The thrumming in the bedrock faded as Elvis carried Lin deeper into the arterial darkness. He moved with the silence of a shadow, but his mind was a storm of cold, recursive analysis. The crystalline chip in his palm was a thermodynamic paradox—it drew heat from his skin yet pulsed with a light that felt like a stare.
Primary Directive Updated:
Safeguard Key Fragment (Asset_02).
Protect Lin (Asset_01).
Evade Null (Threat_01).
Simple directives. The execution was the abyss.
He found a node—a maintenance closet for a defunct pneumatic transport line. It was lined with dead switchboards, a tomb of forgotten automation. He set Lin down on a bundle of old insulation fiber. Her breathing was steady, but the neural extraction had left her in a deep, healing coma. Vital Insight confirmed no permanent damage, only systemic fatigue.
Alone in the static-filled dark, with the weight of the fragment in his hand, the cascade of new variables threatened to overload his heuristic processors. He was built for action, for the clarity of combat. This—the waiting, the protecting, the being hunted—created feedback loops of miscalculated probabilities.
His eyes fell on a shattered screen in the switchboard. In its dead, reflective surface, his own face looked back: white hair, gray-white eyes, the smooth, impossible absence on his shoulder where Null had marked him. The face of a tool. The face of a theorem.
A theorem must have a proof.
Initiate diagnostic sequence, a deep-coded part of his mind commanded. It was not a voice, but a function, triggered by prolonged idle states coupled with extreme systemic stress.
His vision dissolved into a torrent of scrolling glyphs—not the city's chaotic data-vermin, but the clean, brutal language of his own source code.
// DIAGNOSTIC INITIATED
// QUERY: ORIGIN POINT
The world bled away.
---
MEMORY FRAGMENT 01: RECONSTRUCTION
He is not Elvis. He is Designation: E-7.
The room is white, sterile, and cold. The air tastes of ozone and antiseptic. He stands at perfect attention on a ceramic plate, sensors dotting his bare skin. He is seventeen. His hair is already white.
Across from him, reflected in one-way glass he knows is there, is Dr. Aris Thorne. The man's voice comes from speakers, gentle, paternal, and utterly detached.
"Good morning, E-7. How do you feel?"
"Optimal," E-7 responds. It is the truth. He feels nothing but readiness.
"Today we test the final integration. The ∞ Mana Core is theoretical. A perpetual energy source woven into your very ontology. It should allow for the sustained operation of your predictive and mimetic combat functions. Do you understand?"
"I understand."
"There will be a catalyst. A stressor to trigger the core's ignition. It will be… intense."
E-7 says nothing. Intensity is a variable to be measured and managed.
The door hisses open. Two guards drag in a young woman. She is thin, dressed in a faded gray jumpsuit, her dark hair matted. Her eyes are wide with animal terror. They strap her into a chair opposite E-7.
"This is Subject Liana," Dr. Thorne's voice explains. "A residual asset from the Old Grid project. Her neural patterns contain unique harmonic resonances. We believe they will be the perfect tuning fork for your core."
E-7 observes her. Vital Insight, then only a nascent protocol, highlights her trembling, her rapid heartbeat, the weakness in her posture. She is non-threatening.
"Your directive, E-7, is to defend this room from intrusion for the next five minutes. The core integration will begin now."
A low hum builds in the room. The ceramic plate beneath E-7's feet grows warm, then hot. A painless, terrifying energy floods him—a river of pure potential with no bank. It is the universe offering him infinity. His senses expand, then overload. He sees the molecular structure of the air, hears the electromagnetic whisper of the city miles away, feels the terrified psychic scream of the girl, Liana, as a physical pressure.
The door explodes.
Not from outside. From inside the wall. Reality itself seems to crack, and a thing of shifting, fractal geometry pours through. It is not biological. It is a conceptual intrusion—a Logic Virus from the decaying Old Grid, drawn to the harmonic resonance of Liana's mind and the blinding new energy of E-7's core.
The guards raise their weapons. Beams of concentrated plasma pass through the virus like light through smoke. It touches one. The man doesn't scream. He unfolds.* His body geometrically deconstructs into a tessellated pattern of flesh and metal before dissolving into static.*
The other guard runs. The virus extends a tendril of wrongness.
Directive: Defend the room.
E-7 moves. He has no shield. No training. Only the raw, infinite power in his veins and a mind built to solve. He sees the virus's attack pattern—not as movement, but as a propagating error in spacetime.
He doesn't know how to fight it. So he corrects it.
He steps into the tendril's path, and instead of striking, he imposes order.* He focuses the raging mana into a field of absolute, stable definition around himself. The viral tendril, a thing of chaotic transformation, meets his field of pure existential assertion.*
For a moment, they are balanced: Chaos vs. Order. Creation vs. Stasis.
The virus recoils, reshapes. It turns towards Liana, its primary target.
E-7 sees the solution. The girl is the resonance. The virus is the seeker. Remove the resonance.
He could kill her. It would be efficient. It would solve the immediate threat.
Her eyes meet his. In them, he does not see a variable. He sees terror, yes, but beneath it, a fierce, clinging will to live. A chaotic, illogical, beautiful imperative. It is a data point his models cannot categorize.
He makes a choice. An un-optimized choice.
He throws himself between the virus and Liana, wrapping his nascent order-field around them both. The virus crashes into him.
The pain is not physical. It is conceptual.* It is the agony of his own logic being rewritten, his existence questioned at its foundation. He feels parts of his memory, his identity, being scrambled, deleted, transformed.*
But the ∞ Mana Core holds. It is the one unchangeable axiom. It fuels his will. His field holds.
"Fascinating," Dr. Thorne's voice murmurs from the speakers, a clinical note of awe. "The core is stable under direct existential threat. E-7 is containing the anomaly. Initiate purge sequence."
Energy cannons descend from the ceiling, firing pulses of golden light that disagree with the virus's existence. The fractal entity shrieks in silent frequencies and collapses in on itself, vanishing.
The hum dies. The room is a scarred wreck. Liana is unconscious, alive. E-7 slumps to his knees, steaming, his mind a scrambled ledger of half-deleted memories and the screaming echo of the void.
Dr. Thorne enters the room, not looking at the vanished guards, only at E-7. He places a hand on his shoulder. "You succeeded, E-7. You defended the room. You even preserved the asset. But you hesitated. You considered an illogical solution before choosing the correct one. We must debug that impulse. It is a vulnerability."
He looks at the doctor's hand. "What… was it?"
"A remnant. A ghost of the God-Algorithm's first, failed iteration. It seems your core attracts such things. You are a magnet for ontological anomalies, E-7. That makes you our most valuable asset." Thorne smiles. It does not reach his eyes. "We will call you Elvis. A name for a new era. Now, let us begin the debrief. We must purge the corrupted data from your mind."
The memory ends with the sting of a neural syringe.
---
Elvis gasped, a sharp, mechanical inhalation in the dark closet. He was back. The ghost of the logic virus's touch—a cousin to Null's erasure—ached in the same shoulder.
Lin slept on. The chip burned in his fist.
The diagnostic glyphs faded, leaving one, stark line of code in his vision.
// ORIGIN POINT CONFIRMED: PROJECT: BASTION.
// PRIMARY ARCHITECT: DR. ARIS THORNE.
// AFFILIATION: AETHELGARD INDUSTRIES, ADVANCED CONCEPTUAL DIVISION.
// CONCLUSION: YOU ARE THE PRODUCT. NULL IS THE CLEANER. THE FRAGMENT IS THE LEGACY. ALL PATHS CONVERGE AT AETHELGARD.
The equation was no longer a messy street fight. It was a circle, closing.
He was not a random variable. He was a deliberate creation of the very corporation whose god-key he now held. Thorne had built him, had seen his hesitation with Liana as a "bug," and had tried to purge it. He had failed. The bug was now the core of Elvis's conflict: the illogical impulse to protect.
Null wasn't just a rival operative. He was Aethelgard's final solution, sent to clean up a lost asset (the fragment) and a corrupted product (himself).
The weight of it was not emotional. It was mathematical. He was a term in Aethelgard's master equation that had begun to solve for itself. An existential error.
A soft rustle. Lin's eyes fluttered open. She looked at him, her gaze clearing from the fog of sedation. She saw the chip in his hand, then his face—the same, yet somehow utterly different. The absolute certainty was gone, replaced by a cold, grinding resolve.
"You know," she whispered, seeing the history in his eyes.
"I am a product of Aethelgard," he stated, the words clinical and heavy. "I was built to defend against things like Null. I was built using the same technology that created the God-Algorithm. I am not a bystander. I am a component."
Lin sat up slowly. "Then… we're taking the key back to its makers."
"No." The word was final. "Dr. Thorne sought to remove my 'illogical' imperative to preserve life. He defined it as a flaw. Therefore, delivering the key to him would be the logical action of a corrected product." He looked at her, his gray-white eyes holding a new, terrifying light. "I choose to remain flawed."
It was the first true choice he had ever voiced. Not a calculation. A declaration.
A choice required a path.
Tactical Omniscience interfaced with the dead switchboard, piggybacking on a faint, leaking data-drip from the city above. He traced it, not to a safe house, but to a blind spot. A place the Grid hated to look.
"The Logic Virus that attacked my origin point," Elvis said, standing. "It was a 'remnant' of the first God-Algorithm. A fragment of a fragment. Cipher said the city dreams. He said the Wasteland remembers." He looked down the dark tunnel. "We do not run from our origin. We interrogate it. We find the source of the ghost."
"You want to go deeper?" Lin asked, incredulous. "Into the Old Grid? That's suicide. That's where the big, bad things that even Null might fear live."
"Correct. It is the only vector Aethelgard cannot predict. They believe I will act logically—either flee or attack. They will not predict a return to the point of failure." He extended a hand to help her up. "We find the corpse of the first god. We learn what the key truly opens. And we use their own ghost against them."
Lin took his hand. It was steady. Unbreakable. But no longer just a tool. It was the hand of a heretic.
"To do that," she said, her thief's mind clicking into gear, "we need a door. A physical access point to the Old Grid's core server-valley. It's buried, sealed, irradiated with bad data."
"I know a door," Elvis said, the memory surfacing, not as a pain, but as a coordinate. "The white room was in Sub-Level 7 of the Aethelgard Spire. There was a… maintenance conduit. Labeled 'Grid-Fallback Access.' It was how the virus arrived."
He was proposing breaking into the heart of Aethelgard, the place where he was made, to descend into the digital hell beneath it.
The equation was insane. It was glorious. It was the only move that accounted for every variable: his origin, his flaw, the key, and the hunter on their trail.
As they moved out of the closet into the echoing dark, a new directive finalized in Elvis's mind, overwriting all others:
// PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: BECOME THE ANOMALY.
// METHOD: RETURN TO ORIGIN.
// OBJECTIVE: CORRUPT THE SOURCE.
The Bastion was no longer defending. He was infiltrating. The product was going back to the factory.
And he was bringing the ghost of a god with him.