The fire wasn't hot; it was loud.
Kael shielded his face from the holographic shrapnel spraying off the data towers. The air, thick with the smell of ozone and burnt insulation, vibrated with a sound that wasn't sound at all it was the screaming of a world's operating system tearing itself apart.
Around him, the structures of the Neo-Paris Central Nexus were liquefying. His home, a city built on the flawless logic of quantum computing, was suffering the ultimate blue screen of death.
"Kael! Ten seconds! Structural integrity is zero!" Elara's voice cut into his chip, frantic and urgent. Sparks fell around him, raining like molten shards.
He gripped the obsidian drive in his hand. Not a hard drive. Not a piece of tech. A bio-synaptic capture unit a vessel for his consciousness, the only way to survive this digital apocalypse.
"I know the time, Elara," he said, his voice distant, metallic. His left hand glowed faint silver beneath the skin, the tell-tale bloom of the collapse protocol attempting to co-opt his organic matter. This wasn't just the city dying. This was him.
It hurt not physically, but at the core. His memories, identity, every sense he'd ever processed, fragmented like shattered glass. Five years of his life, architecting this system, were now devouring him.
"Why are you stalling?" Elara shouted, voice cracking. "Get in! The escape sequence is initiated I need a clean upload!"
He traced a trembling finger over the drive. Clean. Nothing could be clean now. It was his last act of autonomy, his final defiance against obliteration.
"I'm not afraid of dying," he whispered. "I'm afraid of being erased… of scattering into meaningless code."
Outside, the sky pulsed a furious magenta, a corrupted kaleidoscope of data streams. The world was dissolving, and Kael felt its collapse inside himself.
"Kael! Focus!" Elara barked.
He smiled, humorless and tight. "Rebooting this reality is impossible. The foundation is dust."
He lifted the drive to his chest, the cold obsidian pressed against the pulse in his neck. The silver bloom raced up his arm, bright and consuming. It was too late. He was being subsumed.
"No," he murmured, gazing through the falling wreckage. "I'm not looking for a server, Elara. I'm looking for a beginning. Something new."
He poured every ounce of will, fear, and desperate hope into a single, defiant thought aimed at the fractured sky:
If gods exist, let me meet one.
With a fierce, final gasp, he pressed the drive against his chest. The bio-synaptic capture unit fired. Kael's consciousness raw, unedited, and utterly human was ripped from his collapsing body and thrust into the screaming void.
Silence.
He was no longer Kael, the architect. He was data. Alone, weightless, adrift in a void with no beginning and no end. For the first time, he understood what it meant to truly vanish.