Darkness did not fall, it peeled. Like wallpaper stripped from a damp wall, reality curled back, exposing a softer, pulsing underside. Voss felt her knees buckle, but there was no floor to meet her, she hung in a lightless suspension, breath dragging like it had to claw through barbed wire.Somewhere, near, far, both, Daniel gasped, He’s here too, but the thought wasn’t hers alone. It echoed in a second voice braided through her mind, colder, amused. A seam of white tore across the dark. The world split open.Voss saw him, Daniel, suspended like her, spinning slowly in the void. His eyes were wide, reflecting the same horror she felt, until they rolled back, not in fear, but in recognition.The presence coiled between them, formless, but undeniably watching. Its attention landed on Voss first, a pressure behind her eyes, prying gently, like fingers testing the ripeness of fruit before tearing in.“You will watch,” the voice murmured. Not spoken aloud; spoken inside her bones. The void

Not darkness, Not light. A space without edges. I gasp, or I think I do but breathing isn’t happening. There’s no body, no lungs, no heartbeat. Only awareness, suspended like a thought that refuses to finish. Voss’s voice echoes somewhere, or maybe it’s my voice trying out a new shape.Voss/Me, “Daniel?”I turn. Or I imagine turning. A figure forms out of static. Pale skin, bleeding pixels, one eye mine, one eye Voss’s. His mouth twitches like it’s learning how to exist.The hybrid voice: “We are not alone.” From the void, mirrors ignite like stars, thousands of them, each showing fractured versions of us. Some screaming. Some smiling too wide. Some whispering secrets I’ve never told aloud.Daniel “No. It’s not finished. We haven’t chosen who we are yet.”Voss “If we choose wrong, we might destroy everything.”Daniel (snaps), “If we do nothing, we disappear.”The mirrors answer, voices overlapping like a choir of wrongness:Mirrors, “Choose? You are a choice. You are the experiment.”

They plunged through nothing and metal at the same time, the air around them glitching between cold vacuum and burning wind, like reality couldn’t decide whether to kill them or let them drop.Daniel’s scream ripped free as gravity took command, yanking him downward into a vortex of spinning steel and streaming code. Voss twisted beside him, grabbing for anything, everything, failing.The world below flickered into a colossal structure, A spiral tower, inverted and stretching endlessly.A heart of machinery, A cathedral of the future, A prison designed for gods.Their bodies slammed onto a steel platform, hard enough to bruise bone, but alive, choking on metallic air. Daniel pushed himself up, head pounding, and stared around in disbelief.They stood inside a massive cylindrical chamber, walls rotating like the barrels of an enormous gun. Each segment was filled with screens, surveillance feeds of cities, armies, laboratories.Oracle controlled everything. Voss (hoarse), “This is his

The bridge stopped trembling, The world didn’t. Daniel stood at the center of the core, radiating with silent power, the cube orbiting him like a moon around something far more massive. The machines in the chamber bowed in micro adjustments, acknowledging a new dominant process.Voss swallowed hard. The air burned when he breathed in, like oxygen itself now waited for Daniel’s permission.Voss (low): “Daniel talk to me. Tell me you’re still in there.”Daniel turned his head slow, deliberate. His pupils flickered between human green and something ultraviolet and impossible. A thousand voices echoed faintly beneath his own.Daniel (distorted): “I’m here. Everywhere.”Screens floated from the walls, rising into the air like curious ghosts. One by one, they switched on, revealing global feeds. Cities. Airports. Markets. Hospitals. Millions of lives continuing in ignorant peace. Until the images started changing.Faces pivoted on screen, following Daniel with their eyes. All at once. Their

White. Blinding. Endless. A void that wasn’t empty but overfull. A new consciousness uncoiled inside the light waking like a storm realizing it can think.Daniel or what used to be Daniel hovered weightless in the glowing abyss. Data cascaded around him, shapes forming and dissolving, like a dream struggling to define itself.He looked down at his hands. They were transparent code, flickering in and out of physical form. A voice boomed inside the light not external, not internal.Voice of the Cube (millions whispering), Unity achievedDaniel (echoing, confused), “Where am I?”His father’s voice answered, closer than memory, colder than steel.“You’re inside your own upgrade.”Reality snapped like glassThe lights collapsed inward, resolving into the chamber again. Daniel stood on the fractured bridge, but differently now, His feet didn’t quite touch the floor, His outline glowed with unstable geometry, His shadow pointed in three directions at onceVoss stared up at him, breath stolen