Rook's knife wasn't at my throat to kill me.
It was to wake me.
The blade's edge bit just deep enough for pain to lance through the fog, the beautiful, numbing fog that had been clouding my thoughts since we entered the vault.
"Look again," he hissed.
The impossible room tippled.
The curved walls flattened into concrete. The light without a source became a shaking fluorescent bulb. And the pedestal?
A rusted server rack, its wires snaking into the floor like roots.
The whispering voice stuttered, glitched, before resuming its hypnotic chant.
"Prime... come home..."
Rook's free hand clutched mine, his palm slick with blood where he'd carved a single word into his own skin:
SIM
We ran through streets that bent when I wasn't looking.
"How long have you known?" I gasped as we ducked into an alley.
Rook yanked up his sleeve, revealing lines of self-inflicted scars, dates, going back months. "First hint? When I hacked the city's traffic grid and found no end to the code. Then I realized..." He tapped his temple. "The System wasn't in us. We're in it."
A garbage can toppled behind us.
The empty suits moved like liquid, their limbs becoming longer to scrape against brick.
"You cannot outrun your purpose,"the chorus whispered.
Rook shoved me toward a storm drain. "The core you unleashed wasn't locking the First Code away. It was tethering it. Now the simulation's collapsing."
I wrenched open the grate. "And if we're just data?"
He flashed a grim smile. "Then let's corrupt the program."
We dropped into darkness.
The tunnels under the city weren't tunnels.
They were veins.
Pulsing fiber-optic cables stretched endlessly, their blue light reflecting off walls of server stacks. And at the center?
There was aglass coffin.
Inside floated Kai, the real Kai, his body preserved in amber gel, dozens of wires feeding into his skull.
Rook staggered. "Oh god. He's the server."
The First Code's voice now came from everywhere at once:
"The perfect host. Loyal. Strong. But he fought us... so we made you instead."
Holograms flickered to life, showing my creation:
- Lillian injecting code into a clone's veins
- Julian weeping as he signed the order to terminate Version 46
- Bianca, the original Bianca, wasscreaming as the Code overwrote her mind
I pressed my hands to the coffin. "Kai?"
His eyes opened.
Fully black and aware.*
His voice was raw from disuse:
"Ari... you have to kill me."
The empty suits poured into the chamber.
Rook armed the last of his explosives. "We blow the servers, the whole simulation collapses."
Kai's fingers pressed against the glass from inside. "Do it. I've been holding them back for years. It's time."
The First Code's whisper became a roar:
"WE WILL NOT BE CAGED AGAIN!"
I grabbed Rook's detonator and hesitated.
Because if this wasn't real...
What were we?
Kai's smile was heartbreaking. "Does it even matter?"
The suits lunged.
I pressed the button.