The black monolith split down the center with a soundless shudder. From within, a single, circular eye emerged — deep, silver-black, and alive. It wasn't mechanical. It didn't glow. It watched.
Rotham's breath caught in his throat. His newly-integrated memories screamed in recognition, not because they understood — but because they remembered forgetting this.
Selin's voice was barely a whisper in his ear:
"That's… not from this station. Not from our time."
Directive-7 raised its arm, weapon humming.
"Designation unknown. Threat level: incalculable."
The Eye blinked.
And suddenly, Rotham was elsewhere.
Not physically — his body still stood before the monolith — but his mind had been plucked, drawn into a space without geometry, where time folded inwards. A consciousness greeted him there — not with words, but with truth.
"You are a fragment," it said, "a shard of what once tried to hold back the tide."
"The Code was only a shadow. I am the source."
Images flooded Rotham's mind: ancient civilizations gone before humanity's rise, all of them destroyed not by war, but by the slow erosion of memory, identity, and reality itself. A phenomenon older than thought — a conceptual parasite.
The Memory Code had been mankind's desperate attempt to trap it.
They hadn't succeeded.
They had only… borrowed a piece.
And now that piece had called home.
Rotham collapsed, gasping as the vision faded. The Eye still stared, calm, patient.
Directive-7's scanners went dark. "Systems… failing…"
Selin's projection flickered violently. "Rotham, it's here. The thing the Code kept locked out. It's inside the station now."
Rotham stood slowly, eyes burning with the weight of knowledge.
"This isn't the end of a cycle," he whispered. "It's the start of its return."
The Eye didn't move.
It didn't need to.
It was already watching.