"I am not the architect, Arel," Elias gasped, his voice fracturing into static. "I am merely the longest-running process. The system… the system is just a machine. And it is starving."Jara hauled him upright, her grip iron-hard, ignoring the way his shoulder flickered and threatened to dematerialize under her fingers. She glared at Arel, her eyes reflecting the dying violet light of the corridor. "Stop looking for gods in the circuitry. We aren’t here for his soul; we’re here for the cooling units. If he’s just a process, then he’s a process we need to keep from crashing until we get what we came for."Arel stood, the cold of the sector biting through his tunic like a physical serrated blade. He looked down the hallway—if it could be called that. It stretched into a horizon of infinite, overlapping geometry, where pipes twisted into impossible knots and the floor seemed to ripple like liquid glass. "The Cold Sector. That’s where the logs said they kept the secondary cooling array. If

The corridor shuddered. A massive, rhythmic thrum vibrated through the floorboards—the sound of a failing machine attempting to reconcile two contradictory realities. Arel gripped his lantern, the beam cutting through the shifting haze of the Static Fringe. Ahead, the floor didn't just end; it folded inward, collapsing into a jagged vortex of raw code that hung suspended in the air like a weeping wound."Watch the anchor point," Jara warned, her spear lowered. She moved with the practiced precision of a predator, stepping over a patch of floor that had momentarily turned into a pool of shifting mercury. "Don't step where the light ripples. If you sink, you don’t drown—you get deleted."Arel adjusted his hold on Elias, who was now little more than a rhythmic tremor of flickering light. "How much further? My lungs are burning, and I’m fairly certain I just saw my own childhood home projected onto the bulkhead for a split second.""It’s not a home," Elias wheezed, his voice distorted by

"Easy for you to say," Arel hissed, his breath hitching in his throat as the bulkhead beside him rippled like disturbed water, briefly manifesting the blurred, terrifyingly familiar silhouette of a kitchen table he hadn’t thought about in twenty years. "You aren't the one losing the thread, Jara. I don't know how long I’ve been walking. I don’t know if I’m walking toward a mission or walking into a funeral."Jara stopped. The abruptness of her halt forced Arel to stumble forward, nearly collapsing under the uneven, rhythmic dead-weight of Elias, whose physical form was currently stuttering between solid flesh and translucent light. Jara didn't turn around. She kept her eyes fixed on the heavy, reinforced doorway that loomed ahead—a slab of tarnished steel that stood as the final barrier to the auxiliary cooling room."If you let the thread snap, we die," Jara said. Her voice wasn't harsh, but it was cold—colder than the sub-zero air leaking from the cracks in the vault door. "If you t

"Stand back," Jara commanded, her voice dropping an octave as she wedged the reinforced steel head of her spear into the narrow, frost-rimed seam of the auxiliary cooling vault door."The metal is fused solid, Jara," Arel shouted over the rising, high-pitched whine of the facility’s internal cooling turbines, which were shrieking like a dying jet engine. "You aren't going to pry that open with a polearm! The thermal welds are completely melted together!""Watch me," Jara gritted through her teeth, her biceps straining until the tendons stood out like thick cords beneath her dirt-streaked skin. She threw her entire body weight forward, using the spear shaft as a crude mechanical lever against the heavy bulkhead.A deafening metallic shriek echoed down the narrow corridor as the weld began to yield, spraying a shower of white-hot micro-sparks across the frost-covered floor. Elias let out a wet, rattling gasp in Arel’s arms, his head lolling backward, his eyes glazed over as his digital

"Stop talking about his resolution, Arel, and start talking about how we get him moving," Jara snapped, her chest heaving as she shoved her spear into a makeshift sling across her back. She crossed the threshold of the cooling vault, her boots crunching on layers of frozen condensation that shimmered like crushed glass under the flickering, sickly yellow emergency lights.Arel didn't move. He stared down at Elias, whose skin was now fluctuating between the familiar weathered lines of his face and a raw, flickering grid of white code. "He’s dying, Jara. And I don’t mean he’s reaching the end of his life. I mean he’s being deleted. Look at his hands—they aren't even solid anymore."Jara knelt, grabbing Elias by the collar of his heavy, grease-stained coat. She hauled him upright, ignoring the way his shoulder seemed to lose its structural integrity, momentarily turning into a blur of grey static before snapping back into a semblance of bone and muscle. "He isn't dying. He’s lagging. The