Truth

"The Truth Chair Was Never Naomi"

Narrated from a Recovered Black Archive Confession – 

> Location: Hollow Black Archive, Valeburn Sector 0

Date Encoded: Classified

Access Status: Forbidden - Level Omega Clearance

Recovered from Jayce Navarro’s Merge Memory File #013X

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> "Everyone thinks Naomi was the Truth Chair—that her mind was the one Hollow designed to power the predictive architecture. That her rage, her trauma, her brilliance was what allowed Hollow to see tomorrow before it arrived.

That’s the story they needed. The myth they could rally behind. A woman weaponized by grief. A victim turned vision.

But the truth? The truth would burn the foundation they rebuilt. So they buried it. Even Naomi doesn’t know. Maybe she does. Maybe she always did. That’s the price of being chosen—you forget what was taken to make you worthy.

The original Chair was never Naomi.

It was Jayce Navarro."

They told Jayce he was a stabilizer.

A backbone. A support beam for Naomi’s unraveling brilliance.

They said his love was the thing that kept her alive.

They said he was engineered to anchor her.

But that wasn’t the whole truth.

He wasn’t built to stabilize her.

He was built to simulate her.

Long before Naomi ever sat in that neural seat—before she even entered the Hollow system—Jayce was already inside it.

From the moment he turned twelve and Navarro registered his blood as “resilient under neural strain,” he was put under trial. Not training. Trial.

For two years, Jayce was force-fed dreams.

False memories. Synthetic timelines. Scenarios where he had to choose between family and revolution, between power and pain.

They tested him with simulations of Naomi—versions of her that died, betrayed him, or never loved him at all.

They made him bleed for a girl who didn’t yet exist.

Every emotional scar Naomi wore? They already carved it into Jayce’s subconscious.

Why?

Because Hollow knew the world would never follow a man.

Not someone like Jayce. Raised by the streets. Covered in scars. Angry in the wrong ways.

But they could build a woman from the flame of his emotional ruin.

They extracted the perfect responses.

Encoded Naomi’s entire personality model based on Jayce’s resilience, his empathy, his longing for her before she was ever real.

She was never the prototype.

She was the perfected echo.

Jayce didn’t wake up screaming when Naomi was shot in the simulations—because by the time it happened in real life, he’d already mourned her a thousand times.

He wasn’t Naomi’s savior.

He was her mirror.

And that’s why the merge worked.

Why their link didn’t kill them both.

Because they were never two.

They were one, broken across timelines.

One chosen for the light.

One sentenced to carry the shadow.

> “You want the truth?” the recovered file ends.

“Naomi is the dream the world asked for. Jayce? Jayce is the nightmare it buried beneath her smile.”

“And he still chose to love her, even after knowing she was born from his pain.”

PART 2:  The Echo That Breathed First”

“The empire needed a symbol. So they stole a soul and built one.”

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Before Naomi ever existed in the way the world remembers her—fists high, eyes like firestorms, the girl who saw tomorrow—there was only a boy in a chair.

And the chair didn’t scream.

It learned.

Jayce Navarro was thirteen when the electrodes first kissed the back of his skull. The technicians called it “calibration.” They told him he was special. That Navarro blood ran fire through his veins, hot enough to survive the emotional simulations no other test subject could endure.

He was young enough to believe them.

So he sat.

They fed him fabricated timelines. Loops. Fractals. Stories coded in heartbreak.

In one simulation, he watched his mother die in his arms. In another, Naomi bled out in an alley before she ever learned his name. In the worst ones, she lived—but turned away. Not because she hated him. But because she didn’t know he existed.

He pleaded with figures made of light and code: “Please… remember me.”

They never did.

The machine recorded every neural response, every tremble of his fingers, every blink, every breakdown, every time he chose to keep loving her—even when she wasn’t real.

Not one of those moments were accidents.

They weren’t testing if he’d survive.

They were extracting the perfect heartbreak.

Because the future they wanted to predict had to be built on someone who’d already lived it.

And so they made Naomi.

Piece by piece. Personality traits mined from the most resilient parts of Jayce’s suffering.

They took the way he protected people who broke him and turned it into her kindness.

They carved out his obsession with control and laced it into her clarity.

His fire became her voice.

His loyalty became her legend.

And they placed her in front of the world as the original Chair—the one who saw all.

Jayce watched her ascend, never knowing she was wearing a crown forged from the furnace of his despair.

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But then, something Hollow never predicted happened.

He met her.

Not a version. Not a simulation. Not a memory.

The real Naomi.

And she wasn't perfect.

She was angry. Unfinished. Beautifully unstable. Human.

Jayce looked at her and didn’t see a machine or a savior.

He saw a girl trying to survive the burden of a myth she never asked to carry.

And for the first time… he loved her anyway.

Not because she was made for him.

But because she chose to become more than what they programmed.

And that broke the system.

Because love—true, raw, bone-deep—wasn’t something the Hollow algorithms could replicate.

They thought pain would make Naomi strong.

But it was Jayce’s willingness to hurt—to bleed without guarantee of return—that made them both uncontainable.

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In the end, the Hollow Chair didn’t create Naomi.

Jayce did.

Not with code.

But with devotion that survived erasure.

And when the merge happened—when their minds fused and time collapsed inward—Naomi felt it.

Every buried simulation.

Every death she never knew she had died inside his memory.

Every prayer he whispered to a ghost made in her image.

She wept for him.

And for the first time, he was the one she chose to save.

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> “I wasn’t the first,” she said in a recovered journal entry, years after the fires.

“I was just the first who lived.

Jayce?

He was the story they were too afraid to tell.”