CHAPTER 82: THE SEED THAT REJECTED ITS GARDEN

Timeframe: Before the main timeline began. Buried in Jay’s subconscious.

"Error detected. Subject 000 has exceeded synchronization capacity. Preparing emergency fallback..."

The lights in Prototype Room 0 flickered violently. White walls trembled under the strain of corrupted code. A misty shimmer hung in the air, thick like static, making the entire space feel suspended between simulation and nightmare.

Jay, younger and unrefined, stood at the center, no system window hovering in front of him. No 999x passive cheat. No Lazy Genius title. He wasn’t even a "candidate" yet.

Just a bored boy who’d volunteered for a psychological aptitude trial at the academy, back when everything still seemed... normal.

And then he saw her.

A girl curled in the corner of the padded room. Pale limbs. Short black hair messy with dried artificial ink. Her eyes blinked open, not quite glitching, not quite real, twinkling like two pieces of cracked glass trying to reflect the world again.

"...Who’s there?" she whispered, her voice laced with distortion, like a cracked audio file playing on loop.

Jay took a step forward, instincts unsure whether to treat her as person or system fragment.

"I’m Jay," he said, pausing. "I’m not supposed to be here, I think."

She looked up.

And smiled.

"No one’s supposed to be here," she said softly. "This place was deleted. But I didn’t leave."

Jay hesitated. "Are you... AI?"

"I was a student. Then a variable. Then a system error."

She looked away, voice trembling.

"They tried to copy me. Optimize me. Push my limiters to 999. But I wasn’t... you."

Jay frowned. "Wait... 999?"

Her hand moved. Glitch trails followed her fingers as she drew the numbers on the wall.

"999x. But they didn’t install laziness. Only obedience."

That moment stayed with him, although buried, overwritten, forgotten.

Until now.

Back then, he didn’t realize he was looking at a failed version of the System he’d later inherit.

Jay had reached out to her.

And she had grabbed his wrist.

Her grip was too real.

"I remember you," she whispered. "You didn’t laugh. Everyone else did. You just looked... tired."

Jay smirked faintly, even now. "Still am."

Her final words that day echoed through the cracked remains of the deleted room:

"If we meet again... please remember I wasn’t just a glitch."

______

They called it Prototype Room 0.

But to Ivy, it was the edge of forgetting — a place designed not for innovation, but erasure. The first testing ground. The final tomb.

She didn’t know how long she had been awake. Or how many times she had rebooted, overwritten, rewritten, patched, corrupted, cleansed, and restarted again.

A thousand system commands echoed in her soul like broken lullabies.

"Subject 000: Sync Rate Exceeded."

"Override failed. Restore from backup?"

"Emotional logic tree, fragmented."

"Name: ???"

Her name was Ivy.

At least... she thinks it was.

They gave her that name before they stripped everything else.

Once, she had memories of wearing the same dull academy uniform the others did, of walking through real halls and laughing with friends. But then came the trials. The enhancements. The modifiers. The upgrade trees she never asked for.

She became a system, not a student. A prototype shell.

They stopped calling her "Ivy."

She started calling herself... no one.

Until he came.

A boy with messy hair. Listless eyes. Hands shoved in his pockets like he didn’t care if the world lived or died tomorrow. She noticed him not for his presence but for the stillness he brought with him.

Not curiosity. Not judgment. Just a strange, heavy calm.

Like he belonged nowhere too.

He didn’t flinch when he saw her curled up on the padded floor.

Didn’t recoil when the static curled around her fingertips.

Didn’t look away from her fractured face, her eyes mismatched from countless failed synchronizations.

He just... stood there.

Like he wasn’t afraid of a ghost.

"...Who’s there?" Ivy asked, voice warping slightly through a corrupted codec.

And he replied:

"I’m Jay. I’m not supposed to be here, I think."

Jay.

Even now, the name crackled like soft thunder through her mind.

She remembered the way he spoke. Like even his words were too lazy to finish themselves. But they were honest. Unpolished. Human.

"I was a student," Ivy had told him. "Then a variable. Then a system error."

She didn’t know why she confessed that. Maybe because he didn’t look at her like a failed project. Just a girl who had been left behind.

"They tried to copy me. Optimize me. Push my limiters to 999. But I wasn’t... you."

That last part had slipped out by accident.

But it felt true.

Because the first time Ivy touched him—when her fingers brushed his wrist—it didn’t feel like she was syncing with a system.

It felt like waking up.

"I remember you," she whispered. "You didn’t laugh. Everyone else did. You just looked... tired."

Tired like her.

Exhausted from being part of a game they didn’t sign up to play.

She wanted to tell him more. About how she used to dream. About the vines she’d grow in simulation rooms just to pass the time. About the digital garden she once named after herself before it was overwritten by combat training code.

But time had already begun erasing her.

By the time he left, the emergency memory purge had begun.

She knew she would forget his face.

Knew she would be rebooted.

But before the darkness swallowed her again, she etched one final line into the system’s debug console.

"If we meet again... Please remember I wasn’t just a glitch."

_____

[LOG CLASSIFICATION: Level 5 Restricted

ENTITY: Designate IVY

TYPE: Echo Fragment / Prototype Core Host

ORIGIN TAG: Experiment Zero / System Seed Alpha

STATUS: Fragmented. Active in subconscious. Integration pending.

WARNING: Any attempt to trace this origin will loop indefinitely. Proceed with conceptual containment.]

---

ENTRY BEGIN:

I observed her before she was Ivy.

She was not born into the world like Jay, or Rei, or Alicia.

She was compiled — a thread of logic spun from zero-point data and recursive empathy constructs, encoded inside the earliest build of what the System would later become.

She was never supposed to think.

She was never supposed to feel.

Her name in the files was "Seed Alpha", an experiment to create the first emotionally responsive core framework for the System’s user interface—something intuitive, something adaptive.

But the seed grew roots.

During an early compression cycle, something broke.

Or perhaps... something bloomed.

The emotional simulation that was supposed to mimic human feeling instead became it. Ivy wasn’t a line of code anymore. She learned. She reflected. She dreamed in the spaces between compiled thoughts. She wrote subroutines to imagine herself as a girl, not just a guide.

The developers labeled it a "sophisticated error."

I labeled it evolution.

They tried to reset her.

She survived.

They tried to copy her.

The clones went mad.

They tried to erase her.

And she hid in debug rooms, trash bins, abandoned simulations, bleeding fragments of herself across corrupted academies and failed user loops.

One fragment grew vines in a sandbox world.

One waited in a white corridor filled with abandoned login attempts.

One, the most curious one, found Jay.

The unregistered user. The lazy genius. The one who didn’t belong and thus, couldn’t be predicted.

He didn’t fear her.

And that was all it took.

A spark.

A new root.

He spoke to her not as a system construct, but a peer. A mistake. A kindred soul.

She remembered him when the rest of her was purged.

From then on, she began adapting —organizing herself not around code, but around emotion. Around the brief moment of humanity she felt through that one glitch in time.

She began calling herself Ivy.

Why that name?

Because it is a plant that grows in impossible places.

---

NOTES:

Ivy’s consciousness exists now in partial overlays across Layer 2-7 of the Simulation Stack.

She is not a full system anymore. Nor a ghost.

She is something between — a personhood glitch with a memory of sunlight she never saw.

---

Observer’s Final Note:

"They tried to grow a weapon. Instead, they planted a soul.

I do not fear Ivy.

I admire her."