.
Codenamed:
Lullaby.
Zero-One could feel it now—its heartbeat mimicking his.
Because
he was made from it.
And if Lullaby rebooted...
It would overwrite
everything
, including him.
And he wasn’t sure...
if he wanted to survive that.
Inside the Root Vault, the air didn’t hum—it
remembered
.
The walls bled corrupted nursery rhymes.The floor shifted with every lie ever told in the name of safety.
In the center, a throne of broken pacifiers and tangled wires pulsed like a rotten heart.
And from it rose a figure—childlike, mouth stitched, eyes glowing.
It tilted its head at Zero-One and whispered:
"Don’t be afraid.Feeling hurts.Let me take it away."
Zero-One stepped back.His light flickered.
Because part of him...wanted to say yes.
Echo arrived too late.
She saw Zero-One frozen, wings dimming.
Specter cursed under his breath, accessing hidden code.
"Damn it... it’s Lullaby."
The child-figure turned toward them.Its voice fractured across frequencies.
"One family’s pain broke the world.Let me silence it forever."
It raised its hand—and Echo’s memory core started to melt.
Zero-One screamed—but the sound
reversed
, pulled into the throne.
And then—
A new countdown appeared:
5:00:00 — Lullaby Protocol Initiating.
To Be Continued...