[Initiate Mark Program
.
.
Confirming Target Death: ___Confirmed!
Initiate Soul Grabbing Protocol:___Start___ Progressing____Success!
Initiate Cyborg Soul Integration: ______Start____Progressing_____Success!
Initiate Game World Synchronisation:____Start____Progressing____Success!
Initiate Game Character Integration:_____Start____Progressing_____Success!
Initiate Awareness Wipeout:_____Start____Progressing_____Failure!
Initiate Analysis:_____Start____Progressing_____No rights are handed over to the Big Mind!
Initiate Counter Measures:______Start_______Erase_Recommendations______Failure!
Warning! Warning! Warning!
Unknown error detected!
Unknown erro…
Unk…
….]
"Agh! I swear to God, I'll kill you, you son of a btch!"
The moment the messages ceased their frantic flashing, John's consciousness snapped back into his body like a released rubber band. He cursed, he screamed, he threw punches at the empty air—but all he received in return was the cold, hollow echo of his own voice bouncing off distant walls.
Breathing heavily, his chest heaving with exertion and adrenaline, John finally forced himself to be still. He forced his eyes to focus and scan his surroundings.
"What the hell is this place? Where am I?"
He wasn't in the interrogation room. The heavy, oppressive atmosphere of the prison was gone, replaced by a spacious, high-ceilinged hall that felt alien. The hall was vast, felt like it was a place for training of some sort, with different dolls standing in different spots.
"Am I dreaming?" John muttered. He raised a hand and delivered a sharp slap to his own cheek.
The sting was painful and sharp. "Ouch!" he hissed. "Okay, I'm not asleep. I'm definitely not dead. But what is with this place? What happened to that freak back in the room?!"
He recalled what he passed through: Mark's glowing eyes, the metallic wire, the insane story about the future, and the deafening roar of the guard's shotgun. He remembered falling. He remembered the darkness.
[Stay put, failed vessel John Mirage. You are not dead, and you are not dreaming. You have travelled to the future—or rather, your soul has. You are currently awaiting final assessment.]
John jumped nearly a foot into the air. The words didn't come from a speaker; they appeared as glowing, semi-transparent text floating directly in his field of vision. He stumbled backward, his eyes wide with a mixture of shock and terror.
He waved his hands frantically through the air, trying to swat the words away, but his fingers passed through them as if they were made of light and smoke.
"I took the wrong shot... That's it," he muttered, pacing in a tight circle. "That blue fluid... It wasn't lethal, it was a hallucinogen. I'm still locked up in a cell back there, and this is just a nightmare."
[Easy there, failed vessel John Mirage. You are living in the future, within the VR game known as Athanasia. This world was crafted and went live over five hundred years ago, and now it is the year 2864.]
The text shifted, updating with an answer that was far more terrifying than any hallucination. John stopped pacing. He stared at the floating words, a cold dread settling in his stomach.
"Who are you?" he asked the empty room. "Show yourself, whoever is writing this?"
[I'm the program that was designed to capture your soul from the past, integrate it with your cyborg, place you in this game, and wipe out your awareness. All went fine, all but the last step, all thanks to the lack of the necessary papers, which you signed and gave up your rights as a human for the Big Mind!]
John felt a chill run down his spine as these words aligned perfectly with the last moments he remembered. The guard's shotgun blast hadn't just hit Mark; it had shredded the contract.
[Stay put, failed vessel John Mirage, we are preparing to erase your existence in ten minutes. Once done, you won't be a failure anymore!]
"What the actual fck?!!!"
The moment the explanation vanished, it was replaced by a glowing, translucent countdown clock. The digits were a harsh, neon red, bleeding into his field of vision. 09:59… 09:58…
"You want to erase me? What does that even mean? What happens to me after that?!" John's voice cracked loudly. Even if his brain was still struggling to process the science-fiction nightmare of soul-transfers and future travelling, the word "erase" had a universal, terrifying meaning to it.
[You will die!]
The words manifested directly above the ticking timer.
[Once you are dead, you will no longer be classified as a failure. The anomaly will be resolved, and the Big Mind will no longer face a problem. Your cooperation is not required for completion.]
"Screw you!" John's knuckles turned white as he clenched his fists. The adrenaline was back, sharp and biting. "I don't know what kind of twisted, sick game you think you're playing, but I am not some line of code you can just delete. I will never allow you to do this to me!"
[Just stay put, failed vessel John Mirage. The erasure sequence will commence in nine minutes and thirty seconds. Resistance is mathematically insignificant.]
The message flashed and faded, but this time, John didn't waste his breath on another empty threat. He took it with deadly seriousness.
His first instinct was physical. He sprinted toward the far end of the training hall. He reached the only visible exit—a seamless, metallic door that looked like it had been fused into the wall itself.
He grabbed for a handle, but there was none. He threw his shoulder against the surface, but it didn't budge even a fraction of an inch. It was like hitting a mountain.
Desperate, he began to touch the walls, the training dolls, the very air. He was amazed—and horrified—by the reality of it all. The synthetic skin of the dolls felt soft and real; the metal of the table was cold enough to make his fingertips ache. If this was a game, it was a masterpiece of sensory deception.
"Calm down. Think, John. Think!" He went back to the centre of the hall, forcing himself to take slow, deep breaths. He closed his eyes, trying to shut out the pulsing red timer. "What do I know about this place? What did that bastard Mark say?"
He replayed the last thirty minutes of his life like a high-speed digital recording. He saw Mark's face, heard the static in his voice, and remembered the bizarre jargon.
Mark had called himself a program from the future. And then there were those flashing blue messages right before waking up here—messages about soul integration and some sort of systematic steps initiation.
He snapped his eyes open. He looked up at the empty space where the text had appeared and shouted at the ceiling, "Are you a program? Answer me!"
[That is indeed correct! I am the localised integration program responsible for—]
The text began to repeat the same rehearsed explanation about capturing his soul and the failed awareness wipe. John didn't wait for it to finish. He mentally scrolled past the fluff, focusing on the facts.
"And you said you need ten minutes to erase me? Why ten minutes? If you're a future AI program, why the wait?"
[That's correct! You are a faulted vessel, John Mirage, and that's because…] the words started to repeat again the same thing he read earlier.
A glint appeared in John's blue eyes as his lifelong experience kicked in. He was a hacker. "It has a short memory," he whispered to himself.
"It's stuck in a loop. And that ten-minute window... It means this program is currently isolated from the mainnet. It's like a computer waiting for a dial-up connection to send a final report.
It isn't connected to the Big Mind or mainnet or whatever yet. It's waiting for a window to open so it can send the final script and delete me."
He looked at the timer. 07:50.
"That means…" John hissed, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth. "I have less than eight minutes to save my own as* before the connection comes back."
[Just stay put, failed vessel John Mirage. Erasing your existence will commence in seven minutes and forty seconds.]
"Screw you!" John stood in the centre of the room, racking his brain. If this was a program inside a VR game, then there had to be an interface. "Open window!" he shouted.
Nothing happened.
"Open Command Prompt!"
The silence of the room was his only answer.
"Open Shell! Open Kernel! Access Root!" He was throwing every term he knew at the air, his voice growing more desperate with every passing second.
[Shell opened!]
The next instant, a black box appeared out of nowhere. It was five meters long and two meters wide, a bottomless pit of darkness hovering midair. At the very top left corner, a single white dot flickered—a cursor, waiting for input.
"Holy sht! It worked!!" John's eyes widened to the size of saucers. It was the most basic, primitive coding interface imaginable.
He didn't waste another second. He didn't know the syntax of the future, but he knew the coding logic of the past. He looked around; there was no keyboard to use, but that didn't stop him.
"If I'm in the future, perhaps this can work," he muttered softly, before adding, "Let's see... Slash root underscore access!" he bellowed.
The words appeared in crisp, white font inside the black box. He glared at this unbelievable scene for a moment there. He took a deep breath, his heart hammering hard, and then he shouted the final command with every ounce of hope he had left:
"Enter!"
[Access Denied!]
The red text flared on top of the black void of the shell, mocking him. It was a surreal, electrifying experience; John felt as though he were back in his bedroom, hunched over his high-end rig, but instead of clicking keys, he was coding with his voice.
It was a marvellous, terrifying power—one he would have loved to experiment with under any other circumstance.
"Okay, okay. Let's pivot," John muttered, wiping sweat beads from his brow. "Slash Source! Enter!"
[Access Denied!]
"Dammit!" He frantically ran his fingers through his hair, letting out a muffled, enraged shout that echoed through the hall. He paced in heavy steps, his mind whirring. He was hitting a firewall he didn't understand. "Wait... That bastard... Mark."
John froze mid-step. He squeezed his eyes shut, forcing his memory to sharpen, to replay those final moments in the interrogation room. Mark had been gloating. He'd been laughing about the human leaders and their pathetic attempts at controlling machines. He had mentioned a back door—a piece of "fake" administrative code.
"What was it? Come on, John, think! Your life depends on this!"
The countdown clock was a serrated blade against his nerves. It hit four minutes. Then three. The red glow of the digits seemed to pulse in time with his mounting panic. Then, like a lightning strike, it hit him. The password… The ironic, mocking string of characters the machines had given their supposed human masters.
John raised his head, his eyes burning with a renewed, desperate intensity. He stared at the flickering white cursor in the black box and projected his voice with absolute authority.
"Slash Source underscore Code slash Override slash Admin underscore Code slash L0ngL1v3HuW4n17y… Enter!"
The silence that followed was the heaviest weight he had ever felt. For one eternal second, the program lagged.
[Access granted! Admin code is initiated… Showing the source code now…]
"Hahaha! Serves you right, you motherfcker!" John let out a hysterical laugh that released all the tension and anxiety he had been accumulating. "Even if the code was fake, it's still active today and not revoked yet! It's my lucky day, indeed!"
The black window transformed instantly. The void was suddenly filled with thousands of lines of cascading white code. It was the coding structure of the program that wanted to erase him.
John's eyes moved with the inhumane speed of someone whose life depended entirely on finding the right codes. As a hacker, he didn't need to read every line; he looked for the variables. He looked for the triggers.
"There," he whispered. "Risk_Analysis equals one. That's the flag for an error." His eyes darted further down the digital waterfall. "And Erase_Code equals one. That needs to be zero."
He glanced at the countdown. It had dipped below sixty seconds. The red light was now a blur, racing toward zero. He didn't have time. He had to brute-force the edit.
"Slash Edit slash Risk underscore Analysis equals zero slash Override slash Admin underscore Code slash L0ngL1v3HuW4n17y… Enter!"
"Slash Edit slash Erase underscore Code equals zero slash Override slash Admin underscore Code slash L0ngL1v3HuW4n17y… Enter!"
The timer hit ten seconds. 9... 8... 7...
John's heart was drumming so hard against his chest that he thought it might snap. The sound was like thunder strikes in his ears, a rhythmic announcement of his own death approach.
He held his breath, his muscles locking tight, and squeezed his eyes shut. He threw his hands up in front of his face, shielding himself as if bracing for a physical explosion that would tear his soul apart.
3... 2... 1... 0.
[Access granted! Edits are implemented!]
The words flashed at the exact second the timer hit zero.
John stood frozen. Seconds ticked by. Then a minute. He felt... Absolutely nothing. He dared to peel his eyes open, his breath halted in his throat. He was still standing in the centre of the training hall. The black shell window had vanished. The red countdown was gone.
He slowly straightened his back, his limbs trembling with the aftershocks of the intense ten minutes he just lived. He sucked in a deep breath of the air. He was alive.
Suddenly, a new series of windows erupted in front of him, glowing with a vibrant, golden hue. This time, the visuals were accompanied by a crisp, melodic chime that rang clearly in his ears.
[Ding! Congratulations! New system created... The Hacker System! Unique classification: One-of-a-kind. Status: Permanently bound to the soul of John Mirage!]
[Ding! The system has been patched successfully!]
[Ding! The 'Erase Code' order has been successfully cancelled!]
[Ding! You have gained: Hacker Mind (Passive Ability)!]
[Ding! You have gained: Spoofing (Passive Ability)!]
[Ding! You have gained: Shell (Active Ability)!]
[Ding! You have gained: Frame Recognition (Active Ability)!]
[Ding! Stay put, John. I am initiating a localised reboot to synchronise and update with the mainnet. Whatever you do... Don't die on me now!]
[Ding! Welcome to the future, John Mirage. Welcome to Athanasia.]