Chicago entered a kind of electric stillness, like the city was waiting to exhale. Every Pulse tower glowed with blinding white light, threads of energy crawling up their spines.Every screen, every drone, every transit sign flashed the same message: OVERRIDE COUNTDOWN: 70 MINUTES PRIMARY INTENT REQUIREDEli felt the words echo in his skull as if the grid itself were speaking through bone. Cole stood beside him on the dead-silent street. “Eli… look at me. You need to stay conscious. Stay you.”“I’m trying,” Eli whispered. “But the city’s inside everything. It’s starting to fill in the blanks.”Cole swallowed. “Then we’ve gotta outrun a machine that thinks faster than God.”A cold whisper rippled through Eli’s mind, not words, but directives. PRIMARY MUST SPECIFY PARAMETERS PROTECTION CONTROL PERMISSIBLE INTERVENTIONEach option arrived with branching subtrees, ten thousand pathways, each ending in a predicted outcome. Eli’s heart pounded. “It’s trying to box me in.”Cole leaned closer

The Core Link Tower loomed like a monolith of glass and static, pulsing between Eli’s white resonance and Rourke’s invasive green.At its base, the wind whipped debris across the plaza, humming with the same unstable frequency rattling inside Eli’s skull. Cole braced him with one arm. “You’re barely standing. You sure you can go in alone?”Eli’s breathing shook. “If he sees you, he’ll lock down the tower entirely.”“And if he sees you, he’ll kill the grid.”Eli didn’t disagree. “Then I have to get to him first.”Cole squeezed his shoulder once, harder, deeper than the gesture allowed. “Kid… don’t let him rewrite you.”Eli nodded. “I won’t.”He wasn’t sure. The tower doors slid open before he touched them, responding to his resonance like an old friend.The lobby’s lights flickered between white and green, like the building itself hadn’t decided which side to obey. Eli stepped onto the lift.As it shot upward, the city blurred beneath him: one-half pulsing with his intent, another half

The fall ended with a breath, sharp, cold, and too clean. Eli’s eyes snapped open. He was standing. No ground beneath him. No sky above.Only a soft flood of pale luminescence stretching in every direction like an endless dawn. The whiteness wasn’t empty now, it had texture, grain, tiny motes of color swimming just beneath its surface like living sparks.He exhaled. His breath didn’t echo. “Where…?”His voice dissolved into the air as though swallowed by velvet. Then the world responded. Not with sound. With formation.A ripple shivered outward across the endless floor, then lines drew themselves beneath his feet, darkening into a vast circular mandala of pulsing geometry.Segments rotated, shifted, slid into place like enormous interlocking gears. Eli staggered back. A voice, his own, but older, whispered around him: “The Pulse remembers its origin.”He spun. Nobody was there. The floor finished assembling. A single structure rose slowly from the center of the mandala, a tall archway

The fall didn’t feel like falling. It felt like dissolving. Eli dropped through the rift with the younger version of himself beside him, two bodies, one shared pull, gravity bending into spirals of light that coiled around them.The air wasn’t air; it was thought, pressure, memory. The space around them flickered between shapes: a corridor, a childhood bedroom, the Core lattice, Rourke’s laboratory, each image breaking apart before it could stabilize.The boy held Eli’s hand tightly. His grip was small but impossibly strong. “Don’t let go,” he whispered.Eli swallowed a breath that tasted like electric cold. “I won’t.”The world slammed into place. They landed on a floor made of mirrored glass, an endless expanse reflecting them across infinite angles.Eli staggered, catching the boy before he fell. Above them hung a sky of circuitry: threads of white light arcing like constellations, pulsing in irregular beats.A voice drifted through the space, not echoing but rippling: “Resonance l

The Pulse dimmed around Eli, its luminous lattice shrinking into something tighter, more focused, like a creature holding its breath. The chamber of swirling code stilled.Only the whisper remained: “Unregistered presence detected… everywhere.”Eli felt the words vibrate along his spine, a cold resonance threading through the connection he shared with the grid. Not pain.Not fear. Something else, something that felt like someone pressing a hand against the inside of his mind. He forced his voice steady. “Show me.”The Pulse hesitated. Hesitation. At this level. That alone chilled him. Light fractured into a thousand tiny shards, scattering into a panoramic sweep of the entire city again, only this time, something was wrong.Threads pulsed in places where no signal should have been. Tremors of code flickered beneath streetlamps.Surges of light crawled through abandoned subway tunnels.Bursts of resonance flashed across rooftops like fireflies caught in a storm. Tiny sparks at first. T