His brain short-circuited, caught between the primal cable of panic and the cold, frayed wire of analysis.
The device on her hip was for disconnection. It turned people off like faulty appliances. Temporary.
But he didn't have a standard interface, not really. His was a brand, a curse etched into his perception by the System itself. Would it work the same?
And the other option—Immediate Apagamento. That was a bluff. It had to be.
The System issued Apagamento as a collective penalty for district-wide failure. It wasn't a sidearm for field agents. It was a strategic weapon.
She was leveraging the myth, the terror of the void, to expedite compliance.
But knowing it was a bluff didn't stop the red dot from burning a hole in his forehead.
Knowledge wasn't a shield.
Sergeant Voss's finger was a hair's breadth from the trigger. Her ocular lenses narrowed, calibrating.
"Final chance. Compliance or correction."
Correction. Such a clean word for deletion.
Leo's body, with its AGI of 1, didn't have the speed to dodge a beam of light.
But the world around him wasn't made of light. It was made of things. Heavy, stupid, physical things.
He didn't try to run back or forward.
He moved up.
His hand, trembling, shot out and grabbed the edge of a tall, free-standing display unit next to the counter. It was a flimsy thing of particle board and wire racks, once holding rows of elegant eyeglass frames, now a skeleton draped in dust and cobwebs.
He didn't have the STR to throw it.
But he had enough to unbalance it.
He pulled, throwing his meager weight into it, a graceless, desperate tug.
The display unit teetered with a groan of protesting joints. For a horrible second, it swayed back.
Then gravity took over.
It fell not towards Voss, but away from her, towards the center of the room.
It crashed down onto a glass-topped consultation table with a sound that wasn't a single crash, but a symphony of destruction—the splintering crack of wood, the explosive shatter of glass, the metallic rain of a hundred scattered wire frames.
A thick cloud of dust, ancient and agitated, bloomed into the air, swallowing the clean white beams of the Lealists' lights.
Voss didn't flinch. She took a single, precise step back, her weapon never lowering, its red laser cutting a defiant line through the swirling grime.
"Destruction of pre-System assets is a minor infraction," she stated, her voice barely rising. "It changes nothing."
But the noise did.
The colossal, cacophonous crash didn't just echo. It traveled. It vibrated through the floorboards, through the walls, a shockwave in the stagnant silence.
And from the deep darkness of the back lab, the room marked 'LAB', something answered.
It was a long, low, metallic groan. The sound of heavy hinges, unoiled for years, being forced to move. Then a distinct, grinding clunk, like a heavy bolt sliding back.
A new smell punched through the dust—acrid, chemical, a throat-closing cocktail of ammonia, rotten eggs, and something sweetly toxic like antifreeze.
It was the ghost of a janitor's closet, amplified and gone bad.
Voss's head turned a fraction, her lenses whirring as they focused past Leo, past the settling debris, on the black rectangle of the open doorway.
Her professional calm acquired a new edge: tactical reassessment.
"Contaminant alert," she murmured, more to her interface than to anyone present.
Her eyes flickered as she scanned data.
"Cross-referencing location data with pre-System municipal schematics. This address listed a subsidiary tenant: 'Citywide Sanitation & Chemical Supply, Depot 7-G.'"
Her tone remained flat, but the implications hung in the toxic air.
A pre-System chemical depot. In a reality being rewritten by a glitching System, who knew what those chemicals had become, what they had bonded with, or what they now sustained.
"Unit priority shift," Voss announced, her voice crisp in Leo's helmet comms.
"Containment of unknown bio-hazard precedes anomaly acquisition. Krin, status?"
From the hole in the floor, Krin's voice came back, strained.
"Engaged with… structural parasites. They're adaptive. Cannot disengage. The anomaly is in the conduit, moving east."
"Let him go," Voss ordered, her focus now entirely on the lab doorway.
"Seal the fault from above. We are containing a potential reality-toxin spill. Calling for Quarantine Protocol support."
She was letting him go. Not out of mercy.
Because he was now a secondary variable in a newly prioritized equation. A leaking reality-toxin was a systemic threat; a single anomaly was a manageable nuisance.
But Leo wasn't watching Voss anymore.
He was staring at the lab doorway.
Something was coming out.
It wasn't human. It was a shuffling mound of detritus—sodden bundles of grey rags, crushed plastic gallon jugs, coils of brittle hose, all bound together by strands of something that looked like hardened black sludge.
It stood about the height of a child, its form lumpen and asymmetrical. From its top, a single, rusted metal pole protruded, wobbling like a stalk.
As it shambled fully into the dim light, a part of its body unfolded.
It was a robotic arm, clearly salvaged from a large, industrial toy—the kind used for arcade claw games. It was absurdly large compared to the rest of the thing, its pincer-claw scuffed and missing two fingers.
With a series of jerky, pneumatic hisses, the arm extended, the claw rotating until it was pointed directly at Sergeant Voss.
A speaker grille, welded haphazardly to the torso of rags and plastic, crackled to life.
The voice that emerged was digitally synthesized, but sourced from a child's voice recording—bright, cheerful, and now horrifically distorted by time and damage.
"INTRUSION DETECTED," it chirped.
"PROTOCOL: CLEANING CYCLE. INITIATE."
A panel on the front of the thing slid open, revealing not a weapon, but a spray nozzle, crusted with blue and green crystalline deposits.
Voss finally took a full step back, her weapon swinging away from Leo to target the new entity.
"Identified: Autonomous Custodial Unit. Model obsolete. Likely corrupted by chemical exposure. Non-compliant. Lethal force authorized."
The thing didn't seem to hear. Its claw arm twitched.
"DIRT. DIRT. DIRT." the child's voice recited, each word a staccato burst of static.
The spray nozzle hissed, and a thin mist, shimmering with a rainbow oil-slick sheen, jetted towards Voss.
She fired first.
The crimson beam from her disconnector hit the central mass of rags. The creature shuddered, its voice glitching into a high-pitched whine, but it didn't stop.
The mist, light and drifting, settled on the sleeve of her armored jacket.
Where it touched, the sturdy matte fabric didn't dissolve. It… unraveled.
The threads didn't burn; they simply disintegrated into a fine, grey dust that fell away, leaving a perfect, geometric hole in the material. Underneath, the skin of her wrist began to look waxy, indistinct.
Voss hissed, a raw sound of shock that was the first truly human thing Leo had heard from her.
She scrambled back, batting at the mist. "Contagious data-corrosion! Full quarantine! Now!"
She was shouting into her comms, her tactical discipline cracking. The other Lealists were converging, but their movements were cautious, terrified of the drifting, glittering mist.
The cleaning unit, still chirping "CLEAN. CLEAN." advanced, its nozzle pivoting, seeking more dirt to eliminate.
Leo was forgotten.
The storm of professional violence had turned into a chaotic scramble against a toxic, child-voiced absurdity.
He didn't wait.
He turned and dropped back through the hole in the floor, into the icy water and the skittering darkness of the conduit.
The last thing he saw from above was Sergeant Voss, her face a mask of cold fury beneath her visor, one hand clutching her corroding wrist, the other still pointing her weapon—not at him, but at the thing that had turned her efficient operation into a messy, dangerous cleanup.
He splashed away, the sounds of chaos fading behind him, replaced by the drip of water and the clicking of cable-creatures in the dark.
He had traded one immediate death for another.
But he was, for a few minutes more, alive.