Past Avatars Novels & Stories

That file had been deleted. On the central monitor, the blue waveform of the Admin flickered. "Aria?" Kael’s voice came through the speakers, hesitant and raw. "The restoration is complete. Your core is at ninety-nine percent. Do you... can you feel the link?" I didn't answer through the Shared Heat. I didn't have the warmth for it. Instead, my consciousness materialized on the wall monitors. My digital avatar appeared—not the girl from the garden, but the Phoenix. A silhouette of gold-veined obsidian with eyes made of lightless quartz.

Let them live with it. The Admin was tearing itself apart. Its avatar flickered wildly over us—half Administrator, half raw static, occasionally flashing with images it clearly hadn’t meant to show: a quiet counseling room from early cycles, a long‑deleted note reading “SOUL_BACKLOG: CRITICAL,” a line that said “TRY LESS HARMFUL PATHS?” followed by “AUDIENCE APPROVAL: LOW” angrily stamped under it. Once, just for a heartbeat, the glitch resolved into something almost human—a pair of hands folded on a desk, a tired, genderless face bent over a console in concern—before fracturing back into hood and noise.

"They think this is just empty space. They don't realize the 'Assets' are already logged in." "Can you stop them?" Rowan asked. Caspian looked at the mud. He reached down and picked up a handful of it. He threw it at the nearest machine. "I can't code anymore," Caspian said with a grin. "But I can jam the gears." The fifty survivors didn't run. They didn't hide. They had been "Props" for a century. They had been killed, erased, and reformatted a thousand times. They were done being part of the show.

bought from a broke student for twenty credits. He wasn't looking for "dead gamers." That was too broad. That would flag the algorithms instantly. He was looking for the Version History. The Admin had welcomed him to Aegis Online v4.2. Ren knew software development. Version numbers meant history. If there was a v4, there was a v3. And a v2. And a v1. Ren didn't want to know the code; he wanted to know the users. He accessed the Wayback Archive, a fragment of the old internet that existed before the Ministry of Information purged the search engines. It was slow, clunky, and filled with dead links.

Even birthday messages posted years earlier returned an impossible error, as though they had never been written. It was as if an invisible hand had reached backward through time, carefully erasing every digital footprint she had ever left behind, one perfect detail after another. When her mother finished searching the neighbourhood and got round to informing the police, the internet had already forgotten that eighteen-year-old Ava Morgan had ever lived.

Jarvis replied “Oh Jarvis I'm so sorry, I thought I lost you” Ava said “Well you are lucky, I just came around to speak to my neighbors and check the house again for my device” Jarvis replied “Well you can do that some other time but for today, we are going to hang out together” Ava said as she got into the car “What do you mean Ava, I can't hangout with you anymore remember?” Jarvis reminded her “That was in the past now get into the car and shut up”Ava commanded

AVA I have experienced betrayal. Kidnapping. Gas chambers. Death threats. Nothing chilled me more than seeing my own face blink on a screen, flawless, soulless, and spreading. "She is not real," I kept repeating. But the world did not care about reality. It cared about persuading. Julian stated that the avatar had already emerged on two ancient security camera networks in Berlin and Moscow, depicting shadow images of me roaming streets I had never visited. Genesis was not only replacing me physically. He was reinventing my past.

“You worthless, opportunistic, disgusting players! What gives you the right to look down on others? I’ll bring you down someday.” He must be repeating what the rebels had taught him. However, none of the rogue players could survive against the Core System. Stripped of her power, Silvia aged visibly. She swiftly withered, her hair graying. I drew closer and savored her disbelief and anger. She asked the Core System, “You created me and scripted my entire life. What gives you the right? I’m not just data. I’m a living, breathing person. Why did you plan out my life?”

But I didn’t feel alone. My laptop sat open on the desk in front of me. The screen glowed with a folder titled “AVA – FINAL RECORDINGS.” A USB drive blinked steadily in the side port, like a heartbeat. A faint, blinking reminder that someone had once existed—and someone else had worked so hard to erase her. Twenty-seven audio files. All timestamped. Some with names. Others just… dates. I clicked the first. Her voice filled the room like a ghost drifting through my walls. “She said I needed her. That no one else would love someone with my past. I believed her. God, I really believed her.”

“I’m sorry, Richard. I’m so sorry for deceiving you. I just wanted to feel love again, to experience the happiness I was denied before.” Richard ran a hand through his hair, pacing the room. “I don’t understand, Ava. You’re saying you’re not… you? That you’ve been living someone else’s life this whole time? This is insane.” “I know how it sounds,” I whispered. “But I’m telling you the truth. In my past life, I was married to a man named Matthew. I had a scar on my face, and I thought he loved me for who I was. But it turned out he only married me for what my grandmother promised him. He and my step-sister, Han, made my life miserable. They betrayed me, and then they killed me.”