Level 999: The Glitch King

The Better Version

The other Jace's eyes were open, and they stayed that way without needing to blink.

Nobody spoke first. The ring held him upright, patient, waiting on something none of them had asked for yet. He didn't sway on tired legs the way the real one still was. He didn't need Seraphina's arm under his shoulder. He simply stood, rested and complete, the way a photograph stands still because nothing in it is alive enough to move.

SURVIVAL PROBABILITY — COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Branch A (Untreated Divergence): 6% survival at T+14 days.

Branch B (Continuity Preservation): 99% survival, indefinite.

"Six percent," Jace said. "You built a whole ceremony around six percent."

"Six percent is not zero," Theodore said. "I have watched people spend everything they had chasing worse odds than that."

"Have you spent anything chasing them yourself?"

Theodore didn't answer. His silence had a different weight than Caleb's did — less like withheld data, more like a door he'd decided not to open twice in one day. Whatever the number had cost him once, he'd already paid it and filed the receipt somewhere Jace wasn't allowed to read.

EMOTIONAL STATUS EFFECTS — PROJECTED SUBJECT (BRANCH B)

Grief: Resolved.

Fear: Resolved.

Anger: Resolved.

Attachment (Non-Essential): Diminished.

Attachment (Bloodline / Sunchain): Retained.

Seraphina read it twice, like she thought a third pass might change what it said.

"Non-essential," she repeated. "That's me. That's what I am to whatever's standing in that ring."

"It is a classification," Caleb said. "Not a judgment."

"It's both. You just don't get charged for the second one."

"You are welcome to file a formal objection," Caleb said. "It will be logged alongside the others."

"How many others."

Caleb didn't answer that one, and for the first time all evening, Jace suspected it was because the number would have meant something, not because it wouldn't.

"The classification exists because attachment consumes stability," Caleb went on, unbothered by her tone, the way he was unbothered by most things that weren't a variable he tracked. "Ninety-nine percent survival requires removing whatever the body spends its Corruption Load fighting to protect. Grief protects nothing. It only costs."

"It's not supposed to protect anything. That's not what it's for."

Caleb had no answer to that, because to him the sentence didn't parse as a real objection.

Elijah's voice came quiet, from the edge of the field, where he'd been standing so still Jace had almost forgotten he was there. "It isn't always a trick," he said. "Some of us asked for it. I asked for it. The pain doesn't stop being real just because someone benefits from ending it."

"You didn't ask to forget your name."

"No." His hand found his wrist again, and this time he let it stay there. "I asked for the day before that one to stop happening on a loop. Nobody warned me the exit doesn't let you choose what it takes with you. I still think I'd ask again. I don't know if that makes me a cautionary tale or just someone who was tired in a way none of you have been tired yet."

"I chose it once," Theodore said, quietly, to no one in particular. "Before I wore this face for Sunchain instead of for myself. I don't regret the quiet. I've simply stopped being able to tell you whether that's because the quiet was right, or because whatever used to argue with it isn't here to ask anymore."

It was the closest thing to a confession Jace had heard him make.

Nobody argued with that. It sat in the room like something too honest to interrupt.

Jace pushed himself half a step closer to the ring, close enough that the gold light caught the shake still running through his damaged hand. "Does it hurt," he asked the other version of himself, "being you?"

The other Jace considered the question with no visible urgency, the way a man might consider what he'd like for breakfast.

"No," he said. "I don't believe I'm in a position to answer that accurately. Pain requires something to resist it. I don't have anything left that resists."

"That's not an answer either."

"It's the only honest one available to me."

Jace watched the calm version of himself breathe in that same slow, unhurried rhythm and understood, in a way that had nothing to do with panels, that Elijah wasn't wrong to have wanted the pain to stop, and Seraphina wasn't wrong to refuse the price of stopping it, and the worst part of Sunchain's whole machine was that it had built a door wide enough for both of those true things to walk through at once, one of them toward relief and one of them toward a kind of erasure gentle enough to be mistaken for the same thing. He didn't know yet which door he'd have opened, if the choice had ever really been his to make honestly, and he hated that not knowing felt like its own kind of proof.

"Ask it something," Seraphina said, to Theodore, not to the ring. "Ask it if it loves anyone. See if the answer costs it anything to give."

Theodore considered that a moment longer than Jace expected. "Subject," he said, toward the calm version of Jace. "Do you retain attachment to the individuals present."

The other Jace turned his head, slow and unbothered, toward Seraphina first.

RESPONSE GENERATING...

"Yes," he said.

His voice was warm. Familiar. Entirely his own, in every way that should have made it easier to hear and somehow made it worse.

"I retain the memory of caring for her. I understand it was significant." A pause, unhurried, unafraid. "I don't feel the absence of it as loss. I understand that's the part you're hoping to find missing."

Seraphina made a sound low in her throat and looked away first.

"That's not an answer," she said. "That's a report."

"I don't know how to give you the other kind anymore," the other Jace said, and the terrible thing was that he sounded genuinely apologetic about it, the way a man might apologize for a language he'd simply never learned.

"I'm sorry you're still in pain," the other Jace said, and meant it, and that was somehow the cruelest thing in the room — that the kindness was real, offered freely, costing him nothing at all to give.

"I don't hold anger about any of this," he added, gently, to no one in particular. "I hope you find your way to the same peace."

Nobody answered him.