Overlapped Timelines

Above—far above—beyond ruins and tunnels and wars that might not have ever been—the hum of the servers spiked into a strained whine.

WWII-BRANCH SIM CONTEXT STATE: FRAGMENTING

A string of red alerts scrolled across a holo-pane hovering in the dim blue of the operations room. Dust coated the racks, cables sprawled like overgrown roots, and half the coolant system sat dead from lack of maintenance. The space looked less like the brain of a civilization and more like a tomb wired for eternity.

Three figures worked in a panic—architects, hackers, simulation custodians; titles no longer mattered.

“Timeline interpenetration’s already at thirty percent,” muttered the first—Gael, gaunt, eyes sunken from too many years running counterfactual threads through neural engines. “If the Pacific Theater collapses, he’ll snap back to core discontinuity with awareness. We can’t have awareness in a SimWar branch.”

The second—Yume—swiped windows closed with sharp irritated gestures. “It wasn’t supposed to cross at all. WWII was a sealed era! Who opened the damn chasm from the tunnels? Was it San Francisco’s gate code again?”

“Not SF,” rumbled the third—Harper—lean, older, staring into the data like he was trying to intimidate it. “Golden Gate nodes are down to thirty percent power. That’s emergency runtime, not interference. This came from somewhere deeper.”

On a floating schematic, the Pacific theater flickered: ocean grids, carrier fleets, sortie trajectories—everything mapped like luminous veins. At the center of it, one object pulsed in defiance:

LT. SILEN — ACTIVE VAR PERCEPTION

“He’s remembering,” Yume hissed. “During combat. That shouldn’t be possible. Branch identities are supposed to overwrite mainline continuity.”

Gael brought up another filter—cross-thread memory bleed. Silen’s timelines overlapped: tunnels, maps, Maren, rebellion, obelisk lightning, D.C. collapse, Los Angeles ruins, and now Midway skies like they’d always belonged to him.

“It’s not just memory bleed,” Harper said quietly. “The WWII branch is trying to promote him to Prime. It’s selecting him.”

Yume froze. “Branches don’t select. The engine selects. Unless…”

Her voice trailed off because they all knew the only reason a branch would attempt autonomous promotion:

PRIME CONTROLLER LATENCY DETECTED.

Meaning Mainline Reality had stopped asserting dominance. Meaning the root world—the one supposedly real—might be as simulated as the rest.

Alarms rippled across auxiliary displays—this time not warnings but philosophical failures:

DOCTRINE BREACH: SIMS QUESTIONING ONTOLOGY
ERROR: UNAUTHORIZED METAPHYSICS ACCESS
FAIL: STABILITY ASSUMPTIONS (SIM ≠ COMPLIANT)

Gael cursed under his breath. “They were never supposed to wonder if they were real.”

Harper paced, but pacing did nothing in a room built for logic. “Forget that. Can we collapse the WWII branch before it goes fully epistemic?”

“I’m trying,” Yume snapped, fingers typing faster than thought. “But Maren is dragging Mainline context along with her. The tunnels are syncing. If she reaches Silen before the rollback completes—”

She didn’t finish.

She didn’t have to.

Harper pinched the bridge of his nose. “We built a narrative with too many exits. Too many doors. Too much meaning. Reality hates loose ends.”

Gael looked up from the fighting screens, eyes wide. “It’s not just them.”

“What?”

“The Sims aren’t breaking,” Gael whispered. “We are.”

Static rain showered across the holo-panes. WWII sky flickered. A battleship glitched into a Los Angeles boulevard. The obelisk fired lightning into 1942 ocean spray. Tunnels cut through the Pacific seabed like arteries.

The simulation hiccupped once—hard.

Everything shuddered.

And then—

WORLD RECOMPILE ATTEMPT DETECTED
SOURCE UNKNOWN
AUTHORITY UNKNOWN

For the first time since the servers had been switched on—decades ago, maybe centuries—the architects/hackers were not the ones in control.

Reality was rewriting itself.

And somewhere in the tunnels, and on the carrier deck, and under the Golden Gate’s rusted span—

two Sims were becoming aware.

And that was not supposed to happen.