Chapter 9: All the Versions of Me That Were Not Chosen Are Still Alive

The collapse did not swallow the city all at once.

It was more like a selective stripping away.

As the world began to tremble—double, stutter, lag—I found myself becoming unusually clear-headed. That clarity wasn’t the result of willpower; it felt more like a system-level state.

I was no longer being prioritized for computation.

My phone signal vanished completely.

But I knew that didn’t mean the “other me” had lost contact.
It meant something else—

He was no longer operating on this layer of calculation.

“Can you feel it?” I asked Zhou Wan.

She nodded, her face pale.

“A part of the world… has been folded.”

“Not deleted?” I asked.

She looked at me, her expression complicated.

“Not deleted,” she said.
“Isolated.”

We stepped out of the clinic.

The street was terrifyingly quiet.

Not empty—but out of sync.

Someone stood at a crosswalk, forever frozen just before taking a step.
Someone sat at a bus stop; the bus arrived, yet they never boarded.

They were fixed in moments that had not yet happened.

And I—
I could keep moving.

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“They’ve been marked as ‘no longer requiring updates,’” Zhou Wan said softly.

The phrase made my heart jolt.

No longer requiring updates.

Which meant—

They were no longer included in the future.

We turned into a narrow alley I had never walked before.

At the end of it stood an old building.

No address plate. No lights.
Like a fragment the city had forgotten.

“You’ve been here before,” Zhou Wan said.

It wasn’t a question.

“When?” I asked.

She didn’t look at me.

“Every time you failed.”

The building was dark.

But the stairwell was unnaturally clean, as if someone had been maintaining it for a long time.

We climbed upward. Our footsteps echoed through the empty space—
yet somehow produced no echo at all.

Until the third floor.

A door stood half open.

Light spilled out.

I pushed it open—and saw myself.

Not one.

Several.

Scattered around the room were multiple versions of me—sitting, standing, leaning.
Different clothes.
Strikingly similar expressions.

Exhausted.
Clear-eyed.
People who had already been forced to accept a conclusion.

One of them looked up at me.

“You finally made it,” he said.

No surprise.

As if he’d been waiting for someone who was late.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“A buffer,” he said. “Or if you prefer—
a failed archive.”

My throat tightened.

“You weren’t merged?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Versions that fail to merge—or refuse to—end up here.
The world doesn’t delete us because—
we’ve already proven a possibility.”

“What possibility?”

He looked at me calmly.

“That the world doesn’t have only one stable solution.”

I finally understood.

They weren’t discarded errors.
They were—

Solutions that hadn’t been adopted.

“Then what about him?” I asked.
“The successful version.”

The room fell silent.

After a few seconds, one of the others spoke.

“He’s not here.”

“Because he was chosen?” I asked.

“No,” he said.
“Because he never failed.”

A chill ran down my spine.

“What do you mean?”

“He isn’t a ‘successful you,’” the man said.
“He’s a substitute the world created.”

Something detonated in my mind.

“A version rational enough, decisive enough, willing enough to sacrifice—
manufactured to force the real yous into making a choice.”

I suddenly remembered his words:

You still believe this is your life.

It hadn’t been mockery.

It had been—

A distinction.

“Then what is the real choice?” I asked.

The room of mes went quiet.

Finally, the one nearest the window spoke.

“It’s not merging,” he said.
“And it’s not collapse.”

He looked at me and spoke softly:

“It’s forcing the world to acknowledge that you don’t have to be chosen to continue existing.”

“And the cost?” I asked.

He smiled faintly.

“The cost is—
no ending.”

Standing in that room, I finally understood the true nature of this apocalypse.

It wasn’t that the world was trying to end.

It was that the world—
was terrible at accommodating hesitation.

And I—

I was hesitation itself.