The Guardian didn’t flinch.
Its body shimmered with temporal armor—lines of silver light ran like veins across its chest. It stood between Eka and the vault’s only exit, a blade of energy burning low and dangerous in its hand.
“Do not resist,” it said, voice devoid of emotion. “You are not authorized to command the Algorithm.”
Eka blinked. The glyphs on her hands reignited, glowing gold then red—unstable, the Algorithm warned. She didn’t know what she was doing. Not fully.
But she knew she wouldn’t kneel.
“I’m not asking permission,” she whispered.
She raised both palms.
The vault ignited in a bloom of fractal light.
The Guardian moved—fast, near-instant—but this time, Eka moved with it. Her mind pulsed open. She didn’t control time. Not exactly. But she stepped into its cracks.
One breath.
A dodge.
A thousand simulations bloomed and collapsed with each movement.
They clashed.
The Guardian’s blade grazed her shoulder, but she deflected the second strike with a hard bend in probability. The edge should have sliced through her neck. In one timeline, it did.
But she chose the one where it didn’t.
The fight ended not with a scream—but with silence.
The Guardian stood frozen, arm extended, blade mid-swing—caught in a temporal lock Eka had never learned and didn’t understand. She stumbled back, chest heaving, blood hot in her ears.
It wasn’t victory.
It was warning.
—
Later, in the undercity far from the vault, Eka sat beside a flickering console, her shoulder wrapped in synth-bandage. The Mapmaker stirred a pot of rice and kelp broth over a power coil. They’d taken refuge in a resistance satellite—an old rebel node once used by the Disciples of Fracture.
“I nearly died,” she said flatly.
He nodded.
“I saw futures where I killed. Futures where I became…” She trailed off.
“I know,” he said. “That’s the price of seeing too much.”
She looked up at him, raw and tired. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
“Because warnings are choices,” he said. “And choices are the one thing we must make blind.”
Silence stretched between them.
The Algorithm pulsed again.
Soft this time. Almost mournful.
And she realized: it wasn’t just code. It was memory. Will. A living echo of everyone who had once tried to remake the future.
She whispered, “What happens if I stop running?”
The Mapmaker stirred the broth once more.
“Then the Architects win,” he said. “They restore the equation. And rewrite the world without you.”
Eka touched the glyphs on her hand. They felt heavier now.
Not a gift.
Not a curse.
A responsibility.
She stood and opened her pad. The map had changed. A new path unfolded. One that led to a city-fragment in the Arctic Cloud—the edge of the Algorithm’s birthplace.
She turned to him. “I follow this route alone.”
He didn’t argue.
“I’ll see you when time forgets us,” he said.
And Eka walked into the storm again—armed not with certainty, but with the fire of someone who finally understood what choice really meant.
Somewhere ahead, a different kind of storm awaited—not built of machines or shadows, but of people.
The city was listening.
And some of them were ready to speak back.
YOU ARE READING
Eka Oloni: Keeper of the Algorithm of Fate
Science FictionIn the neon-washed city of Neo-Lagos, the future isn't guessed-it's calculated. When street-runner Eka Olani stumbles into a vault buried deep beneath the city, she inherits a power that should not exist: the Algorithm of Fate-a sentient system capa...
