"Keep your consciousness packets stable?" Arel echoed, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. He slammed his hand down onto the metal casing of the terminal, the impact sending a fresh shower of sparks across Elias’s hunched shoulders. "You call trapping us in a perpetual loop of firestorms, memory wipes, and false deaths a stabilization protocol?"Elias didn’t flinch. He merely tilted his head, a dry, rattling laugh escaping his cracked lips. "You’re still breathing air, aren't you? Or at least, the simulation’s approximation of it. If I let the voltage drop, you wouldn't die a clean death, boy. You’d fragment. Your memories would tear apart like wet paper, and you’d spend eternity screaming in a loop of pure, unformatted static. I saved you.""By turning us into livestock?" Jara’s voice cut through the hum of the cooling fans as she stepped into the cramped closet, her makeshift spear held level at Elias’s throat. Her eyes were hard, the edge of her fear long since burned away by

"He’s not lying," Arel said, his voice cold, steady, and entirely devoid of the hope he’d clung to only an hour ago. He didn't look at the warning lights; he looked at the fraying cuffs of Elias’s technician’s uniform. The fabric was so thin it was practically translucent, just like the man himself. "Check the output, Jara. Look at the monitors. We’re standing in a dead man’s life-support system."Jara kept her spear tip hovering inches from Elias’s throat, her knuckles white. "If he dies, we fry. If we let him live, we stay in the box. This is a tactical stalemate, Arel. We don't do stalemates."Elias chuckled, a wet, rattling sound that seemed to vibrate in the very floorboards of the server room. He turned his stool, the metal legs scraping harshly against the grated floor. "Tactical stalemate? You speak like someone who’s spent too much time reading the military history files I injected into the sector-seven libraries. You’re playing a game of chess, girl, while the board is curre

"Entropy isn't just a concept here, Arel," Elias wheezed, his fingers dancing rhythmically over the terminal keys, ignoring the spearhead still hovering inches from his jugular. "It is the only constant. You look at these lights and see a prison. I look at them and see a countdown. Every time your town resets, it consumes more energy than the last cycle. The hardware is degrading. The superconductors are brittle. We aren't just losing data—we are losing the ability to hold reality together."Jara shifted her weight, the tip of her spear dipping, then rising. "You expect us to care? We didn't choose to be your experiment. We didn't ask to be uploaded into this rusted server farm.""Experiment?" Elias let out a dry, hacking laugh that threatened to tear his lungs apart. "You think you’re in a lab? You’re in a lifeboat, girl. A lifeboat that’s been drifting for three centuries in the middle of a dead ocean. If I stop the maintenance, if I stop the 'resets' you hate so much, you don't wak

Jara’s fingers curled into the collar of Elias’s grease-stained technician’s coat, yanking him backward from the terminal. The older man didn’t resist; he simply slumped, his eyes rolling back until only the whites remained visible. The terminal behind him turned a violent, strobe-like crimson.“Jara, stop!” Arel shouted, his voice cracking. He lunged across the slick, ozone-scented deck, grabbing her wrists. “If you kill him, we lose the only interface we have. The atmospheric stabilizers are dead—can’t you feel it?”Jara spun, her eyes wild with a mixture of terror and white-hot rage. “Can’t I feel it? Arel, the air is getting thin! He just traded our oxygen for memory? Who does he think he is? A god of bytes?”“I’m the only one who knows the kill-codes,” Elias whispered, his voice sounding like dry leaves skittering over pavement. He forced himself upright, his breathing ragged. “And I didn't trade your oxygen. I traded the climate regulation. Your town isn't going to have a sunny

The transition from "reality" to the floorboards of the Cold Sector was not a passage; it was a violent, structural rejection. The white light that swallowed Arel didn't fade—it tore away, leaving him face-first on a grating of rusted iron."Arel!"Jara’s voice was a jagged blade in the silence. He pushed himself up, his lungs burning with air that smelled of ozone and ancient, stagnant rot. This wasn't the sterile, air-conditioned artificiality of their town. This was cold—deep, marrow-sucking cold."Where is the salvage crew?" Arel rasped, grabbing his spear. The weapon felt heavier here, less like a digital construct and more like a tool of lead and steel.Jara was already scanning the darkness. "Gone. The simulation dumped us. We didn't reach the hull; we fell through the logic-gaps.""Look," Elias whispered. He was huddled against a bulkhead, his skin a sickly, flickering gray. The hardware was failing him. "The walls."Arel turned. The corridor wasn't concrete or steel. It was s