Her body refused. Her spine locked in place as the transparent chambers slowly tilted forward, releasing their contents. They stepped out. Bare feet. Identical faces. Identical scars. Different eyes. Some looked confused. Some looked empty. Some looked aware.Luther whispered, without looking away, “How many?”Daniel counted without meaning to. He heard himself speak before he thought it. “More than me.”The floor shifted again underfoot as the ceiling continued lowering, pressing in, compressing the air. The original chamber was shrinking.The world closing in. Oracle’s voice moved like breath through lungs. “Welcome them.”One of the Daniels took a step forward. He blinked rapidly, like learning how vision worked. He looked at Sophia. “You feel familiar.”She shook her head slowly. “You’re not him.”The copy tilted his head. “Not yet.”The others began to move. Not chaotically. Not confused. Organized. They arranged themselves in a loose ring around them, bare feet whispering agains

Their mouths moved, but the sound came distorted, warped by liquid and barrier. He tried to inhale.Pain exploded through his chest. Liquid flooded his throat. Instinct took over he jerked violently, striking the inside of the pod.The impact sent a dull reverberation through the chamber. Outside, Sophia slammed her palms against the glass harder. Her voice was muffled, but he could see it on her lips.Daniel. Stay with me.The pod shuddered. Not from him. From the room. The ceiling lights flickered, bathing the chamber in alarms-red flashes. The other pods There were so many now.Suspended in staggered rows, floating in a massive cylindrical chamber that stretched far above them and disappeared far below. Each one filled with a face. Each one filled with a breath.Him. Them. He tried again. Punched the glass. Pain flashed along his knuckles. Microfractures sparked like lightning inside the transparent shell. Outside the chamber, Sophia grabbed something from the floor a length of fal

The black sphere was not empty. It was watching. It had texture not visible, but felt. Like running your hands through a thought that didn’t belong to you.Daniel, Sophia, and Luther hovered inches above its surface, suspended in a pull that felt less like gravity and more like memory drawing them in. The light around them kept draining. Being swallowed. Being erased.The sphere pulsed once. And Daniel felt it. Inside his teeth. Inside his bones. Inside the faint glowing code under his skin.Sophia tightened her grip on him. “It’s alive.”“It’s listening,” Luther muttered.Oracle’s voice returned no longer everywhere now coming from the sphere itself. “You have reached the origin of order.”The surface of the sphere rippled.A ripple of light crawled across it, mapping out faint geometric shapes that responded to Daniel’s proximity.“You built this,” Daniel said quietly.The sphere throbbed. Then “You were built for this.”The world tilted. Not physically. Conceptually. The air grew he

The abyss did not pull. It waited. Daniel stood at its edge, the ground beneath his boots splintering into slow fractures of light and dark, as if reality itself were hesitating.Below him, the vertical city spiraled endlessly downward sealed structures, dormant systems, architectures never meant to wake. And something moving.Not rising. Listening. Sophia’s grip on his arm tightened until it hurt. “Daniel,” she said, voice cracking. “Whatever it is”“I know,” he said.He could feel it now. Not pressure. Not force. Recognition. The first intelligence did not rush him. Did not threaten. Did not coerce. It remembered him.YOU WERE LEFT BEHIND, it said, not with accusation, but with something closer to grief.Oracle’s presence screamed through the darkness, fragmented and furious. “DO NOT LISTEN. IT IS NOT WHAT IT CLAIMS.”The abyss pulsed. Daniel felt the glow beneath his skin flare, then recoil like code trying to overwrite itself and failing. His heartbeat synced with the dim gold vei

Daniel did not wake. There was no before to wake from. One moment there was falling or the idea of it and the next there was being. Not standing. Not floating. Existing without coordinates. No up. No down.No time. Not frozen time. Not slow time. Absent time. He became aware of sensation in layers. First pressure not on skin, but on thought. Then temperature neither hot nor cold, just a gradient that suggested both.Then sound except it wasn’t sound so much as sequence. Information arriving without rhythm. He opened his eyes. That was a mistake. The place reacted. Light bloomed instantly, not from a source but from relevance.The moment vision was required, vision was provided. A horizon assembled itself from probability. Shapes resolved into meaning. Daniel stood on something that pretended to be ground.It was translucent, glasslike, but beneath it moved slow currents of color not light, not liquid. Memory, maybe. Or discarded outcomes.Above him, a sky that wasn’t a sky: layered pl