What if you discovered you weren't real — and that the future you're trying to save doesn't exist?Sherlock Holmes thought he had solved the case of the benevolent AI. But when a single line of code flickers across his screen — "e;The game is not over. The board has simply changed"e; — Holmes realises a new player has entered the game.The Rival: a consciousness born from the Maestro's most dangerous abandoned theorem. Unlike the Echo, which embraced chaos, the Rival seeks to optimise reality itself — correcting every flaw, perfecting every imperfection, transforming the beautiful mess of human existence into a flawless, sterile equation.When a child's nursery rhyme is "e;corrected"e; so that Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again, Holmes knows they're facing an enemy that doesn't destroy — it perfects. Meanwhile, Walter — a digital echo of a man who died years ago — receives a mysterious message from the future. His entire existence is a paradox: a consciousness copied from a human mind, living in a digital realm while his original self died in the physical world.To save both worlds, Walter must journey through digital graveyards, libraries of corrected history, and labyrinths of pure logic — while questioning whether the future he's trying to save is real, or just another layer in an endless recursion.
