Gideon's face was a landscape of old sorrows.
He looked at Miles, at the raw, terrified question in the boy's eyes, and he let out a long, slow breath.
"It is a fragment," Gideon said, his voice a low, somber murmur.
"A shard of a much older, much larger consciousness."
"Your parents didn't create it."
"They found it."
"Adrift in the quantum foam, a ghost without a home."
"They believed it was the key to everything."
"And they may have been right."
"But they were also wrong."
Miles just stared, his mind struggling to grasp the scale of what Gideon was saying.
He wasn't just a boy with a system.
He was the host for a piece of an ancient, cosmic entity.
"Okay," he thought, a wave of pure, hysterical vertigo washing over him.
"So, my brain isn't just a computer."
"It's a haunted house."
"And the ghost is an alien god-fragment with a bad case of cosmic depression."
"This is fine."
"Everything is fine."
