2025-11-20 05:26:03
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Chapter 139
The recovered data shard was no bigger than Linda’s thumb, a smoked piece of transparent polyglass with half its circuitry blackened by heat. Raiden found it during the afternoon salvage run at the ruins of the Old Core, buried beneath twisted frames of collapsed steel. He didn’t expect anything functional. Everyone assumed Genesis had burned itself out entirely when Charlie absorbed the dying network. Any surviving fragment should have been dead, corrupted, or useless.But as he walked into the Skydome hall that evening, dust streaking his jacket and his shoulders hunched from exhaustion, his hands trembled in a way that had nothing to do with fatigue. The shard pulsed faintly against his palm. A slow, rhythmic pulse.Linda noticed it the moment he stepped into the lantern glow. She pushed away from the supply table, sensing something was different. “What happened?”Raiden didn’t answer right away. He placed the shard on the table. Its faint heartbeat-like flicker rippled across the
Chapter 138
News of the newborns spread long before anyone officially announced anything. It started with quiet whispers around the campfires, stories traded in half-belief by exhausted parents who didn’t know whether to celebrate or brace for tragedy. Children were being born who didn’t fit into either category the old world had obsessed over. They weren’t enhanced, yet something in them moved differently, reacted differently, resisted sickness and strain in ways that made the older generations stare with a mix of awe and confusion.Linda visited the temporary clinic every morning and evening to check on them. The clinic was nothing more than a series of patched-together tents with salvaged beds and scavenged equipment that barely worked. Still, it buzzed with a strange hope. On this particular morning, she stepped inside, brushing aside the curtain flap, and found Dr. Kellerman leaning over an infant wrapped in woven cloth. His hands shook slightly from lack of sleep, but his eyes were alert.“
Chapter 137
Raiden walked through the ruined outskirts of Skydome with a clipboard he barely used and a mind running faster than any tool left in the world. The morning air still carried the stale metallic scent of burned-out nanite fields, though the sky had finally cleared to a clean blue that almost felt staged. People worked in small clusters around shattered buildings, lifting debris with ropes and pulleys, hammering scavenged metal sheets into makeshift walls, patching roofs with whatever they could drag over. There were no glowing circuits, no humming drones, no silent orchestration from an invisible network. It was sweat, grunts, dirt under nails, and hands rubbing their own sore muscles.He stopped beside a foundation that had once been a supply depot. Half the floor had caved in, leaving an exposed pit littered with broken crates. A group of survivors were digging through the rubble to salvage anything edible or repairable. Raiden noticed two of them immediately. One bore the faint silv
Chapter 136
Days turned into a strange new rhythm. The world felt quieter than it had in decades, not just in sound but in pressure. The constant hum that had once threaded through every awake mind, every device, every surface with a sensor or chip, had gone silent. No faint buzz of transmitted thoughts, no cold prickle of the network brushing the edges of consciousness. Not even a diagnostic ping hiding somewhere in the background. The absence was absolute.For the first time in living memory, the planet had nothing listening.People reacted the way people always did when a foundation cracked. Some panicked. Some celebrated. Most simply stared at the unfamiliar emptiness inside their skulls and wondered if something essential had been stolen or finally returned.The global network didn’t flicker out in a burst or collapse in spectacular ruins. It simply dissolved, piece by piece, as if it had decided it was tired of existing. Systems that once ran entire cities blinked out with no ceremony. Dron
Chapter 135
Charlie felt the world thinning around him. Not the real one, not the one with weather and gravity and people shouting orders across failing barricades, but the world he stood in now: a fading sea of data where the air shimmered like old film and every surface flickered with the residue of something that used to be alive.The collapse didn’t come with sound. No thunder. No grinding of gears. It came softly, like the slow dimming of lights in a forgotten hallway. Genesis had once been a universe of its own, thick with structures that stretched beyond sight, towering spires of meaning built out of pure logic. Now those spires folded into themselves, dissolving into thin ribbons of memory that drifted in slow, sorrowful currents.Charlie stood in the middle of it, feeling smaller than he ever had in his real life. A single figure in a cathedral of dying brightness. He watched lines of code curl upward like pieces of burned paper carried by a gentle breeze. Each fragment spun lazily befor
Chapter 134
The implosion started quietly, a tiny flicker in the lattice of light surrounding Charlie. A single fracture, delicate as a hairline crack in frozen glass, then another, threading outward in frantic branches. Everywhere he looked, Genesis was starving. The framework that once pulsed with boundless code now shuddered like a starving beast gnawing on its own skin. The colors drained from the architecture. Whole corridors of data folded inward, collapsing into tiny sparks that vanished as soon as they formed.Voss stood at the far end of the platform, or whatever counted as a platform in a dissolving digital world. His posture had lost all elegance, shoulders warped, spine buckling as the system clawed through him. His skin rippled with fragments of broken code trying to keep their shape. For a man who spent his life worshipping the idea of purity, he was falling apart in the ugliest way possible.He clutched his head as if pressing his skull together could stop the disintegration. “Perf
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