We didn't find out Null-01 was gone in some dramatic way.
No alarms across realities. No prophetic echo. Just a status line on a boring diagnostics panel refusing to change.
Echo had the Pilot-03 device open on a crate in the ruin, cables fanned out like a metal spider trying to knit reality back together. The dead Null-00 hub around us hummed faintly with borrowed power. Old conduits complained every time the device drew a surge.
"Okay," Echo muttered. "Home ping in three… two… one…"
They tapped the command.
The screen blinked.
ROUTE: NODE 001
STATUS: UNRESOLVED
QUERYING…
I waited for the usual: the slight delay, the handshake, the lazy ACK that said, Sure, your horror office is still there.
Instead:
NODE 001: ACCESS DENIED
REASON: TIMELOCK – OVERSIGHT / GREAT ORDER
Echo frowned.
"That's… not a normal error," they said.
"Try again," I said.
They did. Same result.
NODE 001: ACCESS DENIED
TIMELOCK ACTIVE
Samira stepped closer, eyes narrowing at the grey box that now held more of our lives than any building.
"Show me the topology," she said.
Echo flipped to a schematic view.
I'd seen it a few times now: lines of light, each one a Null node, drifting in a dark grid. Most we didn't know. The ones we did were tagged.
NULL-00 – OFFLINE / LEGACY
NULL-002 – FAILED / SEALED
NULL-001 – ACTIVE
Except now, NULL-001 wasn't just "active."
Its line glowed a thick, angry red. Around it, a translucent shell pulsed slowly, like a heartbeat.
NULL-001 – ACTIVE – TIMELOCKED
"What does timelocked mean, exactly?" I asked.
"In theory?" Echo said. "It means their local timeline has been wrapped in a protective shell. No in, no out. No changes from outside systems."
"Protective," I said. "Right."
"It's not for their protection," Samira said quietly. "It's for the Great End's data integrity. They don't want this node contaminated by external interference while it's doing something important."
"Something like what Mikheil's asset just started," I said.
The word "asset" tasted like rust.
Samira's jaw tightened, but she didn't deny it.
"If Null-01 is under internal cleansing," she said, "they'll lock the clock around it. Let it run a sequence to completion. Then harvest the results."
I stared at the red shell.
"How long?" I asked. "Until it unlocks?"
"Depends on the class of process," she said. "Small hygiene events? Minutes, hours. Full cascade? Days. Bigger operations—" She stopped. "You saw the Great End symbol in the brief. This isn't just a Null process. Angelus is on the line. That means meta-timeframe."
"Meaning?" I pushed.
"Meaning," she said, "by the time it unlocks, what you want to save may already have been converted into numbers."
Something hot surged up my throat.
"I'm going back," I said.
I turned away from the crate, toward the gate.
The Pilot-03 device had built the gate like a scar in the air—an oblong distortion standing in the middle of the dead hub, shimmering faintly, edges lined with thin, moving symbols. Stepping through it felt like stepping through a thick curtain that refused to admit it was there.
Echo made a noise behind me.
"Wait," they said.
Samira moved faster.
Her hand closed around my wrist, fingers digging in hard enough to hurt.
"No," she said.
"Let go," I snapped. "They've cut the connection. They've timelocked the node. Something's wrong. I can still get in physically. The lock is on data channels, not doors."
"You don't know that," she said.
"I don't care," I said.
It came out sharper than I meant. That was fine. Sharp was all I had left between me and panic.
Samira didn't flinch.
"I left my badge, my rank, my apartment, the grave I was saving for myself," she said. "Don't talk to me about not caring."
"Then why are you stopping me?" I demanded. "If you want to save them, we go now. Before—"
"Before what?" she asked softly. "Before the version of them you remember finishes dying?"
The words hit like a slap.
I yanked my wrist free.
"You think I'm going to stand here while the system eats them?" I said. "While Mara—"
My voice cracked on her name.
I swallowed hard.
"She might already be dead," Samira said.
"Or killing," Echo added quietly.
I rounded on them.
"Not helping," I snapped.
They held up their hands.
"Just… naming the options," they said.
The gate shimmered, patient. The Pilot-03 device hummed with potential paths. On its display, Node 001's red shell pulsed and pulsed.
Samira stepped between me and the distortion.
"You don't even know where that door leads right now," she said. "Timelocks twist coordinates. You could aim for Null-01 and end up in a quarantine buffer, or an error pocket, or dropped into the middle of a cleansing daemon mid-cycle."
"Good," I said. "Then I'll hit it where it hurts."
I sounded like every righteous idiot I'd ever rolled my eyes at.
Samira must have heard it too.
She sighed.
"You remind me of my first trainee," she said. "Came in with a homemade sign about justice. Thought if she just shouted loud enough, the machine would apologize."
"What happened to her?" I asked.
"She took a job in routing," Samira said. "Convinced herself that making the pipes run smoother was rebellion."
"Is that what you think I am?" I asked. "A slogan with legs?"
"I think," she said, "that you're trying very hard not to feel how scared you are. And that saying 'I'll save them all' is easier than admitting you might already be too late."
The words scraped against something old in me.
I shoved past her.
She caught my shoulder this time, fingers digging in harder.
"Noor," she said, voice low. "Listen to me."
"I don't want to listen," I said. "I want to move."
"If you jump blind into a timelock, you give the Great End exactly what it wants," she said. "A brave, desperate narrative. An anomaly that threw himself into the fire. They love that kind of story. They eat it."
"I'm not doing it for them," I said. "I'm doing it for my people."
"For your city," she said. "For your mother, your roommate, the journalist, the activist you refused to let become a symbol, the clerk who flirted with you at the coffee machine. For everyone. Always for everyone. You don't even know how to want less."
Her voice sharpened.
"Do you ever want anything for yourself?" she asked. "Or is everything just fuel for whatever crusade looks most like penance?"
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
The gate hummed behind her, waiting.
The red shell around Null-01 pulsed in my peripheral vision like a heartbeat I couldn't reach.
"I…" I started, then stopped.
What did I want?
The answer rose automatic.
I want them to be okay.
I want the Great End to fail.
I want no one else to go through the dock, to feel their body evaporate in the Endless Death tide, to be catalogued and filed and…
"That's not what I asked," Samira said.
I hated her a little, in that moment.
"I don't know," I snapped. "Is that what you want to hear? I don't have some pretty individual dream. I don't want a balcony full of plants or a six-year plan or a cabin in the mountains. I want the machine that killed me and turned me into content to stop. I want the world that let it happen to be less murderous. Is that selfish enough?"
She just watched me.
The words kept coming, like someone had opened a valve.
"You know what my life was before Null?" I said. "Before Endless Death? It was… noise. Half-finished causes. University groups that fell apart. Protests that made good photos and bad laws. Articles no one read. I kept thinking, If I just find the right thing to fight, the right thing to fix, then the emptiness will… quiet down."
My throat hurt.
Echo shifted their weight, face very still.
"When I died," I said, "there was this stupid, quiet thought under the panic. Oh. Finally. Something that matters enough."
Samira's expression flickered.
"You think fighting the Great End 'matters enough'?" she asked.
"What else is there?" I demanded. "You saw the brief. You saw what they're doing. They're cutting threads across timelines. They want a clean ledger. No loose ends. If someone doesn't stop them, everyone everywhere ends up in that pithole she mentioned, that pit of nothing. If I can push them off course, even a little—"
"Then what?" she cut in.
"Then… then I wasn't a waste," I said, before I could stop myself.
Silence slipped into the room.
The dead Null hummed around us. Old cables ticked as they cooled.
"I act cold," I said, softer. "I make jokes about content and narratives and how I don't care. But I do. I care so much it makes me stupid. Every time I cut a thread in the Office, some part of me tried to imagine them landing somewhere soft. Every time I refused to let someone turn me into a miracle story, some part of me still wanted to be… worth the bother."
I laughed, humorless.
"So yes," I said. "I want to save everything. Because if I can't, then what was the point of any of this? Of my mother crying in a café, of Ben staring at an empty chair, of Rana's article no one published, of Mothlight's stupid flyers, of Pilot-03 scratching 'NO ONE DESERVES TO BE TURNED INTO CONTENT' on a box in a basement?"
My hands were shaking.
"I'm hollow," I said. "You know that. Four percent residual, the rest scrubbed. The only thing that fills the echo is trying to fix the damage. If I stop, it's just… noise again."
Samira listened without interrupting.
Echo's eyes were bright, but they didn't speak.
When I finally ran out of words, the only sound for a moment was the soft whine of the gate.
Samira let go of my shoulder.
She took one step back, enough that I could walk past her if I wanted.
Then she said, calmly:
"Saving the world doesn't give your life meaning."
I stared at her.
"Excuse me?" I said.
"It doesn't," she said. "It gives the world continuity. It gives other people more days. It might even give history a different arc. But you? You're still you."
I opened my mouth to argue. She raised a hand, forestalling me.
"You're not special because of the scale of the thing you're fighting," she went on. "The Great End is big. Fine. So was the Church that burned my cousin. So was the Council that approved the first Null node. So was the movement that taught kids to chant that sacrifice is noble and dying for a cause is the only way to matter."
Her voice had sharpened; her accent thickened just a little, edges from whatever city she'd left behind.
"They all told themselves they were saving the world," she said. "Some of them even were, a bit. None of that gave meaning to the kids they ground up to keep the wheels turning."
"So what?" I said. "I should just… what, become invisible? Go lie down in a quiet corner of the pithole and accept it?"
"If your altruism is only ever a way to avoid looking at yourself," she said, "then it's not altruism. It's an addiction. You're using 'humanity' like a drug. Like if you inject enough of other people's pain into your veins, you won't have to feel your own. That's not noble, Noor. It's self-erasure with better branding."
I flinched.
Echo winced like they'd been slapped too.
Samira's gaze didn't soften.
"If all you want is to die for something instead of dying for nothing," she said, "then go back through that gate right now and let the Great End cut your last thread. Let them write 'interesting anomaly, expired tragically" in their report and move on. They will be very grateful."
She took another step back, making room.
"No one here is going to stop you from volunteering to be content," she said. "If that's honestly all you think you can be."
The words hung in the air like a gauntlet.
I felt sick.
The gate shimmered just behind her shoulder, quiet and inviting.
I could almost see it: stepping through, emerging in some burning corridor, finding Mara or Tess or Nesrin in their last seconds, doing something dramatic and fatal that would make for a hell of a story.
They'd talk about me in debriefs. There would be a case study. Future trainees would get a module about "When Anomalies Interfere With Operations." The Great End would file it under "Narrative Consumption: Successful."
Some tiny, ugly part of me wanted the simplicity of that.
I closed my eyes.
"Do you think I don't want them alive?" Samira said, softer now. "I do. I dream about their faces. The ones I guided, the ones I lied to, the ones I watched walk down the dock. I left my life, my medals, my carefully constructed excuses because I couldn't keep pretending the system was neutral."
She stepped between me and the gate again, not touching me this time.
"I didn't leave to save a building," she said. "I left because I want people to have a chance to exist without being sorted and cleaned and archived. But that desire doesn't make me worth more. It just makes me responsible for what I do with it."
I opened my eyes.
Her expression had shifted. Still hard. But there was something like grief under it.
"If you base your worth on the size of the monster you're fighting," she said, "then the moment we kill the Great End – if we ever do – you'll look around and realize you still have no idea who you are. And you'll go hunting for another apocalypse to throw yourself at."
"I don't know how to do anything else," I said.
"Learn," she said simply.
"If saving humanity is trivial," I said bitterly, "what do you suggest? Gardening?"
"It's not trivial," she said. "It's just not a substitute for a self. It's a task. An urgent one. But a task. You're treating it like a personality transplant."
She glanced at the topology screen, at the red shell around Null-01.
"Time is different up there," she said quietly. "You know how timelines sit in this architecture? Not like threads on a loom, like we tell clients. More like layers in a stack. Null-00 burned out generations ago, and we can still walk its corpse because meta-time is sideways. Null-002 lit Tesse's street on fire, and the Great End sealed it and spun up Null-001 on a slightly different axis. From up there, we're just… experiments on a wall."
I pictured the Great Order council room she'd described once. Layers of glass with different cities stuck to them like insects in amber.
"When they timelock a node," she said, "they aren't just freezing it. They're pinning it in place while they adjust the others. You can't just kick that pin out by wanting it hard enough. You have to understand how the whole stack tilts."
"How long do we have?" I asked.
"For them?" she said. "Inside the shell? Maybe hours. Maybe days. For us, out here?" She exhaled. "Longer. That's what meta-time buys you. Enough delay to think. To aim."
"So we… sit here? While Mara—"
My voice broke again.
"While Mara fights something we woke up," she said. "While Tess argues with screens she can't override. While Riya tries not to be swallowed by guilt. While a daemon built to make cities quiet remembers it knows how to scream."
It hurt the way she said their names.
"What we can do right now," she said, "is learn as much as we can about how the Great End stacks its toys. We have the Pilot-03 device. We have the Null-00 brief. We have access to a dead node they thought they'd buried properly. We can map the timelock, see how far it reaches, find where the shell is thinnest."
"And then what?" I asked.
"And then," she said, "we hit it where it actually matters. Not at the surface, where you get to be a tragic hero. At the hinge. At the part that lets them extend this across all timelines. The thing that turns your city into a template instead of a home."
Echo cleared their throat.
"For what it's worth," they said, "I like you better confused and alive than noble and dead."
"Helpful," I muttered.
Samira studied my face.
"This isn't me telling you not to care," she said. "It's me asking you to stop using other people's lives to avoid having one of your own."
"I don't know how," I said again.
"Start small," she said. "Decide to live long enough to annoy Angelus. Long enough to make them regret giving you that four percent. Long enough to find out what you want that isn't just 'die correctly.'"
My chest hurt.
"And if I can't?" I asked.
"Then we'll deal with that later," she said. "Right now, we need your brain. The Great End built an entire category – P3 narrative-resistant – because you refused to be turned into content. Don't hand yourself over now because the situation finally looks big enough to match your self-hatred."
That landed harder than anything else.
I swallowed.
The gate hummed behind her, still patient.
The red shell around Null-01 pulsed on the screen.
I pictured Mara's face. Tess's terse half-smile. Nesrin's harried jokes. The kids on the dock. Gabriel in Room 0, weighing offers.
I pictured the city under Null, oblivious above a building that thought it was doing them a mercy.
"I want them alive," I said.
"So do I," she said.
"I don't know how to do this without making it about me," I admitted.
"Then let it be about you too," she said. "Just… not only about you. You're allowed to want to live for reasons that aren't noble."
Echo snorted softly.
"Samira, patron saint of realistic expectations," they said.
"Shut up," she said, but there was a ghost of a smile.
I let out a shaky breath.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?" she repeated.
"I won't jump blind," I said. "Not yet. We map first. We look for hinges. We make them work for every percent they strip."
I hesitated.
"But if the shell opens," I said, "if we get even a crack—"
"Then we see what's left to save," she said. "Together. Not you alone playing martyr."
I nodded.
The urge to sprint into the gate didn't vanish. It just… shifted. Took on a different shape. Less like a leap, more like a promise.
Echo turned back to the Pilot-03 interface.
"Right," they said. "Let's see how many timelines our favorite apocalypse manager has stacked on the wall."
Lines of light bloomed across the schematic. Null-00, Null-002, Null-001, and dozens more nodes we didn't recognize, each with its own thin shell, its own color, its own weight.
Above them all, barely visible, a faint sigil pulsed.
ANGELUS – GLOBAL TIMELINE COORDINATION – ACTIVE
Four percent of me hated that symbol with a clean, specific fury.
The rest of me, hollow as it was, leaned into the work.
Behind us, the gate kept humming.
Around us, the dead Null waited.
Somewhere inside a red shell, my city continued to move in slowed time, caught between an old directive and a choice it hadn't been given yet.
We had meta-time.
We had a map.
We had, for the first time since I died, something that looked less like a death sentence and more like a plan.
It wasn't meaning.
But it was a start.
Act Thirty-Third's End – "the angel sees, it exists in every timeline"