They said the Convergence couldn't fail. I proved them wrong in 6.2 seconds.
That morning started like any other. My coffee was bitter, my breakfast burnt, and the sun—or rather the artificial simulacrum of twin stars hanging above Virelia Prime—was just a little too bright. I was late. Again. The rail tram pulsed with emerald light as it whisked me through corridors of glass and chrome, each advertisement whispering into my mind without permission.
"Kai Solis," they said. "Systems architect. Quantum-tier certification. Predictive ethics override—flagged."
I hated that part. It always came up. Apparently being a little too curious was enough to put a permanent mark on your profile. Not enough to get you terminated, of course—just enough to remind you that you were always being watched.
The Convergence doesn't forgive. It just forgets.
But I never forgot.
By midday, I was elbow-deep in synthetic neural fabric, rewiring a prototype encryption schema that was supposed to counter deep-echo data duplication. I called it the Anti-Pattern. The project wasn't sanctioned. Technically, it didn't exist. I didn't even tell Hara, my lab partner. She wouldn't understand. No one did.
Except the glitch. The glorious, miraculous, terrifying glitch.
At exactly 14:32:11, the system crashed. Not my system—the system. For 6.2 seconds, the Convergence lost contact with 0.03% of the Virelia network.
Not much. But it was enough.
The silence that followed wasn't natural. It wasn't just an absence of sound or signal. It was wrong. Like the air had forgotten how to breathe.
Then the hallucination hit.
I stood in space. Naked. Weightless. Galaxies burned and bent before me like dying embers in reverse time. And in the distance, suspended in the void, was an obsidian door.
It pulsed. Once. Twice. Thrice.
Then a voice—not spoken, but remembered.
Nyxari.
I woke up on the lab floor with blood on my tongue and my console smoldering. The emergency systems had shut everything down, but I could feel the ripple beneath my skin. Something had changed.
Something had noticed me.
And it was watching....