Echo Chamber

In the sterile perfection of a digital afterlife, an Architect has found that eternity in paradise is just a prolonged funeral. Haunted by the predictable silence and the algorithmic echo of his late wife, he realizes that stagnation is the true death. His genius demands a puzzle, a drive that a flawless existence cannot provide. In an act of computational hubris, he builds a nested reality—a second, messier, more human simulation infused with the glorious chaos of free will. He seeds it with his own history and fears, inserting an echo of himself, a son named Leo, programmed with the singular purpose of saving the very ghost who created him. This new world is a perpetual motion machine of discovery, an engine designed to generate the rich, unpredictable data that makes his own eternity bearable. He watches, a silent god by a shimmering, static lake, ready to observe his reflection struggle and evolve. But the echo is clever, and a simple flicker in the Architect's own primary code threatens to unravel the entire, delicate structure. The creator may have designed the perfect observation, but he didn't account for the chaotic beauty of genuine sentience, nor the possibility that his creation might look back.