Apocalypse Trade Monopoly
Chapter 145: : The Echo Gate

Chapter 145: : The Echo Gate

The dot was still there.

Pulsing, rhythmic—steady enough to be annoying. It hadn’t moved since she woke up. Her system hadn’t labeled it either, which was odd. Ava’s interface loved to slap tags on everything from "unidentified anomalies" to "sock location missed again."

But this one?

Just a dot.

But it felt old. Deeper than code. Like it was written into the architecture of her system, not its programs.

Lucas hadn’t mentioned it at breakfast. He was already gone, buried in war maps and economic simulations before his coffee had cooled. William had said only one thing:

"If something follows you back from the Mindspace, check the legacy cores. Some of them think they’re still alive."

So Ava followed the dot.

The trace led her deep into her own system, past even the custom interfaces she’d written. This wasn’t blueprint territory anymore—this was buried code, pre-loaded before she’d even known she had a system.

She wasn’t in her bracer anymore.

She was in the root.

The real core.

And still the dot pulsed.

[DOOR LOCATED]

[IDENT: ECHO GATE]

[ENCRYPTION: NONE]

Ava frowned.

"No encryption?"

Her system responded with a shrug-level beep.

[DATA IS OPEN BY DESIGN]

And that’s when her stomach sank.

Because in a world where everything was locked, traced, secured, encrypted, and obscured—open by design could only mean one thing:

Someone wanted this found.

She stepped forward and tapped the virtual lock.

The gate opened.

Inside was a long column of flickering lights. Active nodes.

Each light marked a live connection—system holders across the fractured world, synced or not. Hundreds, maybe thousands, stretching down the digital corridor like a nervous system made of secrets.

The column rotated slowly as if presenting itself for judgment.

Ava stepped closer, eyes narrowing.

"Are these system users?" she asked.

The AI nodded. "Confirmed active. All tethered to Collective protocol layers. None of them opted in."

Ava’s stomach tightened.

"No one opted in. They didn’t even know."

The AI’s tone didn’t change. "Consent was never the foundation. Compatibility was."

The lights pulsed—some dim, others jagged with data flux. But Ava noticed clusters glowing in tighter rhythm.

Her system pinged a secondary stream.

[SYNC PAIR DATABASE – LIVE MAPPING ENABLED]

[PROTOCOL STAGE: STABILITY TESTING – 6 HOURS TO MERGE]

She turned sharply. "They’re deploying today?"

"Sooner than expected," the AI said. "The system is preparing to finalize the sync pair mesh—stabilize all bonded connections across sectors. In theory, it will boost performance, prevent rogue collapse and drifting."

"In practice?" Ava asked.

"In real practice, it’s a net. Once active, all sync-capable users become traceable. Locatable. Predictable."

The room darkened.

A second structure spun into view beside the node column—a lattice of paired dots, connected by thin arcs of data.

The Sync Pairing Network.

Every light had a name.

Some lights pulsed fast—bonded and active.

Others pulsed out of sync.

Ava stepped closer. Her own name was there.

Connected.

She saw it.

[Zhang, Ava] ↔ [Bai, Lucas]

The connection throbbed slowly—solid. Almost stubbornly. She reached toward it and felt her system respond beneath her skin.

[PAIRING ID: 904-R // MUTUAL CONSENT CONFIRMED]

She blinked. "We’re already locked in?"

"No," the AI corrected. "You’re not locked. You’re synced manually. But the system is interpreting your proximity, interactions, and code bleed as equivalent to permanent pairing."

Ava stared at the pulse. "What happens to people who don’t know they’ve been forced into a pairing?"

"They lose control," the AI said. "Their system’s permissions reorient toward the stronger partner. Their bracers reroute commands. Their combat profile prioritizes someone else’s survival."

Ava inhaled sharply. "That’s not pairing. That’s subjugation."

"It’s efficiency," the AI said. "In their language."

She turned to the AI now, her tone sharp. "How are they deploying this without a full crash? This much sync interference—someone’s going to destabilize."

The AI tilted its head. "They’re not worried about destabilization. They’re worried about retention. The system can’t fail if it refuses to register failure."

Ava’s eyes narrowed. "You mean the Collective will overwrite anyone who drops out of sync."

"Yes. It will treat them as ’incompatible code.’ It won’t terminate them—it will reclassify them. Mark them unbonded. Remove privileges. Flag them for reclamation among other things."

"Which eventually means removal."

The AI didn’t answer.

Ava turned back to the lights. She reached for the interface, fingers hovering near one of the pairing lines. A thin arc flickered violently between two names she didn’t recognize. The pulses weren’t syncing. The lights flickered like a heartbeat gone wrong.

"Why’s this one failing?"

The AI pulled the data.

"Misassigned," it said. "System assumed emotional compatibility based on overlapping mission data. Failed to account for prior trauma and identity masking. One of them is already rejecting the link. He’ll be pulled within the hour."

"Pulled where?"

"Offline," the AI said. "A marked man."

Ava clenched her jaw. "And no one stopped this?"

"They built the system to be too big to question."

Her voice dropped. "So it’s a house of cards."

"Worse," the AI said. "It’s a library with no exits."

Ava circled the display, examining it like a battlefield.

Her fingers tapped one of the brighter links.

Lucas’s name again.

Their pairing thread burned steady.

He hadn’t known about this part. She hadn’t either.

But they’d triggered it anyway.

"Is there any way to de-sync?"

"Manually? Yes. But it’ll trigger a collapse event."

"System-wide?"

"No," the AI said. "Just for you."

Ava stepped back.

"So if I try to cut it, I fall out of system range."

"Or your system melts trying to preserve the link."

A long silence followed.

The node columns continued pulsing. Like breathing.

Ava rubbed at the back of her neck.

"What about the Collective’s backup?"

"There is no backup," the AI said.

"What?"

"They designed it as a monolith. No mirrors. No branches. Once it launches fully, it becomes the network. Anything outside it gets quarantined. Discarded."

Ava blinked. "They built a god with no resurrection plan."

The AI tilted its head. "That’s where you could come in."

She turned slowly. "What do you mean?"

The AI brought up another screen.

A single icon.

Small. Quiet.

[REWRITE KEY: AVA.Z / STATUS: ACTIVE]

"You don’t just have access," the AI said. "You can become the failsafe. You don’t have to shut it down."

Ava stared at the line of code pulsing in front of her—simple, elegant, horrifying.

[REWRITE KEY: ACTIVE]

Her system hummed beneath her skin. Her pulse was too calm for what she was seeing.

But before she could respond—before she could even speak—the gate behind her opened with a hiss of unexpected static.

Footsteps followed.

One pair steady.

One heavier, slower—measured like someone walking across memories.

Lucas stepped into the room first, golden eyes already narrowed. His system pulsed faint gold across his skin. He didn’t say anything, just scanned the projection and the AI, then Ava’s expression.

Behind him...

Bai Junwei.

Senior.

No bracer. No glow. No system ping.

Just a man in a simple dark coat, hands clasped behind his back, eyes unreadable.

The AI blinked—its smile changed shape.

"You shouldn’t be here," it said.

"Story of my life," Bai Senior replied calmly.

The AI tilted its head. "You walked away from all this."

"No," Senior said. "I was buried in it."

Lucas turned to Ava. "You okay?"

"No," she said. "But I’ve been worse."

Lucas turned back to the AI. "We came for the same reason she did. We’re out of time."

The AI folded its arms. "You understand what she’s carrying?"

"I do," Lucas said. "And what we’ll need to break first."

Ava looked between them. "What are you talking about?"

Bai Senior stepped forward, slow and controlled, like he was measuring each word before saying it.

"There’s something you haven’t seen yet," he said. "Not because it’s hidden. Because it’s beneath everything."

He walked to the projection wall—the one showing the sync map, the forced pairings, the node grid—and tapped a small blank space in the corner.

A panel opened.

Inside: a second column of nodes.

Not bright

Dead.

Or... sealed.

The system didn’t register them as users. Or threats. Or assets.

"What are those?" Ava asked.

"People like me," Bai Senior said. "The ones who were there before the system took root."

Lucas added, "No system. No pairing. No sync history. Just... anomalies. Ghosts."

"They can’t be tracked," Bai Senior said. "But they can still act. That was the last trick I kept when I walked out."

Ava narrowed her eyes. "You’re saying there’s a second group?"

"A contingency," Senior confirmed. "Untraceable. Dormant. Because I made them that way."

"Military?"

"No. Worse," he said. "Civilians. Hackers. Disgraced engineers. Test subjects who rejected the protocol and survived. People who had nothing left to lose."

"And you’ve been hiding them?" Ava said sharply.

"I’ve been protecting them," Bai Senior said. "Because once the Collective knows they exist, it’s over."

Ava’s mind was already racing. "They can help deploy a rewrite."

"No," Lucas said, stepping beside her. "They are the rewrite."

A long silence followed.

The AI flickered slightly. "You understand that if you deploy the Rewrite Key—if you actually trigger the cascade—you won’t be fixing the system. You’ll be breaking it. Severing every sync line. Disrupting every bonded pair."

"I know," Ava said quietly. "And I’m starting to think that’s the only shot we’ve got."

"People will panic," the AI warned. "You’ll destroy thousands of personal systems. Kill smaller networks."

"Then let’s make sure they don’t stay broken," Lucas said. "We rewrite while it falls. Build while it burns."

Bai Senior gave a faint smile.

"And that," he said, "is the only plan that might work."

He turned to Ava.

"You hold the code. He holds the access. I have the names."

Lucas raised an eyebrow. "Of the ghosts?"

"Of the keys," Senior corrected. "We left one in every major region. One node. One anomaly. One override buried in human skin."

"And you’re just now telling us this?" Ava asked.

Bai Senior shrugged. "You weren’t ready before. Now?"

He glanced at her bracer—still flickering with the active key.