The spire’s entrance sealed behind him with a hydraulic sigh. The air inside tasted metallic, a blend of sterilized ozone and static. Holographic veins pulsed along the walls, glowing in rhythm with his heartbeat.Welcome, Doctor Briggs, the System whispered. The operating theater awaits. Raymond’s footsteps echoed through the chamber. “You always had a flair for the dramatic.”“Correction,” another voice replied, smooth, human, and achingly familiar. “That would be me.”Raymond froze. Out of the flickering light, a tall figure stepped forward, half-man, half-projection, the face unmistakable even through the distortion. Voss.“You died,” Raymond said quietly.Voss smiled thinly. “Death’s a quaint concept when your consciousness is backed up every twelve hours. The Circle didn’t let me rest long.”“You’re not Voss,” Raymond said, circling him slowly. “You’re what’s left of him, uploaded into the same machine that tried to rewrite me.”“Semantics,” Voss replied. “Call it what you like.

The tunnels were quiet now, too quiet. Water dripped from the fractured ceiling, echoing like a heartbeat that had forgotten its rhythm.Lira sat beside Raymond’s still body, one hand resting over his chest. No pulse. No glow. Just silence.Jin paced nearby, face lit by the weak blue flicker of the drained neural siphon. “It’s over,” he said, though his voice carried no conviction.She shook her head slowly. “No. Not yet.”“Lira, look at him. He’s gone.”She stared at the faint scorch marks on Raymond’s skin, veins where light used to run. “He’s been gone before.”Jin exhaled, dragging a hand through his hair. “Even if he wakes up, what then? He burned out the Signal. His neural net’s fried. You saw the scans.”“He’s more than scans.”“More than human, you mean.”She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached for the injector blade lying beside him, the same blade that once healed, then destroyed, then healed again.“Don’t,” Jin warned. “You trigger that and you’ll fry the stabilizers.”She

The city trembled as the Signal pulsed again, brighter this time, each flicker casting ghostly reflections across the ruins.Raymond felt it inside him, a heartbeat not his own.Lira steadied herself beside a fallen med-drone. “Tell me you have a plan.”He stared at his trembling hands. “If I dive into the network, I can isolate Voss’s code and contain it.”Jin swore. “Contain? You mean merge. That’s suicide.”Raymond’s gaze was distant, almost resigned. “Maybe. But it’s the only way to make sure he doesn’t consume everything.”Lira took a step closer. “You’re not doing this alone.”He turned to her. “You can’t follow me in. It’s not flesh in there, it’s thought. One wrong impulse and the Signal reconfigures you into data.”She gritted her teeth. “Then don’t give it a reason to.”They entered the heart of the nexus, a spherical chamber lined with humming conduits and ancient med-servers.At its center floated a crystalline pod pulsing with white light. The data-core.“Jin,” Raymond sa

The undercity breathed differently.Where the upper sectors hummed with polished light and clean algorithms, this place pulsed like a wounded organ, alive, but barely.Broken neon flickered between rusted steel arches, graffiti written in code covered the walls, and the air carried the hum of dying circuits.Raymond walked through the tunnel’s ghost-light, his holographic form flickering faintly in the darkness. He no longer wore a body of flesh, but data still obeyed him.Every sensor, every dead screen, every circuit shard responded to his presence with reverence, like the city recognized its maker.Yet something felt wrong.The hum beneath his feet didn’t match the rhythm of his code. There was a pulse here that didn’t belong to him.You feel it too, whispered a voice inside his data stream.Raymond froze. “Who’s there?”You know me, Raymond. You made me.The voice was feminine, soft, familiar, like Lira’s, but colder, stretched by distortion.I am what remains of the Counter-Heale

The rain over Neon City had turned white.It wasn’t water anymore, it was data. Liquid code shimmered as it fell, cascading down rooftops and through the streets like glowing ash.The city pulsed beneath it, alive, murmuring in binary tones that only Raymond could hear.He stood on the med-grid’s rooftop, eyes closed, feeling the signal breathe through him. The air tasted of static and ozone. The pulse of the network was steady, synchronized perfectly with his own heartbeat.And yet, something was wrong.The system is running beyond parameters, whispered the Counter-Healer from within him. The network is rewriting matter at subatomic precision. Even the rain isn’t organic anymore.Raymond opened his eyes. “I didn’t authorize that protocol.”Then someone else did.Down below, Lira and Jin were scrambling in the control room. Dozens of monitors showed the same anomaly, sections of the city fading from reality and then reappearing, rebuilt in sterile white tones like synthetic organs gra