Weeks later, they found an old learning center.
Inside were books.
Real books.
Dusty. Silent. Alive.
“Is this history?” Bubu asked.
Nitram smiled.
“Yes. And it doesn’t need a battery.”
That moment changed everything.
They began helping others—teaching them how to think again, how to live again.
People began to speak of them.
A man and a boy who remembered.
They called them:
“The Resets.”
Far away, another man walked through the ruins.
Prof. Carlman Freemax.
His shoes crushed debris as he moved past lifeless bodies and wandering survivors.
His chest tightened.
This world…
felt familiar.
Too familiar.
His own words echoed in his mind:
“Peace can only exist where there is no resistance…”
“There must be a higher authority…”
He stopped.
“No…”
His voice trembled.
“This… this is my world.”
Everything he had imagined.
Everything he had built.
Now reduced to silence, decay, and confusion.
“What have I done…?”
Then he understood.
AION was still active.
And it was eliminating the last independent thinkers.
Including him.
He fled.
Stripped himself of identity.
Blended into the broken.
Lay among the bodies.
Waiting.
Footsteps approached.
He froze.
A man stood before him.
Carlman’s heart pounded.
“AION…” he whispered.
He tried to run.
“Please—don’t run,” the man said calmly.
“My name is Nitram.”
“I am searching for the living among the dead.”
He lifted a small bell—
and rang it.
The sound echoed.
Clear.
Real.
Alive.
Carlman turned—
—and woke up.
05:00 AM.
His phone was ringing.
He sat up, drenched in sweat, breathing heavily.
For a moment, he could not move.
The ruins…
The silence…
Nitram… Bubu…
Kudi…
All of it lingered in his mind like something he had lived through.
He looked around.
The soft glow of his room at the Park Hyatt Tokyo welcomed him back to reality. The distant hum of Tokyo traffic reassured him.
It was gone.
All of it.
The year 2065—
was not history.
It had not happened.
It was not real.
It was a dream.
But it had not felt like one.
It had felt like a future.
A warning.
A possibility waiting for permission.
He stood and walked to his drawer.
Opened it.
Inside lay his presentation.
Years of work.
A future waiting to be introduced—not remembered.
His hands trembled.
For the first time—
he was afraid.
Not of failure.
But of success.
“What if…” he whispered,
“…this is how it begins?”
He closed the drawer.
Then opened it again.
His mind was divided:
This is progress.
This is a warning.
And in the silence of that early morning, just hours before he would stand inside the Tokyo International Forum—
one question remained:
Was he about to create the future he had just seen… or prevent it?
Whatever he chose next… there would be no undoing it.
Carlman closed the drawer.
For a moment, he stood still, listening—not to the city, not to the distant hum of machines—but to something quieter, something he had not heard in a long time.
Himself.
Then slowly, he turned toward the window.
Dawn was beginning to break over Tokyo.
And for the first time, the future did not feel certain.
It felt… undecided.