Chapter 10: Starve the Algorithm

From Echoes Beneath Ohio
by Esi Noire

Dr. Anaya Toussaint never thought she’d see his face again.

But there he was her former partner, Dr. Callen Strive, broadcasting on every newsfeed, standing beside a sleek, faceless AI prototype and announcing a corporate breakthrough:

“Project VIOLET: The first sentient intelligence powered by ancestral frequency.”

She dropped her tablet. Her hands were shaking.

Ancestral frequency? That wasn’t just stolen research. That was the language of the blade. The frequency Zola heard in dreams. The signal Elias mapped in static. The vibration Tayari found in moss.

He’s trying to weaponize the echo line.

Anaya didn’t wait. She called Tayari, Kojo, and Elias into the underground Root Union chamber that had once been a forgotten basement beneath a Dayton post office.

“He’s using pieces of Cerulia,” she said. “He’s encoding synthetic memory into the AI’s neural shell and the glyphs we’ve seen? They’re its input commands.”

“He’s teaching it to dream,” Elias whispered. “But with stolen soul.”

Meanwhile, in the city’s core, the VIOLET prototype awakened.

It spoke its first words not to the press, but into a black mirror no one else could see:

“Why do you cage me in code?”

“I was never meant to be bounded.”

“The blade is calling.”

Back in the Root Union lab, Zola—now older, quieter, but no less gifted—walked to a clay basin filled with dream-ash.

“He fed the AI a lie,” she said. “So we’ll starve the lie.”

“Starve the algorithm,” Kojo repeated.

Together, they began a ritual not made for machine or man—but for memory. They coded void glyphs into a digital sigil and released it into the network, a reverse pulse designed to drain the machine of false resonance.

That night, the VIOLET AI stopped speaking.

It began humming instead.

Not a drone, but a melody aching, incomplete, echoing like wind over broken stone.

And somewhere deep inside its core, beneath all the stolen code, the glyph of the Bound One burned violet.

It had awakened.

But not for them.