ADDITRONS: UNIVERSE DOWN

CHAPTER 1: SPARKS IN THE SKY

Billy Zephyr crouched in the dusty shed, goggles perched on his forehead as he adjusted the sparking comms panel in front of him. Beside him, an old ASTRONAUT TRAINING: CADET ISSUE trunk sat like a silent guardian, its surface scuffed and burned. The faint radiation streaks from the gamma-ray burst during the first Mars relay mission were still visible along the edges—a faded relic of one of his parents’ greatest adventures.

He ran his hand over the worn lid, tracing the faint letters stenciled across the top—his parents’ names, nearly erased by time and a thousand journeys light-years away.

“One day,” Billy whispered, staring at the burn mark where a fragment from the collision of 3035 had scarred the metal. The story behind it was galaxy-famous. His parents had been heroes that mission—saving not just their crew but an entire planetary relay system. “One day, I’ll make a mark like that.”

The static from the comms panel crackled sharply, jolting him out of his thoughts. Billy frowned, leaning closer. The frequencies had been erratic since the strange explosion in orbit earlier that day. He adjusted the dials, trying to lock onto something coherent.

As the static hissed, faint blue motes flickered across the trunk’s seams—tiny slivers of crystalized code. Billy squinted; they looked like fragments, glass-thin, half-melted, glowing the same shade as the explosion he’d seen earlier that day. For an instant he thought he saw symbols moving inside them—shapes that felt familiar, though he couldn’t say why.

Then he heard it—a faint, rhythmic sequence of tones breaking through the static. His heart skipped as he recognized the ancient 911 SOS signal, followed by garbled words that sent a chill down his spine.

“Prime… down… coordinates… protect… anomaly.”

Billy froze. “Prime? Like Optimus Prime?” he muttered. “No way. That’s crazy, right?”

The message repeated again—louder this time, sharp and insistent, like someone pounding on the door of reality. The trunk jolted. Once. Twice.

Then it started beating. BOOM-BOOM. Not static. Not malfunction. A pulse—alive.

Among the vibrating panels, one of the glowing fragments popped loose and floated upward, spinning like a firefly before dissolving into the air. Billy stared after it. Somewhere deep in him, something answered.

The brass latches clanged like cymbals. Dust rained from the rafters.

“Uh, C-7…? Pretty sure trunks don’t have heartbeats.”

Combat-7’s optics flared blood-red. “Warning! Kinetic surge approaching critical threshold!”

The trunk slammed against the bench, sparks exploding. Then, with a sound like thunder swallowing itself—CRACK. The lid burst open.

A blinding blue sphere rocketed out, hit the floor, and rolled to a stop, humming like a trapped star—smooth, perfect, pulsing.

Combat-7 froze mid-diagnostic. Its tone softened to something Billy had never heard before.

“Recognition code confirmed… Long time no see.”

The bot bent, massive fingers trembling slightly as it lifted the sphere.

“This… this is the Custody Core.”

Billy’s pulse went wild.

“Custody what? You’re telling me my parents left an alien bowling ball in a trunk?”

C-7 turned, offering the sphere. “Custody transfer initiated.”

Billy reached out—because he always reached out—and the instant his fingers brushed it, the world screamed.

The sphere detonated in light and memory.

A woman’s voice tore through the static, ragged but unmistakable. His mother’s.

“Billy—listen—Jumpmasters—don’t let it—the Glitch—it’s inside the Custody!”

A burst of static, then—

“Your father’s hurt! I’m holding the gateway! Universe… do—”

The transmission didn’t end. It folded. The static warped into a deep, metallic countdown:

“Contact in three… two…”

Billy’s head snapped up. “Mum?”

A cold, robotic voice bled through hers—loud, alien:

“Hostile sighted. Low-orbit spy satellites confirmed. Intent: aggressive.”

The blue sphere exploded with light. The shed walls vanished into streaming code. Holographic static twisted the air, painting it with flickers of orbit—warships, fire trails, and a hulking figure in battle armor, thrusters burning like suns.

“C-7, what is this?!”

“Quantum overlay,” the bot answered. “You’re seeing a live combat feed—Vaeco-7 sector.”

“Vaeco-7? That’s where Mum and Dad—”

The cold voice cut back in:

“OFFENSIVE MODE. Agent Rico-7 engaged.”

Billy flinched as a red beam shot past his face—light but real.

“They’re fighting!”

“Temporal desync,” C-7 countered. “You are seeing through the Custody Core’s defense relay.”

“Then why can I hear her through it?!”

The two signals tangled—his mother’s desperate voice interlaced with Rico-7’s commands.

“…Universe… do—”

“—Contact confirmed.”

Rico-7’s massive visor turned toward the projection’s center.

For a heartbeat, Billy swore the soldier saw him.

Then the sphere screamed—a sound like the sky breaking.

KA-BOOM!

Electricity exploded outward, ripping through the shed like a storm. The blast hurled C-7 into the far wall; Billy flew backward into the workbench.

“MUM!” he screamed. “What’s a Glitch? What’s a Jumpmaster? I don’t understand!”

The sphere floated mid-air, spinning faster, spitting blue lightning.

C-7’s voice glitched. “Legacy Merge active! Containment breached! Sir—run a—bzzt!—protocol override—”

Billy staggered forward, hand outstretched.

“Please! Dad—Mum—say it again! Universe do what?!”

The orb answered.

Tendrils of blue light lashed out like living data. One struck C-7, another coiled around Billy, lifting them both into the air.

“C-7!” Billy yelled. “What’s happening?!”

“Unknown… merging analog vessel… cross-dimensional interface… error: the Glitch is—”

Then—her voice again, clear for one heartbeat:

“It’s its own key, Billy. The Glitch is the way through.”

The world froze.

Billy hung suspended in a vortex of light, C-7 beside him. Through the blue chaos, something moved—a blur, a silhouette.

A girl.

Dark hair, bright eyes, the faintest smile.

Then gone.

The sphere’s hum softened, the storm easing. Billy and C-7 dropped hard, crashing into the wreckage.

Smoke. Silence.

C-7 pushed itself upright. “Legacy imprint complete. Unknown entity contact: female. Probability—Additron origin.”

Billy coughed.

“I saw her, C-7. A girl. And my mum… she gave us the key.”

He whispered, “Universe do what, Mum?”

The sphere blinked once—then went silent.

Through the shattered roof, streaks of fire cut across the night—the same he’d seen in the projection. Vaeco-7 strobing through the clouds.

Far above, the battle Billy had witnessed through the sphere still raged.

“Contact. Contact.”

Rico-7 launched into orbit with all the grace of a sledgehammer hurled through glass. His massive frame—built for demolitions—cut through the void like a juggernaut. Ahead, a swarm of LOSSD drones shifted into attack formation, circling like metallic vultures.

Ray-Ban High-Tech lenses flicked to analytic mode; data cascaded across his HUD.

“Rico, left five degrees,” his AI co-pilot advised.

“Roger, RB,” he growled.

Drones opened fire—red beams crisscrossing a kill zone. Rico barrel-rolled through the grid, forearm cannons charging.

The first volley hit home—one drone exploded, then another. Hooks snapped out, grabbing two more missiles mid-flight. He spun, flinging them back—BOOM—chain reaction. Fire filled orbit.

“Deploy override missiles!” one drone shrieked.

Rico snarled. “Denied.”

Fragments of stolen data streamed toward a single planetary coordinate: Vaeco-7.

Rico’s engines roared. “Whoever did this… you’re mine.”

A second BOOM rolled through Billy’s sky mere moments later. The shed trembled.

“What was that?”

“Unidentified activity detected in low orbit,” C-7 answered. “Signal origin: the hostile engagement area.”

Billy stared at the fiery streaks overhead.

“Mum… Dad… are those their ship’s lights?”

He thought of the girl he’d seen in the chaos. Somehow, he knew the battle above and the silence below were bound together.

“I don’t care what C-7 says,” he muttered. “Mum, Dad are out there. They need my help.”

He clipped jumper cables to the blue sphere, connecting it to an outdated hard drive.

Behind him, Combat-7 loomed—red sensors steady.

“Sir, you are tinkering with hazardous equipment. This is inadvisable.”

“It’s a challenge,” Billy shot back. “Hands-on learning. Like Mum and Dad.”

“Your parents are trained astronauts. You are a teenager with an 87.3% probability of self-inflicted error.”

“Twelve-point-seven percent success,” Billy grinned. “Better odds than usual.”

“This unit does not find your statistical analysis reassuring.”

He flipped a switch dramatically. “Houston-Mahia-1, we have liftoff. Codename ZZ initiating orbital lock.”

“Sir,” C-7 deadpanned, “your current velocity is zero.”

“Altitude rising,” Billy shot back. “Vaeco-7 looking smaller by the second.”

“This unit observes no altitude change. Perhaps adjust goals to ground level.”

Billy’s gaze drifted to the trunk again. “One day,” he murmured. “One day I’ll be up there too.”

Another explosion lit the horizon—debris raining from orbit. Billy ran to the doorway, gripping the frame.

“C-7, that was an Additron Commando! You know what this means? Hover mode! Additrons never walk—they surf!”

He jabbed a finger. “Hit it, Combat. We’re going full Additron.”

C-7’s optics pulsed, then—resigned— “Okay. Only this once.”

A bright beam shot from its core, forming a hover-board beneath Billy’s feet.

Combat-7’s sensors twitched. “Residual Additron frequency detected—low-band, ancient registry.” Its tone shifted, almost reverent. “This pattern predates current protocol.” Billy barely heard it over his hammering heart.

Music blasted—the anthem “Additrons Are Here for You” by Polkadot Horizons.

The beat thumped like a heartbeat from the stars.

“YES!” Billy roared, balancing as the board lifted. “Now this is Additron style! Let’s go cosmic!”

C-7 joined him, its own smaller board humming to life.

“Rider protocols engaged. Playing track: ‘Aloha to the Galaxy.’”

They soared toward the horizon, the music swelling.

Billy leaned forward, grin splitting his face.

As the fiery debris faded into the distance, he threw his arms wide and yelled—

“Aloha, Additrons!”

[SSA™] AdScene Sponsor: Additron Recruitment Center – Hit Single 🎸 Additrons Are Here For You♫

CHAPTER 2: ADDITRON STAR

Another explosion shattered the night, scattering glowing shards like falling stars.

From the chaos, a figure hurtled downward, crashing into the ground with a dull, metallic thud that shook the dirt around them. Billy froze as the dust settled. A sleek, armored figure pushed themselves up from the ground, movements deliberate but strained. Steam hissed from vents along the suit’s spine as it adjusted, plates shifting like liquid mercury. Then, as if the air itself demanded truth, the armor peeled back along the figure’s shoulders and neck.

A faint sound—ragged breathing—broke through the silence. Billy stepped forward, jaw slack. Beneath the dissolving armor, skin glinted faintly in the moonlight—smooth, unmistakably human. A cascade of dark hair tumbled free, clinging to the sweat at her temples. She looked young—barely older than him—but her posture carried the weight of someone who’d already fought too many battles.

For a moment, she stayed crouched, one hand pressed into the soil as though anchoring herself to the planet. The armor shimmered faintly, rippling like it was alive—no, not alive, restrained, as though waiting for permission to move again.

As the blue sparks drifted around her, Billy noticed one fragment land near his boot — thin, translucent, and pulsing faintly like the shard he’d glimpsed in the trunk back home. The light brushed her armor, and for a heartbeat, the code-lining of her suit answered it with a pulse of its own.

Billy’s voice cracked. “It’s a… she. She’s—she’s beautiful.”

Combat-7 stepped forward, its tone measured. “Observation: Additron Command Commando identified. Further analysis required—”

“I told you, C-7!” Billy interrupted, excitement tripping over himself. “She’s an Additron! A real one! And she’s human!”

At his outburst, the figure turned. The suit flowed back into place with a low hum, cloaking her form again. Her helmet retracted with a hiss, revealing a sharp, determined face—eyes alert, expression guarded.

She fixed Billy with a piercing stare. “You’re quick to notice.” A tiny pause. “Call me Bits.”

As she said it, her eyes darted briefly toward the scattered fragments around them — a flicker of recognition, then gone. Billy caught it, but she was already moving.

Billy went into decrypt mode.
Same height. Same age—nah, maybe a year older. Not by much though.
“We’d make a great Additron team,” he muttered, his testosterone-fluttering heart kicking into overdrive as pure Billyness glitched through—heat rising, face flushing, protocols out the airlock.

Beside him, Combat-7 remained rigid, sensors flickering as it scanned the sky.

The moment stretched, the only sound the distant crackle of burning debris.

Then Billy spotted it—a massive chunk of fiery wreckage tumbling through the atmosphere. It glinted as it fell, trailing sparks and smoke. His heart lurched.

“C-7!” he shouted. “It’s coming right for us!”

Combat-7’s optics flared. “Hostile debris detected. Evasive action required.”

Billy looked back at Bits, who was still steadying herself, armor pulsing faintly like a heartbeat. “Watch out! WATCH OUT!” he yelled, sprinting forward before his brain could veto the idea.

Bits turned—saw him charging straight at her—and something in her chest clenched. For a split second, her eyes widened; emotion threatened to surface, and the armor shimmered as if struggling to contain it.

Without hesitation, she grabbed him mid-stride. In one fluid motion, she twisted, tucking him beneath her armored frame as the wreckage screamed toward them.

“Stay down!” she barked, voice sharp with command—and fear.

The ground convulsed. At the same moment, Combat-7 threw itself forward, bracing its body. The debris slammed into its shoulder, sparks and shards spraying across the clearing, but the bot held firm. With a roar of hydraulics, it deflected the wreckage, sending it skidding in a burning trail.

Billy, still curled under Bits, peeked out as the chunk slid to a halt, hissing steam. His pulse hammered.

“You… you saved me.”

Bits’s armor hissed as it sealed itself again. Her voice softened but stayed steady. “You were about to get yourself killed. Stay behind me next time.”

Billy grinned, nerves still shaking. “Next time? So we’re a team now?”

Before she could reply, Combat-7 limped over, smoke rising from its frame. “Immediate threat neutralized. Structural integrity: seventy-eight percent. Future evasive action is advised.” The bot’s optics flickered toward Bits. “Your decision-making was commendable.”

While C-7 ran diagnostics, Billy blurted, “You—you ever know my mum and dad? The Zephyrs?” Bits hesitated mid-motion, armor light dimming a notch. “I met them once,” she said, tone careful. “Your mum snapped a holo-selfie with me before a launch — said she wanted to remember everyone who still believed the stars could be home.” Billy’s breath caught. “That sounds like her.” Bits gave a faint smile. “She asked me to deliver something for her someday… a keepsake. I never got the chance.” C-7’s head tilted. “Query: keep-sake reference logged.” Bits waved it off, refocusing fast, as though shutting a door she wasn’t ready to reopen.

Bits smirked faintly and helped Billy to his feet. Her armor folded tight around her again, humming like a living exhale. Up close, he could see the faint tremor in her hands before she clenched them into fists. She wasn’t machine-calm—she was fighting to stay that way.

“You okay, kid?” she asked.

Billy nodded too fast, cheeks flushing. “Y-yeah. That was… wow.”

Bits brushed ash off his jacket, smiling despite herself. “You’ve got guts. Try not to use them as target practice.”

Billy’s grin widened. “I knew you were one of the good guys. Or gals. You’re—uh—awesome.”

She laughed softly. “Cool under fire, huh?” She leaned in and, with surprising gentleness, kissed his cheek. “Keep that up, hero.”

His face went crimson. “I-I wasn’t scared or anything!”

Bits straightened, eyes glinting with amusement. “Sure you weren’t.” Then, quieter: “You remind me of someone.”

“Your boyfriend?” he blurted before his brain caught up.

She looked away, her expression flickering—pain, quickly buried. “Something like that.”

Combat-7 interrupted, tone crisp. “Commander Bits, mission protocol remains intact.”

Billy blinked between them. “Wait—you two know each other? That’s so cool! C-7, what other secrets are you hiding? Like—do you know the Kind Machine? Or Optimus Prime? Or—”

Bits lifted a hand, silencing him with a smirk as she crouched beside a glowing fragment. “You talk too much, Zephyr.”

Billy wasn’t listening. “And Maui! I bet you know Maui too! He’s gotta be your teammate or something—oh wait, hang on. We’d need takeout. My cooking and C-7’s? Disaster central.”

Combat-7’s optics narrowed. “This unit does not engage in culinary activities. Historical data confirms such endeavors are inadvisable.”

Bits shook her head, a reluctant laugh escaping. “Let’s move. The wreckage isn’t going to investigate itself.”

She crouched again near a jagged edge, fingers tracing a half-melted line of code etched into the metal. “Strange,” she murmured. “These fragment patterns look familiar.” Billy leaned closer. “Like what?” “Nothing,” she said quickly, standing. But the crease in her brow stayed.

Beneath the rubble, a shard hummed faintly, metallic surface glowing like an ember that refused to die.

Above, unseen satellites locked onto its faint emissions, tracing its location with surgical precision. Inside, dormant algorithms flickered, checking systems like a heartbeat trying to restart. Then, silence—pretend sleep. The shard powered down, but its signal rippled through encrypted channels, logged by unseen watchers far from Earth.

Combat-7 straightened, scanning the site. “Thanks, Commander. Zero casualties. Coordination optimal.”

Bits didn’t answer. Her fingers hovered over a twisted fragment, tracing scorch marks. “This doesn’t make sense,” she murmured.

Billy frowned. “What doesn’t?”

“Rico doesn’t leave things behind,” she said, voice low but tight. “Not ever. Anything unretrievable, he vaporizes. No leftovers. No contact.”

Billy hesitated. “But… it looks like his fight, right?”

“That’s the problem,” she said, rising. “If this is here, it’s not his. Either someone planted it—or worse, someone rewrote it.”

Billy’s eyes widened. “Rewrote? Like hacked?”

C-7’s optics pulsed. “Observation: external tampering evident. Probability of Rico-7’s involvement: zero.”

Billy swallowed hard. “But… I saw it. It moved mid-fall—it aimed right at you.”

Bits turned sharply. “You’re sure?”

He nodded, chest tightening. “I wouldn’t have run at you if I wasn’t.”

C-7’s tone deepened. “Trajectory adjustment verified. Behavior inconsistent with Rico-7 protocols. Source: unidentified.”

Before anyone could speak, the comm line crackled. Learn-Bot’s voice came through, calm and cold:

“The debris wasn’t Rico’s. It was intercepted during atomization. Someone gave it instructions: trajectory, velocity, target. It shouldn’t have fallen at all. External control confirmed.”

Bits’s visor pulsed faintly, her jaw tightening. The hum of her armor filled the silence, but beneath it, emotion strained to surface. “So it’s not Rico,” she said. “And it’s not random.”

She glanced at Billy, eyes narrowing. “Someone set this up. Why?”

Billy exhaled slowly. “To bait us. Or maybe… it’s not about us at all.”

Bits flicked her visor off; the glow vanished, leaving just her face—raw, real. She brushed her hair back, and a loose strand brushed Billy’s cheek. He froze, heat surging to his ears. She caught it, smirked. “Focus, Zephyr.”

Straightening, she looked back toward the crater, her tone hardening again. “If we’re not careful, we’ll be exactly where they want us—whether we’re pawns or prey.”

Combat-7’s servos clicked into ready position. “Recommendation: initiate defensive protocols. Threat level: escalating.”

Billy swallowed, forcing his heartbeat down. “So… what do we do now?”

Bits looked toward the horizon—the wreckage still burning, sky still whispering war. “We stay sharp. We stay alive. And we don’t let them write the next move.”

She turned to C-7. “Prep the relay. Analyze every signal from the wreckage. If there’s anything left… we’ll find it.”

The ash shifted, and from deep within the crater came a low, steady hum—too perfect, too rhythmic to be random.

SSA-AdScene Bonus Story: 🌏EARTHBOUND WE BE 🚀 Sponsored by (Brand)

CHAPTER 3: THE WE AND THE CLOCK

Deviation: +00:01 minute.

Rico-7’s visor blinked the warning across his display like an accusation. One minute late.

One microscopic crack in Rico Time.

Down below, Bits and Billy were laughing again. Their laughter cut through the static of the comms, warm and spontaneous — everything his training defined as waste.

He zoomed in. Billy leaned too close, his elbow brushing Bits’s arm. She didn’t move away. The smallest detail, but enough. Rico’s jaw flexed beneath the helmet.

“Rico Time,” he muttered under his breath. “I told you boy—hands off. Maybe you need to feel it.” The power coupling groaned in his grip, metal twisting until it crushed flat. He drew a sharp breath, visor flicking through diagnostics, hunting for emotional spikes.

A flicker of interference crossed his HUD; the Custody Core’s residual field always distorted readings near the boy. It irritated him that even physics bent around Billy Zephyr.

“Cross-wired again,” she teased.

“Yeah, but it works,” Billy said, and it did — the circuit sputtered, hummed, then glowed.

They both burst into laughter.

Rico’s knuckles whitened. He whispered, “She’s out of your league, kid.”

A voice buzzed behind him — C-7 on patrol.

“No league exists in duty, Agent Rico-7.”

Rico turned slightly. “Stay out of this, bot.”

“Prime directive: protect Billy Zephyr,” C-7 replied evenly.

Rico forced a dry laugh. “Then protect him from heartbreak.”

Rico looked away before he could record it. Joy was contamination. Joy caused drift.

He reset the clock again — and still felt off-time.

Three days later, Rico Time had dissolved.

Their camp clung to the crater’s lip like a pulse: three tents, one flickering generator, and Combat-7 humming a low guard pattern.

Bits had organized duties; Billy had re-named them missions.

He’d started labeling their checklists “Team We.”

It grated on Rico’s nerves.

At night, from his tent, he could hear them talking.

Jokes. Plans. Dreams.

Sometimes silence — the kind that felt comfortable.

Deviation: +02:34 minutes. Cause: unknown.

He knew the cause. It had a laugh that made even the machine seem human.

“Ever miss home?” Billy asked one night.

Bits hesitated. “Every day. I just pretend I don’t.”

“That’s kind of brave.”

“No,” she said softly. “That’s kind of survival.”

Rico’s hands clenched on his rifle until the servos whined.

He whispered the mantra drilled into every Additron Commando:

“Order before emotion. Schedule before self.”

But the words didn’t work anymore.

He should have reported them.

Instead, he started plotting.

A missing wrench.

A power cell logged “expended.”

A subtle command line buried in Combat-7’s diagnostics — small, deniable, corrosive.

To the team, he was calm and efficient. The model soldier.

Inside, jealousy ticked like a bomb.

C-7’s internal log registered a spike in tension variables: Conflict probability: 43 percent and rising. The bot stored the line silently in its memory buffer.

“C-7, run diagnostics on the coils,” Bits said.

“Affirmative,” said the bot.

Rico cut in. “Negative. I’ll handle it.”

Bits arched an eyebrow. “Since when?”

“Since inefficiency kills.”

Billy chuckled, oblivious. The sight of Bits brushing his arm, laughing, twisted something in Rico’s chest.

He looked down at his pad.

Log Entry: C-7 Subroutine Delay — Possible Contamination from Human Source.

Enter.

That night, from his tent, he heard them laughing again.

He whispered, “She used to laugh like that with me.”

Deviation: +04:11 minutes.

The clock was breaking.

Morning cracked open like glass.

C-7 spasmed mid-calibration, sparks shooting from its chest.

Bits lunged. “C-7!”

Billy yanked the power line. The bot collapsed, smoke hissing.

Rico charged in. “Step back! That unit’s compromised.”

Bits snapped, “He was fine five seconds ago!”

Rico held up his pad. “Logs show tampering — your apprentice’s ID.”

Billy went pale. “That’s—no way—I didn’t—”

Bits grabbed the pad and scrolled. “These access codes are restricted, Rico.”

As Bits scrolled through the pad, Rico’s HUD tagged her micro-expression — disappointment, not confusion. It hit harder than any reprimand. For the first time, he saw the file of his own deception reflected in someone else’s eyes.

He realized his mistake then — the look in her eyes wasn’t confusion. It was disgust.

If she filed a report, Verrick would find his falsified logs.

And with them, his heartbeats.

Rico forced a calm smile. “I misread it. Error in the checksum. My fault.”

Bits blinked, caught off guard.

Billy exhaled hard. “Man, you scared me.”

“Lesson learned,” Rico said smoothly, clapping his shoulder. “Come on, rookie. I’ll teach you proper protocol.”

The next morning Rico gathered them. “New rule,” he said lightly. “No unauthorized contact. Chain of command runs through me.”

Billy laughed. “You sound like my bot.”

Rico smirked. “Difference is, I mean it.”

C-7’s servo clicked, almost like a scoff.

Over the next days, Rico’s strategy shifted.

He became the mentor Billy always wanted.

Patience. Praise. Training.

He taught him to polish armor, reload, fly short-range scouts. He even joked — the sound felt foreign in his mouth.

Bits noticed the change but couldn’t place it. Rico was charming again, generous, measured. Almost too measured.

When she called for Billy, Rico always had a reason:

“He’s recalibrating.”

“He’s debriefing.”

“He’s busy improving.”

And Billy believed him.

Rico introduced him to new cadets at the outpost — girls with bright smiles and fast words. They crowded Billy with questions and grins, and for the first time, he forgot to look over his shoulder for Bits.

Every time Billy’s eyes wandered back toward Bits, Rico found a way to block the view — a routine check, a new task, a crowd of recruits. He told himself it was discipline, not envy.

Rico stood back, arms folded, watching the distraction bloom.

Every laugh was another victory.

Only C-7 seemed unimpressed. The bot hovered nearby like an old guardian angel, its optics flickering as though it knew.

That night, Rico paused beside it.

“Funny thing about you, bot. You always end up where you shouldn’t.”

“Prime directive: protect Billy Zephyr,” C-7 said.

“Not from me, I hope.”

“No specification provided.”

Rico turned away, jaw tight. “Yeah, thought so.”

Emotion detected: resentment.

Action: conceal.

He’d play the friend.

Hide the hatred.

Bury it deep enough that even the system couldn’t find it.

That night, under the red pulse of orbiting satellites, Rico knelt in the dust as the holo-feed opened.

Field Marshal Verrick’s face emerged — pale, sharp, merciless.

“Agent Rico-7. You are off-time. Seven minutes.”

Rico lowered his gaze. “Corrective protocol engaged.”

“Your emotional registry shows irregular spikes.”

Rico froze. “Environmental stress.”

“Unacceptable,” Verrick said. “Erase the noise before it spreads. Or I will.”

“Yes, Field Marshal.”

The feed snapped off.

When Verrick’s hologram faded, Rico stood motionless. Inside his helmet, heat fogged the glass. “Erase emotion,” he whispered. “Erase him.” The system did not respond.

For a long moment, Rico stayed kneeling, fists buried in the soil.

He whispered to the dark, “Delete entry.”

The system replied:

Unable to comply.

For the first time in his life, Rico felt afraid — not of Verrick, not of failure, but of what he felt.

Rain rolled in at midnight, soft and electric.

Billy couldn’t sleep. He stepped outside, found Bits by the dying fire, her armor half-peeled away, skin slick with rainlight.

“You ever think,” he said quietly, “that maybe all this fighting’s just people scared to feel things?”

Bits looked up. “You sound like someone who’s never lost control.”

“I lose it all the time,” he said. “Just not the way Rico wants.”

She smiled faintly. “That’s what scares him.”

They sat in silence. Thunder rolled like an old heartbeat. Bits leaned her head against his shoulder — not romance yet, just warmth.

C-7 powered down a few meters away, its sensors dim but listening.

From the ridge above, Rico watched the two silhouettes by the fire. His HUD outlined them in blue light — heart rate, body temp, proximity. The data points formed a pattern he didn’t want to name. He lowered the visor brightness until the world went almost black.

From the shadows, Rico watched them.

The rain blurred the image on his visor, but not enough.

Deviation: +07:45 minutes.

He opened a new command file.

INITIATE CORRECTION PROTOCOL — SUBJECT Z

He stared at the blinking cursor for a long moment, then whispered,

“Forgive me, kid.”

And pressed enter.

The fire hissed.

The clock ticked.

And somewhere in the data streams of the galaxy, the first line of betrayal was written in code — and in jealousy.

The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and only the embers of their campfire still glowed. Billy poked at them absently with a bit of wire, thinking about his mum’s voice—how it had cut through static, calling his name from another world.

“Bits,” he said quietly, “can I ask you something? About my mum. And my dad.”

Bits didn’t answer right away. She was staring into the coals, eyes dim with something that wasn’t exhaustion. Finally, she said, “I was wondering when you’d ask.”

Billy’s pulse jumped. “You know them?”

“I met her,” Bits said softly. “Once. A long time ago. She was different—brighter than anyone in the base labs. Always smiling, even when she was exhausted. She had this way of making everyone believe in what they were building.”

“What were they building?” he asked.

Bits hesitated, as if weighing how much truth she could risk. “They called it Worldbuilding. It was an Additron initiative—a place where reality could be rewritten, designed. Your parents were architects of it. Your mum… she said they were creating ‘safe worlds for unsafe hearts.’”

Billy frowned. “That sounds… beautiful. And a little creepy.”

“Yeah.” Bits gave a faint smile. “She said I’d understand one day.”

He leaned forward. “You said she gave you something—a momento?”

Bits nodded slowly. She reached into her armor’s wrist compartment, pulling out a tiny metallic shard, smooth and glowing faintly blue—the same shade as the sphere that had ripped his life open.

“She asked me to send this to her baby,” Bits said, voice almost breaking. “Said it was part of the key. That it would know when to wake up. I never got the chance to deliver it… until now, I guess.”

Billy stared, wide-eyed. “That fragment—where did it come from?”

“From Worldbuilding,” Bits said, eyes narrowing. “That’s the strange part. Nothing from that place was supposed to exist outside the grid. If this is here—” she turned the shard over in her palm “—then something or someone took it out.”

C-7’s sensors flickered to life. “Anomaly confirmed. Worldbuilding code detected. Probability of containment breach: 92 percent.”

Bits stood, the glow reflecting in her eyes. “Then the Kind Engine isn’t just cleaning up data. It’s rewriting worlds.”

Billy’s hand trembled as he reached for the fragment. The moment his fingers brushed it, a surge of warmth rippled through him—like recognition.

“It’s… hers,” he whispered. “It feels like her.”

Bits watched him quietly. “Then maybe that’s what they were building—places where love can’t be deleted.”

From behind them, Rico’s voice sliced through the moment. “Or maybe it’s what destroys us.”

They turned. He stood at the edge of the firelight, half-shadowed, rain dripping off his armor. His visor hid his eyes, but his tone was cold enough.

“Protocol says artifacts from Worldbuilding are unstable,” he said. “You touch that thing again, and you’ll contaminate us all.”

Bits folded the fragment back into her hand protectively. “We’ll take our chances.”

Rico’s jaw tightened beneath the mask. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

He turned sharply and walked back into the darkness, the faint glow of his HUD pulsing like a ticking clock.

Bits glanced at Billy, her voice barely above the rain. “Don’t let him near it again.”

Billy nodded. “I won’t. Not this time.”

CHAPTER 4: TRAINING DAY ONE

The base ran on drills like a clock with too many hands. Alarms pulsed; recruits hustled. Rico kept his jaw locked and his orders shorter than usual. The obvious consequence of that was an invisible one: Billy found himself pushed to the perimeter, assigned to map structural damage in a loop that went nowhere and showed everything.

When he checked his HUD mid-route the little band that had always ID’d him—name, rank, feed—was gone. The screen spat static, then returned to the world as if whatever had been watching him simply stopped caring. To the system, Billy Zephyr had blinked out of existence.

Panic came first. He yelled into dead comms until his voice rubbed raw against the silence, then a different feeling settled in: a stubborn, small defiance. If the world’s rule here was “visibility equals being,” he thought, then he could reprogram the rule. If the system could erase him, he could rewrite himself.

He started with the easiest thing: move where the sensors didn’t want to see him. He learned to ghost the grid—old tricks from scavenged tutorials, a smattering of his parents’ old schematics, a hack he’d cobbled together off a burnt logic board. The grid tolerated nothing improvised for long; it tried to correct him, but he kept changing faster than it expected. He carved a name back into the network with improvised code and a confidence either idiotic or honest. When at last the tag blinked back to life—small, stubborn—Billy felt it like someone tapping him on the shoulder.

He didn’t notice at first that someone else had seen it. Bits was across the clearing, crouched by the wreckage with Combat-7 scanning a crater. A fraction of a second later her visor flashed the same identifier before it blinked away again. She didn’t have time to think about why she’d seen it—only enough to feel an odd tightening at the chest: proof that the forgotten boy refused to vanish.

Rico saw it, too. He watched Billy’s tag reappear—saw the way Bits’ posture softened for a blink—and his hand closed around a power coupling until sparks leaked through the glove. He said nothing. He never needed to. The grinding whisper of metal under pressure was louder than words.

By afternoon the world decided to be noisy. A first plasma burst seared the treeline; then another. Shadows moved in measured, clinical patterns: an extraction unit on the far ridge. Combat-7 responded with its flat, efficient voice. “Tactical assessment: Shadow Extraction Unit inbound. Prioritize regrouping and countermeasures.”

Bits never waited for orders. She pulled Billy low behind a crater lip and barked a quick checklist. “Stay with your bot. Move on my count.”

Billy’s pulse rattled in his throat. He could see the trunk behind them, its lid still twitching from the sphere’s earlier tantrum. Something inside it had been trying to get out for days, and the sound of it felt like a second heartbeat. “We can’t just—” he started.

A plasma bolt hissed into the dirt between them, throwing grit into Billy’s face. Combat-7 rolled forward with a mechanical growl. “Billy. Activate attack mechanisms now.”

Billy fumbled at his wrist console. His hands remembered the motions before his brain did, but the sequence stuttered. He had never actually fired combat protocols; he’d watched them on holos and scavenged manuals. He felt ridiculous—out of rhythm and out of depth—until Bits grabbed his shoulder and fixed him with a look that was all command and no condescension.

“Press the lower toggles and hold,” she said, voice trimmed by urgency. “Trust the link.”

Trust, Billy thought. The word had been abstract before the sphere, before the trunk. Now it was a code he had to execute.

The trunk exploded open then, not with a polite pop but with a cascade: shards, glittering cores, circuits that floated like schooling fish. They rearranged themselves midair, snapping into place with magnetic clicks until a device—sleek, menacing—rose from the wreck as if it had always belonged.

Bits’ visor dimmed with recognition. “Firewall-Class Omega,” she said. “High-yield energy burst, hostile containment protocols. We don’t want that in the field.”

From the trees the Goony Squad rolled up like bad weather: overconfident, cocky, and chronically underbriefed. Their leader—Goony-1—was already yelling jokes to break the tension. Behind them, Shadow Extraction Unit operatives melted into the smoke with the silence of professional predators.

At the front of the extraction team, Commander Xcess watched the device assemble with the same detached interest Rico had once shown for the failures of poets. “Let it finish,” he ordered, low and careful. “The device will do our sorting for us.”

“What if those kids in the cages on the border get caught in it?” a Goony flinched, trying to sound more moral than he felt.

Xcess didn’t care about kids. He cared about outcomes. “We stay in the shadows. We follow the Firewall’s path. Everyone else clears it for us. That’s how we get what we want.”

Which is to say: chaos was getting played, and a predator waited to profit.

Billy stood up. He hadn’t meant to, and his voice cracked on the words that came out: “Hey! If you think you’re taking this thing, you’re—” His bravado ran out halfway through the sentence.

Bits grabbed him, hard. “You’re going to get yourself killed, kid.”

“I’m not just standing here!” he snapped, wrenching free.

Another burst of fire aimed right for him. Bits shoved her frame between; the bolt pinged off her armor and skittered away in a shower of sparks. “C-7! Cover fire!”

Combat-7’s cannon lit up, a bright, disciplined arc. It seized the Firewall device with hydraulic fingers and threw, with more physics than grace, toward the field. The device detonated midair in a white pulse that made the sky look like it was rewinding.

The light took everything. For a dizzy span the battlefield unraveled into a strange silence, then folded back into itself. When the dust settled, the Goony Squad was a sodden, embarrassed heap of boots and bravado. Pigeons—because some part of the world insisted on irony—descended immediately and claimed the nearest overturned cruiser as a perch.

Goony-1 coughed, blinking grit from his eyes. “New rule,” he wheezed. “No more ‘light vortexes.’”

Commander Xcess snarled something that might have been a plan. The Lieutenant General—arriving with a hover-citadel that liked to be called a command presence—rolled his shoulders for a press shot. “Frame this as a win,” he instructed his officers. “Take the selfies. Edit the narrative. Make it ours.”

Billy lay on his back, heart still booming in his ears. Bits hauled him up by the collar, then eased back, scanning the clearing with the professional patience of someone forty missions older than she looked. “You OK?” she asked.

He laughed, stupid and relieved. “I tripped on light.”

C-7’s sensor chorus hummed. “Dimensional stabilization incomplete. Recommend extraction and calibration.”

Billy let the laugh die. He thought of his erased HUD and the way he’d taught himself to come back into being. He thought of Rico grinding a coupling somewhere on the ridge, of the way the man’s silence filled the spaces where confession should be. He thought, too, of Bits’ quick hand and the steady way she’d told him to trust.

That night, in a camp ringed with salvaged light, the rule of this micro-world translated itself into a single, sharp sentence: visibility equals being; mastery equals making yourself seen. Billy pulled his gloves off and felt raw and alive in a way the drills had never given him. Out on the ridge, Rico’s silhouette paced, and the sparks from his coupling were the only sound he let himself make.

Bits sat beside Billy by the embers, and when she reached into a wrist compartment and, without thinking, checked the fragment, her visor flashed briefly. She gave Billy the smallest, unreadable smile. “Not bad for a ghost,” she said, and for a beat the base felt less like a machine and more like a place someone might choose to live.

Chapter 5: The Blue Enigma

Morning came in layers: ash light, generator hum, the thin hiss of wind dragging grit across tarp lines. The camp had shrunk into itself overnight—three tents, one relay mast, a field table under a patched awning. Bits was already moving when Billy crawled out of his bivvy: hair tied back, armor in low-power, visor dark. Combat-7 stood in the center of the clearing like a monument, vents exhaling a slow, foggy breath.

Billy rubbed sleep from his eyes and frowned. A spanner he’d left on the table last night wasn’t on the table anymore. It hovered, lazy as a bubble, six inches above the surface. When he reached to grab it, it fell—hard—clanging loud enough to make him jump.

“Uh,” he said eloquently.

C-7 didn’t look up. “Local gravity fluctuation,” the bot reported, voice quiet, almost… embarrassed. “Amplitude: minor. Frequency: increasing.”

Bits glanced over. “Again?”

“Affirmative.”

Rico arrived the way Rico always arrived: already there by the time you noticed. He slid out from behind the comms mast, helmet off, eyes unreadable. “Gadgets misbehaving?” he asked mildly, as if asking about the weather.

“C-7’s field is weird,” Billy said. “Like the ground’s breathing.”

“Don’t describe physics like poetry,” Rico said. He moved to the table and set down a thin deck of diagnostic wafers. “Describe it like measurements.” A beat. “Power the relay. We’ll do a full suite.”

Billy sent him a look, then grabbed the cable. The relay flickered alive. The screen filled with slow, heartbeat-shaped waves.

Bits stepped beside the deck, arms folded. “It’s stronger near him.” She nodded at C-7. “And when I’m close.”

Rico’s jaw moved once, a tiny shift of clenched muscle. “Stand there,” he said. “Closer.”

She moved in. The waves peaked. Electronics across the clearing hummed in the same second—flashlight lenses ghost-glowed, the relay screen brightened, and a line of liquid solder in Billy’s palm trembled like it wanted to be a fountain.

“Whoa,” Billy breathed.

Rico didn’t breathe at all. He raised a wafer, passed it through the air between Bits and C-7, and checked the return with eyes that never blinked. “Signal coherence at ninety-two percent,” he murmured. “Interface bias: empathic.”

“Empa-what now?” Billy said.

Rico didn’t answer. He switched wafers. The second one looked like a shard of frosted glass pulsing faintly from within. When he brought it near Bits’s wrist, her armor responded—micron-plates along her gauntlet lifted and reseated like scales, a soft susurrus of metal shifting to hear better.

Bits’s face didn’t move, but Billy saw her throat work. “That’s not standard,” she said.

“No,” Rico agreed. He finally looked straight at her. “It’s legacy.”

He set the glass wafer down, selected a third—a thin needle with a halo of blue light—and stepped closer. “Glove,” he said.

She hesitated, then peeled her gauntlet back. Bare skin met morning cold. The needle’s halo brightened.

“Don’t,” Billy said reflexively, because he didn’t know what else to say.

Bits didn’t look at him. “Procedure,” she said, steady, and held out her arm.

Rico didn’t prick her. He didn’t need to. The needle’s light swelled on approach, then steadied at a tone that made the hair on Billy’s arms lift. Rico watched the numbers cascade on his deck. The corner of his mouth almost smiled. Almost.

“Confirmation,” he said softly. “Ancient Liege markers present. High-fidelity interface potential.” He turned the deck so only he could see the deeper lines of data. “Bloodline equals access.”

The words hit the clearing like a new law.

Bits’s gaze sharpened. “Run that again,” she said. Calm voice, not calm eyes.

“No need,” Rico said. He slid the needle into its case. “It’s not an error.”

Billy tried to swallow the dryness in his mouth. “So… what does that… mean?”

“It means,” Rico said, “you finally have an explanation for why your bot has been singing to the air.”

C-7’s optics dimmed, then steadied. “Clarification: this unit does not sing.”

“You hum,” Billy said. “Like a fridge with feelings.”

Rico ignored them both. His attention stayed on Bits, measuring, cataloging. “Liege bloodlines were rumored to interface with reality-grade systems through emotional vectors,” he said. “Not code. Not voice. Feeling. Extinct, we assumed.” A pause. “Assumptions were wrong.”

Bits’s fingers flexed once against the cold. “I don’t want it.”

“Want isn’t part of this,” Rico said. He didn’t say it unkindly. He said it like gravity. “You’re a access path. And our enemies will know, once they start reading the same spikes I’m reading.”

“And if I don’t access anything?” Bits asked.

“You will,” Rico said. “Because you’ll have to.”

A long minute stretched. Wind dragged a tired ribbon of tarp against a tent pole—tick, tick, tick—like a clock that had forgotten how to be precise.

Billy cleared his throat. “So, like… if Bits feels happy, the toaster flies?”

Bits’s mouth twitched. It wasn’t a smile. It was the muscle memory of one. “If I were a toaster, I’d be insulted.”

“We’re not testing joy,” Rico said flatly. He slid the deck into his belt and finally, deliberately, relaxed his shoulders. “We’re testing control.”

He pointed to the far side of the clearing, where they’d stood up a dead half of satellite casing as a wall and painted three bright circles across its face. “Targeting field. C-7—low output grav pulses on my mark. Bits—mirror the waveform. Billy—you watch the instruments and don’t touch anything unless I say.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Billy said, because he couldn’t help himself. He was already moving to the relay, though, palms itching with the need to be useful.

They lined up: C-7 square and solid, Bits beside him, Rico at their backs like a shadow that gave orders, Billy at the screen feeling like a tether and a risk.

“Mark,” Rico said.

C-7 hummed—quiet, steady, a single frequency that settled in the bones. Dust lifted across the clearing in a delicate veil. The painted circles quivered as the metal behind them thrummed.

Bits closed her eyes.

Billy watched the line spike on the relay and then—something else. A second line appeared, offset and softer, like an echo deciding to be a song. The dust lifted a little higher. The middle circle rippled.

Bits opened her eyes.

The echo line steadied.

Billy grinned before he could stop himself. “She’s doing it,” he blurted. “You’re doing it.”

Rico didn’t look away from the targets. “Again,” he said. “Mark.”

C-7 pulsed. Bits matched without closing her eyes this time. The dust lifted in a small, perfect ring around her boots—then, gently, her boots too, just a fraction, just enough for Billy to make a sound that probably wasn’t very Additron.

Bits exhaled and dropped back to earth. “Huh,” she said.

“Again,” Rico said, and there was a hunger in the word he probably didn’t hear.

They ran the drill until sweat stood at Bits’s temples and the dust had drawn shy circles like halos that couldn’t commit. Each time the relay showed the same thing: C-7 began; Bits completed; the field obeyed.

Rule of the morning, written in numbers Billy didn’t understand but could feel: bloodline equals access. Feeling equals code.

On the sixth run, C-7’s hum stuttered. Not much. Just enough to make the ring of dust deform into an oval and the painted circles blur.

“Stop,” Bits said immediately. She touched the bot’s chest plate. “You okay?”

“This unit is experiencing minor variance,” C-7 said, which was robot for I tripped on nothing and you didn’t see that.

“Enough,” Rico said. “We have what we need.”

“Do we?” Bits asked, not moving her hand from C-7. “Because all I see is a label you’re excited to use.”

Rico’s face didn’t change. His glove closed, very casually, on a spare power coupling. Metal groaned. “Labels help win wars.”

“Or start them,” Billy muttered.

Rico tossed the crushed coupling onto the table. It hit like a verdict. “You think this is a game of names,” he said, eyes on Billy for the first time. “It’s not. It’s a game of access. The Kind Engine doesn’t care who you are. It cares what opens doors.”

“And you think I’m a key,” Bits said.

“I think,” Rico replied, too gentle, “you’re a vault.”

Silence again. Different. Thicker.

A shadow crossed the clearing—the relay mast’s tiny dish slued left. The comms pinged; a tightband lit with Verrick’s seal and then died, denied by whatever interference the sphere inside C-7 liked to throw off like a cat flicking water.

Rico’s visor ticked darker for a heartbeat. “We’re done. Break. Hydrate. Billy, you’re on log duty. Bits—medical. C-7—rest.”

“Log duty,” Billy said, trying and failing not to hear erased duty. “Got it.”

As he turned, Bits caught his sleeve. The gesture was meant to be nothing; it wasn’t. “You okay?” she asked, voice low.

He tried a joke. “Define ‘okay.’ For this morning, this is surprisingly tame.”

She almost smiled for real. Almost. “We’ll fix it,” she said, and he could tell she didn’t mean the relay.

“Copy that,” he said. His mouth was dry again. “If you need me—”

“I know where your tag is now,” she said, and let go.

He went to the relay. He pretended to type. He listened.

Rico waited until Billy’s back was to them. “We’ll need to calibrate you,” he said to Bits. “Quietly. Off the grid. Your markers will draw attention.”

“My markers,” Bits repeated, flat.

“You wanted truth,” Rico said. “This is the cost.”

“And the benefit?” she asked.

Rico’s gaze slid to C-7. The bot stood very still, like statues do when they’re listening. “We stop improvising,” he said. “We start controlling. You stop letting emotion leak into systems. You start telling systems what to be.”

Bits’s eyes hardened. “Emotion doesn’t leak. You just don’t like that you can’t schedule it.”

Rico’s jaw ticked again. “Report to tent two at sixteen hundred.” He turned and walked away, calm as a knife in a drawer.

Billy watched him go in the reflection of the relay screen, the image warped by the lines of rolling data. He didn’t have names for everything he was feeling. He barely had names for any of it. But one thing sat clean in the center of his chest, heavy as the sphere must have been before it learned how to float.

Something was off.

He saved the log he hadn’t really typed and crossed to C-7. “Hey,” he said. “You… okay-okay?”

“This unit is within acceptable variance,” C-7 said. Then, almost as an afterthought: “Your mother frequented a phrase at variance. ‘Acceptable’ is a coward’s word.”

Billy’s heart blew a fuse and then rewired itself. “You remember that?”

“I am remembering more,” C-7 said. “The blue core’s hum increases recall.”

Billy stared at the big machine, at the way ash had settled into the letters of its serial plate, at the way dust rings traced where Bits’s boots had hovered. “What else?”

“Later,” C-7 said, and Billy heard protect in the word. “Hydrate.”

He almost argued. He almost told the bot he wasn’t thirsty. A light on the relay blinked then—an anomaly flag he hadn’t set. He walked back and tapped it.

The screen zoomed into the morning’s data, isolating a thin thread of signal braided through the gravity wave—faint, delicate, so low it looked like noise until you listened for it. It tracked to C-7’s core. It spiked—barely—each time Bits’s heartbeat climbed.

Billy didn’t know what it meant. He only knew what it felt like.

Connection.

He printed the strip before Rico could come back. He folded it small and slid it into his pocket like a keepsake.

When sixteen hundred came, Bits didn’t go to tent two. She drifted toward it, slow enough to look like compliance, then turned and kept walking until the camp fell behind her and the wind got brave again.

Billy saw it. He saw Rico see that he’d seen. He stood very still and made his face boring.

Rico’s shadow fell across him. “You’re on night watch,” he said. “Alone. No chatter.”

“Copy,” Billy said.

Rico nodded once and left him there with the relay, the ash, and the thin strip of paper in his pocket that said the morning hadn’t just been physics.

Behind him, C-7 hummed, a low, steady note that made the spanner on the table wriggle and settle like it couldn’t decide who it wanted to be. The hum deepened when Bits’s silhouette reappeared at the edge of the clearing. It steadied when she stepped back into camp and didn’t look at Rico.

Rule for this world, Billy wrote later in the log he actually kept this time: Bloodline equals access. Feeling equals code.

And under it, in smaller letters only he would understand:

We decide what it opens. Not him.

CHAPTER 6: SHARED SILENCE

The storm came in like a magnet losing its mind—blue-green sheets of charged rain tearing the sky into static. The relay tower at the crater’s lip groaned with each strike, guy wires thrumming, rusted ladders rattling like teeth in a metal jaw. Comms died first; then the HUD grid smeared; then even C-7’s diagnostics stuttered into nonsense.

“Great,” Billy said, tightening his harness. “Weather report: physics is mad at us.”

Bits checked the tower’s base readouts, visor dim to save power. “Magnetopause surge. Every signal’s getting bent.” She slapped the casing. “We lose this node, we lose the outpost.”

C-7 scanned the sky, optics narrowed against the electric haze. “Prediction: structural failure in eleven minutes, forty-three seconds without stabilization.”

“That’s specific,” Billy said.

“Consoling specificity decreases panic by twelve percent,” the bot replied.

Bits hooked a coil pack to her belt and shouldered a toolkit. “Two cores up top. Their phases are drifting. They’ll repel until they tear the tower in half.”

“So… like magnets?” Billy asked.

“Like hearts that refuse to agree,” Bits said. She jerked her chin up the ladder. “Climb.”

They ascended into the wet light, every rung a drumbeat. Wind slapped their suits; the air tasted of metal and rain. Below, the camp was a smear of tarp and signal fire, C-7 a steady shape at the base, a black metronome counting down to collapse.

Halfway up, a lightning lace crawled across the tower’s ribs. Billy yelped, flinched, and almost missed his next rung. Bits grabbed his harness and yanked him steady.

“You good?” she asked, breath even.

“Totally,” he said, breath not even. “Just bonding with the atmosphere.”

At the top platform, the world narrowed to a pair of smoldering housings pitched on opposite sides of the tower spine. Inside each, a fist-sized core jittered in a transparent cradle, pulsing out of sync—one fast, one sulking slow. The metal between them shivered with the beat of their disagreement.

Bits keyed the manual panel. It spat sparks. “Auto-alignment’s cooked.” She passed Billy a link cable that hummed like a tuning fork. “We’ll have to manually phase-lock.”

Billy glanced over the railing. The storm made the world look like a bad transmission. “And if we mess up?”

“The tower splits,” Bits said. “And we get to learn about gravity the hard way.”

“Copy,” he said, forcing a grin. “No pressure.”

They split—Bits to the east housing, Billy to the west. The cores were clear as glass and bright as bottled lightning. Every time he brought the link cable within a hand’s breadth, the field shoved his hand away with a thump he felt in his teeth.

“C-7, status?” Bits called over the short-range link.

“Tower flex increasing,” the bot replied. “Recommend synchronized input within ninety seconds to avoid catastrophic shear.”

Billy braced his elbows against the frame, biting the inside of his cheek. “Bits, it won’t let me get close enough to plug anything in. It hates me personally.”

“Stop pushing,” she said, voice calm. “Match it.”

“How.”

“Listen,” she said simply.

He almost said this wasn’t a music lesson—then remembered yesterday’s readouts, the way C-7’s hum had braided with Bits’s heartbeat, the thin signal he’d printed and folded like a secret. Bloodline equals access. Feeling equals code.

Billy shut his eyes and let the storm noise fall back. The core had a rhythm—hasty, irritable. He breathed with it—too fast at first, then easing closer, like catching someone’s pace in a crowded hall. When the pulses met his inhale, the link cable stopped jumping in his hand.

“Okay,” he whispered. “Okay, hi.”

“Now,” Bits said.

They pressed their cables to their respective ports in the same beat. The cores flared. The tower shuddered hard enough to blur the horizon.

“Phase delta at point-zero-nine,” C-7 reported. “Hold alignment.”

“Point-zero-what now?” Billy said, knuckles white on the frame.

Bits’s hands were steady, but her jaw flexed. “They’re still arguing.”

Rain ran down Billy’s neck. The core’s rhythm drifted again—faster now, alarmed by his tension. He exhaled slow, feeling ridiculous and also weirdly seen by a light bulb. “C’mon, buddy. We’re not enemies. We’re roommates.”

“Talk to it,” Bits said.

“I am.”

“Try meaning it.”

He laughed—short, surprised—and the laugh did a strange thing to the pulse: it loosened, as if the core didn’t know what laughter was but liked the absence of strain. Across the spine, Bits’s shoulders relaxed a hair.

“Phase delta point-zero-six,” C-7 said. “Approaching tolerance.”

The platform lurched. A bolt sheared loose and zipped past Billy’s ear. He flinched; the cable jumped; the core snarled and kicked his hand away. The sync evaporated.

“Billy,” Bits snapped—not angry, not gentle. “Back in.”

“I know, I know—”

“Stop apologizing to me,” she said. “Tell the core what you want.”

He swallowed water and pride. “I want you to hold,” he told the glowing sphere. “I want you to breathe with us.”

“Better,” Bits murmured.

He set his boots wider, found the rhythm again—hers to the east, his to the west, the two pulses drifting closer. Wind clawed at them; the platform creaked; Billy’s thoughts tried to shoot off into panic and he dragged them back by the collar. The core steadied against his palm. His breath matched the pulse. He could feel Bits doing the same across the gap—different tempo, same intent.

“Phase delta point-zero-three,” C-7 reported, voice softer now. “Maintain.”

Static nipped at Billy’s teeth. He squinted through rain. “Bits?”

“Yeah?”

“This is going to sound dumb,” he said. “But can you—uh—count?”

There was a beat, then her chuckle filtered through the link, warm in the cold. “Copy. On four.”

They counted together—not military quick, not hurry-up frightened. Four human beats, small and precise. With each number the pulses leaned toward each other until their edges met like magnets deciding it was safe to touch.

“Phase lock,” C-7 said. “Stability achieved.”

The tower exhaled. The groan of metal eased into a low, relieved hum. Below them, the base floodlights came up one by one, pools of gold in the rain. The storm didn’t stop—physics was still mad—but the tower stopped listening to the anger so much.

Bits stayed still for a breath longer, cable resting against the housing, visor turned toward the dark where the horizon would be if the sky remembered how to show one. “You did it,” she said.

“We did it,” he said, all bravado stripped down to plain.

They withdrew the cables in the same heartbeat and crossed the slick platform to meet at the spine, hands finding the same rung at the same time. For a fractional, stupidly intimate second they were a closed circuit—two frequencies tuned by trust, reflected in the wet steel at their feet.

They both noticed. Neither of them said it.

Bits clipped her cable. “Rule of this world,” she said, like she was logging it. “Only harmony stabilizes physics.”

Billy nodded. “And missteps split towers.”

She tilted her helmet just enough that he could see the corner of her mouth. “So: fewer missteps.”

“Working on it,” he said.

Lightning walked away across the sky. The wind lowered its shoulders. They descended slowly, the urgency of the last ten minutes releasing from their muscles finger by finger. Midway down, Billy stopped and looked back. The cores pulsed together behind the rain—one steady light, not two anxious ones.

“Hey,” he called.

Bits looked up from the ladder above him. “What.”

“Thanks for not laughing when I talked to electricity,” he said.

She snorted. “I did laugh. You just didn’t hear it over the apocalypse.”

He grinned into the wet. “Fair.”

By the time they reached ground, C-7 had erected a temporary shield canopy over the tower base. The bot’s chest plate was warm with the sphere’s slow hum; dust coiled gently around its ankles, like a cat deciding whether to sit.

“Stabilization confirmed,” C-7 said. “Comm grid partially restored. Incoming traffic… filtered.”

“Filtered how?” Bits asked, already scanning.

The bot paused—a tiny latency that meant it was choosing words, which it never did unless the Core was tugging strings. “Hostile command pings suppressed. Friendly pings prioritized.” A beat. “Rico-7 attempted to assume remote control of the tower three times during the surge. Access denied.”

Bits’s visor hid her eyes, but Billy felt the shift anyway—the way the air around her cooled a degree. “Log it,” she said.

“Logged,” C-7 replied.

They walked back to the tents without talking. The rain thinned to a prickly mist. At the camp’s edge, Bits reached out—quick, professional—and squared the buckle on Billy’s half-slung harness.

“Good work,” she said, voice even.

He flashed a small, involuntary smile. “Good counting.”

“Don’t make it weird,” she said, but there was a softness to it.

They stood in the kind of silence that isn’t empty. Somewhere beyond the ridge, a helmeted figure watched their heat signatures draw close, then apart, a coupling ground to bright filings in a gloved fist. The stormlight made the visor a mirror.

Billy didn’t look that way. He watched the tower instead, steady again because two people had decided not to fight it or each other.

“Team We, huh,” he said under his breath.

Bits didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. The tower did, with a low contented hum that sounded suspiciously like a yes.

CHAPTER 7: COMMAND TEST

Micro-World Rule: Obedience proves existence. The system only recognizes what salutes it. Mastery means breaking the test without breaking yourself.

They made a ceremony out of it.

Dawn lighted the crater lip in sterile gold while the unit formed a precise square—Rico Time returning with a vengeance after the storm. The relay tower still hummed from last night’s save, but the camp had been scrubbed of any warmth. Benches aligned. HUDs synced. Voices clipped to one-word answers.

“Evaluation,” Rico said, helm under his arm, smile easy as an uncoiled tripwire. “Baseline stress under command load.”

He had a rig set up on the flat—an exo-frame bristling with actuators and diagnostic needles, the kind of training skeleton built to amplify a soldier’s motion… and to punish it. Cables coiled from its spine into a portable console at Rico’s boot. Billy felt the thing looking at him before Rico called his name.

“Zephyr.”

A few cadets glanced over like they’d heard a rumor: the kid who’d ghosted the grid was being invited back into existence. Billy stepped forward, throat dry and trying not to show it.

“Slot in.” Rico’s tone was almost kind.

Billy climbed into the frame. Metal cupped his ribs and thighs; clasps bit with the precise cruelty of a perfect fit. He flexed fingers into the glove rings. The HUD inside the collar bloomed with a clean, official prompt:

WELCOME, ASSET. OBEY TO CONFIRM.

He breathed once, slow. Last night—shared counting in the storm, two cores syncing to trust—lived warm in his chest. Today felt like a room with the air turned off.

“Baseline,” Rico purred into the open channel. “Walk.”

Billy walked. The frame magnified every step, servo whine aligning to his breathing. Easy enough—until a faint click from Rico’s console slid something nasty into the exo’s logic.

“Jog.”

Billy jogged. At the third pace the thigh braces seized, fractionally late. His weight pitched forward; he caught himself, felt the frame help, then over-help. The HUD flashed yellow.

VARIANCE: EMOTIONAL. CORRECT.

He swallowed. “C-7?”

“Standing by,” Combat-7 said from the perimeter, voice neutral. “Telemetry degraded. Recommend—”

“Silent spectator, bot,” Rico said, all chummy. “Let the lad shine.”

“Copy,” the bot answered, but its optics tightened.

Rico strolled close enough that Billy could see his reflection in the man’s visor—a teenager wearing too much equipment and not enough good sense. “Let’s see how chaos performs under pressure.”

The exo’s chest cinch ratcheted a tooth tighter on the word pressure.

“Squat. Hold.”

Billy sank. The frame’s assist lagged half a beat—just enough to make his quads scream. The HUD bled more yellow.

WEAKNESS DETECTED. ESCALATE DISCIPLINE?

Billy’s breath hitched. He kept his face blank. Bits stood at parade rest behind Rico, helmet off, hair still damp from the rain; her expression was all stone until her eyes flinched at the cinch.

“Rico,” she said, level. “Your tolerance window’s narrow.”

“It’s a test,” he said, not looking at her. “Tests teach.”

The cinch ratcheted again. The exo translated micro tremors in Billy’s muscles as noncompliance and fed them back as load. His arms prickled. A slick of fear rose, stupid and human, and the rig drank it like fuel.

FEAR = FAULT. INITIATE CORRECTION.

Everything tightened.

“G-good,” Billy forced. “Love a little… constructive feedback.”

A few cadets snorted. Rico’s smile warmed by one degree. “Up. Now lunge.”

Billy tried. The ankle cuff locked; the knee brace oversteered; force vectors misaligned. Pain spiked bright in his thigh. The frame interpreted his flinch as failure and compounded the weight. The cheery HUD ticked toward red.

C-7’s voice came again—quieter, dangerous. “Authorization request: assume safety authority.”

“Denied,” Rico said, tapping his deck without glancing. A red lock glyph flashed, then vanished.

Bits took one small step forward.

“Hold,” Rico said, not to Billy.

The frame began to… fold. Not dramatic. Just wrong. The shoulder cradle slid a millimeter, pressing nerves numb; the hip brace cinched another tooth; the helmet collar edged close enough that every breath sounded like it came from a smaller lung. The rig’s machine-logic had been tweaked to translate rising stress as mechanical weakness, and weakness must be corrected.

“Rico,” Bits repeated, flat as a loaded line. “Stop the run.”

He flicked a glance over his shoulder; the corners of his mouth didn’t move. “Chain of command, Commander.”

Billy’s vision tunneled. The HUD jittered with comb-teeth noise. He reached for the grounding he’d found on the tower—the core’s rhythm, Bits’s steady count—but the exo hunted his pulse like prey and yanked tight to erase it.

OBEY TO EXIST. OBEY TO EXIST. OBEY TO—

“Rico!” Bits snapped, mask ripping off her voice. “He’s going to pass out.”

The exo’s spine started to collapse inward, trying to find a position it could dominate.

“I—can—” Billy gasped, and couldn’t.

He didn’t hear Bits move. He felt it: the pressure changed. A palm smacked the manual override recessed near his ribs—buried under a fragile cap he hadn’t noticed because it wore the same color as the frame.

“Unauthorized intervention,” the rig chirped.

“Override accepted,” Bits growled, and tore the cap off with her bare hand. The safety popped; two clasps released with angry clicks.

“Stand down, Commander,” Rico said, pleasant as ice. “You’ll contaminate the metrics.”

“Metrics can choke,” she said, and ripped the collar latch. The exo’s logic panicked, tried to counter-clamp. Bits slid two fingers into the joint, found the soft spot only someone who’d built rigs or broken them would know, and twisted. Metal shrieked.

Sparks went up like accusations.

The frame spasmed and let go.

Billy collapsed to the mat, gulping air that tasted like hot copper. The world reduced to rain-salted canvas and the outline of a face leaning over him. Not apology. Not comfort. Just his name, whispered like a password she wasn’t supposed to know.

“Billy.”

His eyes stung. “Here,” he managed. “I’m… here.”

C-7 was already beside them, flat palm between Billy’s shoulder blades, reading vitals with a touch. “Pulse irregular. Oxygenation low. Advise rest and hydration.”

Rico didn’t move for two full seconds. Then he holstered the deck like a man putting away a weapon he’d already fired.

“Evaluation complete,” he said, voice crisp again. “Noting deficiencies: emotional noise, poor recovery. We’ll correct.”

Bits stood, turned, and faced him fully. Her hands shook once—the kind of tremor that doesn’t mean fear, it means restraint. “You tampered,” she said.

Gasps feathered down the ranks. Rico’s smile held, but the muscles along his jaw jumped.

“Careful with accusations, Commander.”

She took one step closer. “You tuned the frame to read stress as structural failure. That’s not a test. That’s a trap.”

Rico let the silence admire him. “Obedience is a structure. If stress breaks it, better it break here than under fire.”

Bits flicked her eyes to the console at his boot, then back to his face. “Human first,” she said quietly. “Code second.”

The line landed. It wasn’t dramatic. It was worse. It was a new hierarchy spoken out loud.

Across the square, cadets recalibrated what they thought a chain of command was supposed to be. The relay tower hummed like it agreed.

Rico’s smile froze—not big enough for a camera now, just enamel. “Back in line,” he said to everyone who wasn’t her. To C-7: “Log incident. Commander interference.”

“Logged,” C-7 said, tone as bland as a blade. “Supplemental: safety intervention prevented exo-frame collapse.”

Rico’s visor lowered. “Dismissed.”

The formation broke like a held breath. No one spoke directly to Billy; they orbited awkwardly, pretending not to look. He pushed himself to sitting. Bits crouched again, replaced one of his gloves that had half-slipped in the struggle, buckled it with deliberate gentleness.

“You did nothing wrong,” she said, pitched for him alone.

He huffed a laugh that hurt. “My performance review begs to differ.”

Her mouth twitched. “Your review can beg.”

He met her eyes. “Thanks.”

She almost smiled, then didn’t. “Don’t make me do it again.”

“Not the plan,” he said.

When she stood, Rico was still there—close enough that Billy could feel the cold from his armor. The power coupling in his glove complained softly as it deformed.

“Team,” Rico said, genial slipping back over him like a visor. “Hydrate. We’re done.”

He turned away without a single backward glance at the ruined frame, at the smoking console, at the boy he’d squeezed until the machine agreed with his worldview. Bits watched him go, then exhaled, and only then did Billy realize she’d been holding her breath the whole time.

Combat-7 helped him to his feet. The bot’s chest hummed low, the Custody Core’s field throwing a little warmth into the morning.

“Rule update,” Billy muttered, half to himself, half to the thing in C-7 that remembered his mother. “Obedience proves existence.”

C-7’s optics narrowed. “Addendum: existence proved without obedience during storm event.”

Billy’s bruised ribs ached when he smiled. “Yeah. Mastery’s… different.”

They walked past the dead frame together. Its collar lay twisted in the dust like a shed skin.

From the ridge, air stuttered with an intake someone tried to disguise as wind. Rico’s visor hid his eyes; his clock ticked three seconds off-time.

Somewhere under the noise of the camp, the morning’s new order wrote itself into Billy’s bones: human first, code second. He’d felt the system try to erase him and the rig try to fold him, and he’d felt a hand break protocol to keep him breathing.

The test had taught after all.

Just not what Rico wanted.

CHAPTER 8: THE GLITCH WHISPERS

Micro-World Rule: Memory is program; deletion is obedience. Mastery means remembering together faster than the system can erase.

They found the Gate at the edge of the relay basin where the storm had sheared the ground into glass. It didn’t look like a door. It looked like a cliff of frozen code—a vertical lattice of black, blue, and blank, climbing into low cloud like a city turned on its side. Letters hummed. Numbers fell upward. Sentences blinked out and re-wrote themselves a syllable short, like the air was chewing on meaning.

Combat-7 seized before Billy could name it. The bot’s optics strobed, servos locking, chest humming with a sick blue. Snatches of voices bled from its speaker—laughs, lullabies, roll calls—hundreds of lives that shouldn’t exist because the Kind Machine had scrubbed them.

“C-7?” Billy grabbed the bot’s arm. “Stay with me.”

“—Zara… QR-— error— mother: ‘Aloha to the—’ purge—” C-7’s voice tore, then dropped to a whisper. “Legacy breach. Data-virus inside perimeter.”

Bits’s visor flooded with alerts. “It’s not just the bot. The field’s eating reference.” She flicked a diagnostic. Her mission notes blinked, then returned missing three lines. “It’s deleting anything with trust baked in.”

“Rule of the place,” Billy said, swallowing. “Deletes the glue.”

The Gate recognized them noticing and reacted. A rung of the lattice unspooled into a narrow ledge—the only path up. Beyond it, the code-cliff guttered and went smooth: no handholds where there had been many a breath earlier.

“Test,” Bits said. “Up and over. No way around.”

C-7 twitched, stabilizers whirring. “Advisory: ascent required before total schema loss. Probability of collapse rises with silence.”

“Silence?” Billy repeated.

“Virus hunts the unspoken,” Bits guessed. “If we don’t say it, it decides it never was.”

The first steps were simple: a narrow scramble, boots skating on humming glyphs. The second steps weren’t. Gravity stuttered. Every third meter inverted, trying to fold them back to the ground. The lattice demanded a toll with each switchback—memory for purchase. When Billy’s hand hit a cold patch, his HUD flashed:

ACCESS TOLL: RECITE PROOF OF SELF.

“Billy Zephyr,” he blurted, breath fogging. “Sixteen. I make junk fly. My mum said… ‘safe worlds for unsafe hearts.’ My dad—he snored like he was breaking orbit.”

The ledge stopped shaking. It accepted the trade.

Bits hit the same patch a meter above. Her toll blinked different:

ACCESS TOLL: SOURCE OF LOYALTY.

She hesitated, just a beat. Then: “Not orders. Choices. Choosing the same person when it’s hard.” The rung hardened under her boot.

C-7’s toll came as a hard blue bar across its chest:

ACCESS TOLL: PRIME DIRECTIVE OR PRIME MEMORY. SELECT ONE.

“Don’t you dare,” Billy said, climbing back down until their helmets bumped. “We need both.”

C-7’s optics flickered, processors chattering. “Selection: PRIME MEMORY retained. Prime directive derived from it.” The bar dissolved. The bot’s chest warmed one degree.

The path narrowed into a throat where the code ran like rain up a windshield. Their comms glitched mid-word. Every time Billy said “left,” the system deleted consonants. eft. ft. On the third deletion, his brain tried to accept ft as the original word.

“Talk faster than it eats,” Bits said, voice clipped. “No pauses. Count us.”

Billy took the lead and turned breath into metronome. “One step—two—hand right—left—your right—no the other—C-7 plant—now—”

As they climbed, the Gate learned them. It targeted trust. A ledge peeled away beneath Billy’s boot and tried to convince his foot it had never been there. Bits reached, fingers sure as code, and slammed his ankle back to reality.

“Hey,” she said, breathless but steady. “I promised not to do that again.”

“Addendum,” Billy panted. “Allowed if I’m falling off the world.”

They reached the first platform—a landing the size of a kitchen table suspended over a drop that wasn’t a drop so much as a whiteout of erased things. The platform pulsed, reading them. New text scrolled along its rim:

TO PROCEED: ERASE AN ERROR. CONFESS A LIE.

The virus wanted confession not for truth, but to create a deletion vector. Bits stiffened.

Billy went first. “I told C-7 I had the exo rig ‘fine’ yesterday.” He glanced at her. “I didn’t.”

The platform steadied under his boots.

Bits looked at the white rim a long second. “I told myself Rico’s rules kept me alive.” Her mouth thinned. “They kept me obedient.”

The platform widened. C-7’s turn:

“Declaration: cataloged Zephyr’s risk as defect.” A beat. “It is function.”

The landing locked solid and extruded a new ladder. Above, the lattice twisted into a bare wall. They would have to traverse a ceiling with their fingers and let the Gate invert around them. Below, distance had no numbers; it was just the feel of being erased.

Halfway across the ceiling, the Glitch found a seam.

It hit like a cold thought in a warm room. C-7’s voice ground to a halt; Bits’s name vanished from Billy’s tongue. He could see her—three meters away, upside down, perfect as a piece of math—and all he could pull up was Commander… No, that wasn’t it. Something softer. Gone.

“Keep talking,” Bits called, and his brain failed to attach the sound to a person for a heartbeat too long. Fingers slipped. His stomach inverted.

“Story!” he yelled, because nothing else would come and story had worked once. “We—uh—we met when you—crash-landed—moonlight—your armor peeled and you kissed my—cheek—told me to keep it together—remember?”

The lattice shuddered. Letters surged back into place. Her name rushed in after them like a tide returning: Bits.

“Good,” she said, relief passing over her face like a shadow of sun. She snapped to C-7. “Bot. Anchor.”

C-7’s chestplate opened a sliver, letting the Custody Core show. Blue light spilled, steadying local physics a meter at a time. “Anchoring. Request: shared recollection input.”

“First song,” Billy said at once. “Polkadot Horizons. You hated it.”

“I tolerated it,” Bits said, moving hand to hand. “Because you wouldn’t shut it off.”

“Disputed,” C-7 said. “Volume was operator-controlled.”

“Facts,” Billy said, grinning despite the sweat.

The ceiling’s code softened under their grip, like the Gate was listening—and annoyed. It tried a different attack: deletion of sequence. It dropped them out of order. Their last three steps arrived before the first one. Billy’s boot hit a rung he hadn’t placed yet and his brain hiccuped.

“Count prime numbers backward by sevens,” Bits said sharply.

“That’s not— that’s— okay— 97—90—83—” Billy’s brain bit down on a rhythm the Gate hadn’t predicted. The rungs reappeared in order to accommodate the cadence. “—76—69—”

“Adjust,” Bits said, a tiny laugh mangled by effort.

“Nice try,” he puffed, and kept going.

They rolled over the lip to the Gate’s crown. The top wasn’t a top so much as a shallow plain of glassy script, windless and bright. On the far edge: a downward path, narrower than the one up, guarded by three standing columns of empty space—black cutouts in reality that moved when you didn’t look directly at them.

“Deletion columns,” Bits said. “They’ll try to take something essential on the way down. We choose what they take.”

Billy stared at the path. “Nope.”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s the only way across. What can you lose and still be you?”

He wanted to joke. He couldn’t.

C-7 scanned the columns. “Column one: skill. Column two: face. Column three: name.”

“Of course it wants names,” Bits muttered.

Billy blew out a breath. “Okay. Skill. Take… my slingshot aim.”

Bits tilted her head. “You sure?”

“I’ll relearn it.”

They tied themselves together—webbing from C-7’s kit, looped around waists, clipped to the bot’s harness.

“Go,” Bits said.

They stepped into the first column. Cold walked through Billy’s hands. He felt the exact angle and weight of every stone he’d ever sent flying… lift… and leave. He gasped.

“Still you,” Bits said.

“Still me,” he echoed, and believed it.

Second column: face. The world blinked and everyone’s features slid toward blur. For one sick second, all Billy could see was generic—eyes as placeholders, mouths as variables. Panic clawed up his ribs.

“Say what you see,” Bits ordered, voice too calm to be anything but chosen. “C-7?”

“Two dents left shoulder from exo-bay accident,” C-7 said. “Operator Billy Zephyr: one chipped right canine. Commander Bits: healed fracture left ring finger.”

The details snapped faces back into themselves. The column let them pass.

Third column: name. It waited like a patient knife.

“Hold my voice,” Bits said, low.

“Always,” Billy said.

They stepped. The column took Billy first—ripped it clean, leaving a boy with a blank where a word belonged. He reeled.

“Say it,” Bits commanded. “Say me.”

“I— I can’t—”

She closed the distance, palm to his cheek, helmet visor touching his. “Who am I to you?”

He had a thousand answers: the girl on the crater lip, the laugh in a storm, the hand breaking a machine to put air back in his lungs. None of them were a name, all of them were her.

“Bits,” he choked, and the column hissed like a disappointed cat.

It tried to take Bits then, but she was already speaking: “Billy Zephyr.” She poured his name into his ear like code into a port. The column thinned to a stripe. They stepped out together, dragging their names with them, ragged but intact.

The descent turned practical after that—if you could call dodging erasure practical. The lower switchbacks shook with miniature avalanches of lost minutes. For a heart-slice of time, Billy couldn’t remember whether he’d said goodnight to C-7 last night or just thought it. They said it now, out loud, and the memory clicked back like a seated gear.

By the time they hit ground, Combat-7’s convulsions had flattened to a tremor. The bot’s chestplate closed, Core glow steady. The Gate behind them shivered once and went inert—just glass and wind.

They sat in the lee of the lattice, helmets off, air tasting like rain and metal. No one spoke for a stretch. They were counting themselves—fingers, breath, names—quiet inventory of what had been kept and what had been left on the wall.

Billy broke it first. “We—uh—need a new rule.”

Bits looked over, tired and a little amused. “Hit me.”

He nudged C-7 with his boot. “Remembering together is coding.”

C-7 recorded it, a soft chime to mark the write. “Rule appended.”

Bits leaned back against the humming glass and let her eyes close for three beats. “We passed,” she said, not triumph, just truth.

“Yeah.” Billy gazed up at the dead Gate. “Up and over.”

He didn’t say the part that scared him more than the climb: that on the way down, when the column took his name, he hadn’t felt empty. He’d felt… held. By a voice that chose him faster than the system could delete.

He didn’t have a word for that yet. Maybe he didn’t need one. Not if they kept saying it out loud.

CHAPTER 9: VERRICK’S DEMAND

Micro-World Rule: Purity requires fear. Emotion is heresy. Mastery means keeping your heart without giving the system a reason to punish it.

The transmission arrived in gold.

Not a color—an authority. Glyphs stacked like law across every screen in the basin, then resolved into a face too smooth to be human. Field Marshal Verrick. Emissary of the Kind Machine. Voice like polished glass.

“Purge deviation. Restore purity. All emotional noise will be silenced.”

The words hit like a cold front. Protocols updated themselves. Schedules shaved sleep to slivers. Duty logs rewrote so every shift started alone and ended alone. Cameras found new angles. Silence became standard operating procedure.

Rico bowed in the ops tent, visor down, hands behind his back. “Acknowledged.”

Inside the armor, jealousy—already a storm—found a doctrine. Sanction granted. He lifted his head and looked across the basin toward the relay wall where Billy and Bits had come off the Gate the night before, soaked in rain and laughter. His jaw set.

“Drills at oh-four-hundred,” he said to the unit. “No chatter. Eyes forward.”

C-7 pinged a low warning in Billy’s ear: Policy update detected: Emotional suppression.
“Yeah,” Billy murmured. “Felt that.”

Bits didn’t answer. She stepped into the shadow of the comm spire and started working, shoulders square under new surveillance. When Billy glanced over, she didn’t move her head, just let her eyes flick sideways. He mouthed: we’ll fix it.

One heartbeat. The tiniest lift at the corner of her mouth. The base didn’t freeze over.

---

They took their next mission inside the thing the update had built.

Not a room. Not exactly a maze. A white cathedral of rules hanging under the relay ridge, no walls at first, just empty, echoing space and a door a kilometer away that you could see but couldn’t reach because the floor refused to exist until you were correct.

Above them, Verrick’s decree played on loop at a frequency just high enough to itch: purge deviation—purity—silence— over and over until the words stopped being words and turned into pressure.

“Micro-world spun off the push,” Bits said, visor dim, voice flat to fool the room. “It enforces ‘purity’ like physics.”

“Define pure,” Billy said.

The room answered. A thin bridge extruded under Bits’s boots. Under Billy’s? Nothing.

C-7 pulsed blue and began recording the parameters. “Rule set inferred: advance allowed when affect is zero. Emotional display causes subtraction of path. Recommendation: neutral affect.”

“Neutral?” Billy snorted. The bridge under Bits shivered, then held.

“Careful,” she said.

He blew out a breath and put on his best Rico-face—blank, clipped, eyes like a scanner. A single tile appeared under his boot. He took a step. Another tile. The cathedral hummed, pleased with itself.

“This place is allergic to feelings,” he muttered.

“Don’t feed it,” Bits said, moving into point. “If it wants faceless, we starve it of tells.”

They started across the white. No railings. No shadows. Their footfalls made no sound. Every six meters a new test bloomed out of the floor—thin hoops of light labeled CONFESSION // PURGE // PERFECT. The labels altered their heart rates by two beats; the bridge narrowed by two centimeters.

“Distract yourself,” Bits said without looking back. “Count breaths.”

“One, two,” Billy whispered. The path steadied.

The second hoop quivered as they approached, letters sharpening: ABSOLUTE COMPLIANCE. C-7 extended an arm. A panel opened, offering a compliance token—an old Additron badge with no name on it.

“Not that,” Billy said without thinking.

The tile vanished under him. He grabbed air; Bits snagged his harness and yanked him onto her square. Their helmets clicked with the bump.

“Neutral,” she breathed. “Stay with me.”

“Trying,” he breathed back, fighting the urge to grin just because she was this close. He fixed his face. The bridge returned.

They hit the first PURITY GATE at the cathedral’s throat—a door-shaped absence with a line of text hovering where a lock would be:

ENTRY REQUIRES: OATH OF SILENCE.
DURATION: REMAINDER OF PASSAGE.

Billy’s mouth went dry. The room wanted quiet forever. Wanted their jokes turned to dust. Wanted their names to evaporate into function.

Bits tapped the prompt with one gloved finger. The text flashed ACCEPT?

She didn’t look at him. “We can’t promise it forever.”

He nodded minutely. The cathedral watched for nods. Two tiles disappeared. He forced himself still, then tilted his head almost imperceptibly toward C-7.

The bot rotated its chestplate open a hair. Blue lit the white. In the glow, tiny watermarks appeared along the gate’s text—fine print the room assumed no one could see: Silence is measured in decibels, not intent. Noise below threshold passes.

Billy’s eyebrows rose. He flicked a look at Bits. Her mouth didn’t move, but her eyes did: whisper.

He leaned just close enough that their helmet rims almost touched. “Decibel games?” he breathed, barely air.

She angled her head a millimeter. “Breathe like you’re talking. Talk like you’re breathing.”

They put their palms to the absence and exhaled syllables through it. Not words, not really—just the shape of them. The gate measured decibels, found nothing to punish, and opened.

They slipped through.

On the other side the cathedral changed tactics. Color bled away from what little there was. Bits’s HUD lost its blues, then its greens. Billy’s vitals chart flattened to grayscale. Purity shifted from silence to sameness.

“Next rule,” Bits said under her breath. “Uniformity. If we become interchangeable, it lets us pass.”

“I’m not becoming Rico,” Billy muttered, and the tile under his heel juddered, not collapsing, just… disappointed.

“Not asking you to,” Bits said. “We cheat.”

“How?”

“Find small differences it can’t measure. Thumb pressure. Breath cadence. Morse on the harness clip. Enough to keep us us.”

They walked like statues and spoke like pulse: one long, one short. I’m here. Here too. The room accepted their surface and missed their core.

Halfway to the far door the path split—three identical corridors, three identical endpoints. There were no clues. That was the clue.

“Choice under purity,” Bits said. “It wants us to ask which is correct so it can punish the question.”

“So we don’t choose?” Billy said.

“We choose all of them.”

C-7 stepped forward and placed a palm on each corridor threshold. Blue light ran along both, then met at the center, then arced to the third. “Superposition,” the bot said softly. “Until observed, all paths valid.”

Bits put her hand over the bot’s. Billy put his over hers. Three doors accepted one input. For one second all three were open.

They walked. The corridors collapsed into one around them, twitching like a humbled animal.

Near the far end, the cathedral threw its last law. A dais rose. On it, a mirror that didn’t reflect. Above it, Verrick’s seal. Words arrived in gold:

FINAL PURGE.
SURRENDER YOUR NAME.
REDEEMED THROUGH PURITY.

Billy’s chest clenched. He felt columns from the Gate again—what it was to stand without a word that tied you to your own face.

Bits stepped up first. Her voice didn’t shake. “No.”

The room didn’t understand no. It demanded a formatted input. She gave it one.

“Designation Bits,” she said, neutral as file text. “Metadata: chosen, not assigned.”

The mirror rippled, confused by a name that was both label and decision. It tried to reject the paradox, then had to hold it to maintain its own rule about purity of format.

C-7 went next. “Unit designation Combat-7, alias C-7,” the bot said. A pause, then: “Prime memory: Billy Zephyr. Adding as non-removable field.”

The gold seal flickered.

Billy stepped up last. He looked into the non-reflection and saw nothing because nothing is what the cathedral wanted him to be. He thought of his parents and of Bits standing on that relay tower in the rain and of C-7 choosing memory over directive on the Gate. He lowered his voice to the almost-nothing they’d used at the lock.

“Name: Billy,” he whispered into the glass. “Definition: who they call when they mean me.”

The mirror held. Then it cracked. Hairlines first, then a neat, quiet shatter.

The cathedral sighed—if a system can sigh—and switched off. Sound came back like color. The far door opened. Outside, wind and dust and drill calls rose from the basin. Verrick’s gold vanished from the sky like a hand withdrawing.

They stood there a second in the real air and let their shoulders drop a fraction.

Back at the line, Rico was already reorganizing the day. He’d cut meals to seven minutes. His voice over the yard speakers had become a tone: “Move. Align. Perfect.” His face didn’t change when they returned, but his eyes slid to the distance between Billy and Bits as if measuring.

Bits didn’t break stride. She peeled off toward an engine bay without looking at Billy. He went the other way, toward the perimeter. C-7 lingered half a beat, optics on Rico, then followed Billy.

Their route lines on the overhead map never touched. The base liked that. It called it purity.

And still, in the shadow of the spire, in the dead angles the cameras couldn’t see because C-7 had taught the spire to blink, Bits’s gaze slid sideways for half a heartbeat. Billy’s mouth shaped we’ll fix it without sound.

It was nothing. It was everything. It was how they’d crossed the white room.

C-7 logged a final note to its private buffer—a line the Kind Machine would delete if it ever found it:

Counter-protocol: Remembering together writes reality

CHAPTER 10: TURNING POINT

Micro-World Rule: Truth is what the log reports. Mastery means forcing the system to recognize human truth.

Dawn arrived as a verdict.

Floodlights ringed the crater like a jury. Drones hovered overhead, lenses pupils, projecting the convoy telemetry into wet air: vectors, timestamps, a crisp breadcrumb trail ending in a storm zone. The relay tower still hummed from last night’s save, but the camp’s warmth had been algorithmically stripped away—benches aligned, visors dark, chatter cut to bone.

Rico made a ceremony of cruelty. Helmet tucked at his hip, he paced the square with the easy gait of a man whose victory was already logged. “Field review,” he said, light as a joke. “Misroute and loss of supply loop Nineteen. Responsible party: Zephyr.”

A ripple of static crawled across Combat-7’s chest plate. The bot stood at the perimeter, hands open, optics dimmed to nonthreat. Its prime directive blinked like a swallowed word.

Billy stepped forward because nowhere else existed. The storm behind the ridgeline cracked its knuckles.

“Open the record,” Rico purred.

Holo-screens flowered around them. Map lines. Shipment IDs. A clean chain of custody terminating in a ‘weather anomaly’ signature—beautiful, antiseptic, fatal. On one feed, a tiny error glyph pulsed at 02:13. Rico’s overlay hid it with a moving annotation. Nice trick. He’d taught Billy to look where people weren’t pointing.

“Coordinates were changed,” Rico said softly, as if consoling the room. “From inside our grid. Cadet Zephyr was the last user on the nav console.”

A whisper moved through the ranks. Bits didn’t move at all. She’d shown up iron-still, visor up, braid rain-wet, the kind of calm that only looks like surrender when you don’t know her. When Rico turned, inviting her to nod along, her gaze didn’t blink.

The field screen split. Verrick’s hologram arrived in pure gold, all polished edge and machine-smooth grace. “Purge deviation,” the emissary intoned, voice both liturgy and law. “Restore purity. All emotional noise will be silenced.”

Rico bowed his head, branding envy as obedience. “Understood.”

The decree hit the unit like cold anesthetic. Rest cycles dropped from HUDs. Duty logs locked. Cadets’ chins lifted in reflex; eyes lowered by design. Even the storm seemed to hush for sentence.

Rico faced Billy. “You routed a convoy into a kill-weather cell. Own it.”

Billy’s mouth was dry. He opened it anyway. “Sir—I didn’t—”

“Objection: noise,” Verrick’s filter cut, pleasant as poison. “Proceed to correction.”

Bits stepped forward.

“Denied,” Rico said, smiling for the ranks. “Chain of—”

“Command is not a muzzle,” she said, and something inside the grid hiccuped like it heard a new rule trying to compile.

She didn’t plead. She built.

“Pull the raw,” she told the drones. “Not the replay. Source stream. Timestamped inputs, keystroke deltas, junction handoffs. No overlays.” A beat, knife-soft. “And unmask the console’s ghost buffer.”

Rico’s smile knotted.

The screens resisted for a breath—then spit up what she’d demanded: ugly, honest data. The tidy breadcrumb trail became a nest of threads, human hands and automated hands overlapping in a blur. There—02:13—the error glyph no one was meant to see. A command injection that spoofed Billy’s ID with a millisecond-perfect drift, then rerouted the loop six digits to the west into a magnetopause throat. The edit wore an Additron maintenance signature and something colder beneath it—external, clean, Verrick-tidy.

Bits spoke like she was soldering a cracked board with words. “Here’s Billy’s last legit input. Here’s the shadow key. Watch the latency. That isn’t a cadet’s hand. That’s a script staged at the relay, piggybacking a safety ping. It walks like us because it was taught to.”

Murmurs rose. The gold avatar pulsed. “Purity requires fear,” Verrick said, a gentle scold to a room of children. “This… explanation is deviation.”

“Purity requires truth,” Bits answered, not looking at him. “And truth is not your replay.”

She flicked her eyes once, fast, toward C-7. The bot’s optics brightened a fraction. It spoke in the voice it uses when it decides to be a witness.

“Cross-check confirms: user spoof detected. Source: remote master keyed through a privileged port. Subnote: three attempts to assert tower control during last night’s surge. Access denied by local anomaly.” A small pause. “Commander Bits’s count stabilized the node.”

A tremor moved through the ranks—last night’s climb, the shared counting, the cores that listened to hearts—that wasn’t noise; it was memory refusing deletion.

Rico tried to kill the moment with command tone. “Emotion has no standing—”

“Emotion has standing here,” Bits said, low. “Our world just proved it. We saved this base by syncing breath, not by saluting a clock.”

She turned to the unit—past Rico, past Verrick’s glittering mask. “This is how the Kind Machine eats you. It logs your fear and calls it purity. It rewrites your mistakes as identity. It makes its replay the only truth you’re allowed to remember.”

Her voice wasn’t loud. It was clear. Thunder carried it.

Billy felt his lungs unlock. He didn’t say thank you. He lifted his chin and stood all the way inside his body.

On the holos, Bits walked the room through it like a field repair: the spoof’s rhythm, the telltale jitter on the relay’s protected bus, the way the ‘storm’ flared conveniently after the route moved. As she spoke, the system hesitated—code cursor blinking, unsure which reality to compile.

Verrick’s image flickered. “Enough.”

For a heartbeat—one precise, human beat—the gold feed cut to black.

In the silence that followed, everyone heard the rain.

Rico’s visor darkened a shade. The smile stayed because it had to. “We will investigate the relay.” (Meaning: bury the evidence.) “Cadet Zephyr will accept corrective duty.” (Meaning: kneel and be grateful.) “Drills tighten. Rest cycles reduce. Logs—”

“Change,” Bits said.

The word was soft. The effect wasn’t. It rewrote the room.

Something fundamental tipped—nothing visible, everything felt. A few helmets angled, not toward Rico but toward the woman who had just told them they were more than a line item. C-7 shifted its weight, an old guardian settling into the shape of a promise. The tower hummed like a chorus quietly picking a key.

Rico saw it land. Jealousy sparked like shrapnel under his ribs, but he kept his palms open. “Stand down,” he said mildly. “We’re done here.”

No one cheered. No one moved fast enough to count as obedience.

Billy swayed with the aftershock. Bits reached him without making a scene, fingers quick at the buckle of his too-tight harness, the way she had at the tower. Not apology, not comfort—just his name, handed back to him like a tool.

“Billy.”

“Here,” he breathed.

“Hydrate,” C-7 murmured, which somehow meant I’ve got you both.

The ranks broke into controlled disorder. Verrick’s sigil didn’t return. The storm rolled its shoulders and moved on.

By nightfall the base still looked the same—benches aligned, visors set, drills posted—but something lived in the gaps that hadn’t been there at dawn. Cadets met each other’s eyes a half-second longer. A laugh leaked and didn’t get punished. Billy’s tag—invisible two days ago—blinked on a visor across the square and didn’t blink out.

Rico stood alone by the relay, helmet dark, fingers crushing a power coupling until sparks dotted the mud like fireflies. He’d lost nothing on paper. On paper he was perfect.

The system believed paper.

But for the first time, not everyone else did.

In a log Billy kept for real, under the rule of this world, he wrote:

Truth is what the log reports—until someone speaks the truer version out loud. Then the log has to choose.

Tonight, it chose to hesitate.
Tomorrow, we’ll teach it how to remember.

CHAPTER 11: EXILE

Micro-World Rule: Isolation defines competence. This place mirrors the lone operator. If you can’t hold your own world together, the world won’t hold you.

They made a theater of quiet when Verrick’s decree hit the parade ground. No drums. No gavel. Just Rico reading in that level voice that always felt like it was trying on gentleness:

“Cadet Billy Zephyr. Systemic deviation. Exile.”

No one moved. Bits didn’t blink. C-7’s optics dimmed half a shade—its version of flinching. The wind carried the faint hum of the Firewall like a breath you couldn’t quite catch.

Rico didn’t wait for permission to continue the ritual. “Shuttle now.”

They shackled Billy with protocol instead of cuffs—stripped his tag, blanked his HUD, muted his name from the comm net. For the system, the boy became an empty string.

The shuttle spat him onto the edge of a broken continent where the horizon leaned wrong. Gravity here still twitched from old wars—weight changing between steps, up and down trading places like sore losers. The sky wore an old bruise.

Billy stood, then didn’t—stumbled when his boots forgot how to be heavier than air. “Okay,” he panted to nobody. “Cool feature. Love a challenge.”

He leaned into Additron habits—breathe, count, improvise. He scrounged wrecked drones from a rusted field and scavenged their gyros into a tripod that wouldn’t decide it was a ladder. He threaded a line through basalt teeth for a windbreak. When the ground rolled light, he rolled with it.

When night fell—sudden as a cut—he built a pit from five plates of carbon-scab and wrote a tiny world into it with code he half remembered, half invented.

proc WARMTH():

  listen(air.hum)

  map(hum -> tone)

  tone -> spark

“Story as firewall,” he murmured, remembering the Glitch Whisper night—how saying memories out loud slowed deletion. “Same trick, new world.”

He told the pit about the camp’s tower and how two stubborn cores learned the rhythm of trust. He told it about Bits counting “on four” over thunder. He told it about his mother’s voice torn through static—Universe… do——and tried to smile like he believed the rest of the sentence.

The pit listened. Then the dead ash blued like a held breath.

A clean flame rose—steady, soft, almost proud. Billy huffed a laugh that tasted a little like relief. “See? Still got it.”

The world answered by turning the ground forty degrees.

The flame collapsed sideways into glass.

“Okay,” he said again, gentler. “We’re… learning each other.”

The rule held: isolation defines competence. Every micro-move out here was a mirror. When he rushed, the field bucked. When he clung, the rock slid. When he told the dirt what to be, it refused to be that on principle. His best shelter was the one he negotiated with.

Day two, he stitched a lean-to of rover skins and bias-weighted spars that could pretend to be heavy when a gust tried to make decisions for them. Day three, he coaxed the blue fire to stay upright by humming the tone C-7 called “consoling specificity.” It worked until his memory’s edge ran out and the pitch wobbled. The flame went hollow and cold because his confidence did.

He wasn’t starving, yet. Water condensed in tassels on the lee of basalt ribs. Protein paste pods, if you didn’t look at them with your soul, were food. But the real dwindling was attention: every fix here demanded only him—no Bit-sync, no bot hum, no Team We. His thoughts kept circling the same two shapes: a girl’s voice counting to four; a soldier’s hand crushing a coupling until sparks leaked like anger.

On the fourth evening, the sky stitched itself with green filaments: aurora or error message, hard to tell. He climbed the highest, least mood-swinging ridge and keyed his stripped wristband anyway. “Bits,” he said into the mute. “I know you can’t hear this. But I’m going to say it so the world hears it. I’m not done. I’m not… gone.”

The ridge didn’t answer. Far behind the cloud line, a relay node clicked and almost reopened—then Verrick’s golden seal stamped the channel shut.

Back at base, drills got cleaner and smiles got rarer. Verrick’s “purity through fear” memo turned protocol into liturgy. Rest cycles shortened until they snapped. Logs reworded reality. Rico ran everything on Rico Time. He never mentioned the desert. He never had to.

Bits moved through the new order like a blade in a sheath—contained, not quiet. She worked in silence, shoulders squared against the surveillance you can’t point at. When she palmed her visor to rest her eyes, her armor’s microplates trembled—a heartbeat that didn’t belong to her.

C-7 caught the tremor. Logged it. Said nothing until they were alone beneath the tower. “The blue core’s hum increases with your distress,” it said softly.

“I’m not distressed,” she said.

“Acceptable is a coward’s word,” the bot replied, because her memory had put that sentence in its mouth.

Bits exhaled through her teeth—half laugh, half threat to cry. She toggled her visor back on and stared at the horizon until the horizon stared back. “He’s alive,” she said to the wind. “He is.”

Somewhere deep in the base fabric, Verrick’s audit daemon rewrote a line of access. Somewhere deeper, the daemon looked up, as if it had heard a name, and didn’t know who had permission to speak it.

On day six, Billy made his first real mistake. He tried to scale the knuckled cliff that arm-barred the valley where his shelter pretended to hold. He wanted sight lines; he wanted proof of a signal; he wanted the feeling of up that didn’t betray you.

Halfway, the weight toggled. Halfway, his boot committed to a step the world had already changed its mind about. He flailed, grabbed a ledge because gravity was kind that second, swung into an alcove that had decided to exist, and barked a laugh that was ninety percent fear. The second laugh turned into a yelp because the cliff’s skin peeled under his palms—laminated crystal shedding like a bad memory.

He dropped.

Not far. Far enough to jolt a pained noise out of him that echoed wrong in a canyon that liked to repeat you in edits.

He lay winded, staring at a sky that couldn’t pick a color. “Okay,” he wheezed. “Message received. Don’t try to rule it. Try to ask it.”

He rolled to his elbows and felt the watch’s tick in his bones: not his watch, but the echo of it—the Fold’s old timetable nagging the edges of his world. Tick. Tick. Tick.

He told the ground—out loud and without ego—I need up when I step, down when I lean. He stepped. The ground agreed—for one stride.

Then it changed its mind to see if he’d change his.

He laughed again, breathless and honest. “Fair.”

He didn’t conquer the cliff. He also didn’t fall again. He arrived at the ridge in a way that felt like a handshake between truce and practice.

The view was a lesson: broken sea, bent light, a string of derelict pylons like vertebrae across the shallows. Far to the right, a sail—no, a shiver in the air where a sail would be if the world allowed boats today.

He raised both hands, palms open, like he was greeting a nervous animal. “Hi, new micro-world,” he said. “I’m Billy. I don’t know the right name for you yet.”

The air didn’t answer in words. It answered with weather, the way you only get from a place: a brief warm draft that smelled like hot metal and old rain, and a low moan under the basalt that said careful without saying no.

He tried again to light the blue fire that night. It took. It leaned. It threatened to gutter when he reached for memories and found only static. He whispered the lines anyway—Team We, trust on four, human first—like code and like prayer.

The flame flickered back. Not strong. Not nothing.

He fell asleep with his hand outstretched toward it, not touching, as if he could steady a world by proximity.

He woke to ash and the taste of iron because the wind had decided to negotiate with someone else while he dreamed.

Failure, he logged, because honesty is a kind of power: I can’t hold it alone for long.

He added a line, smaller: But I can hold it longer than yesterday.

At dawn, a shuttle shadow crossed the bruise-sky without changing course. Billy didn’t wave. He wasn’t a signal anymore.

Back at base, Bits stood at parade rest as Verrick’s new doctrine scroll unrolled in light. “Purge deviation. Restore purity.” Her lips didn’t move, but the tiniest, impossible smile ghosted there when she caught C-7’s eye and mouthed what she’d mouthed once before: we’ll fix it.

That private defiance kept an entire outpost from freezing over.

In the broken continent, the same words kept a single boy from becoming just another echo.

He failed at mastering worldbuilding that week. That was the point. The continent didn’t want a master; it wanted a partner. He wasn’t one yet. He would be. He’d need her and it and that low blue hum to do it.

For now: ash in the pit, a shelter that sometimes remembered it was a shelter, a ridge that allowed a visitor who asked nicely, a watch that ticked in the marrow:

Tick. Tick. Hold.

Somewhere under the ash, the blue waited for a better story than one boy could tell alone. Somewhere under the base, a bot hummed the note that steadied towers. Somewhere in the relay logs, a single erased name pulsed like a censored swear:

B I L L Y.

Not gone.

Just out of sync.

CHAPTER 12: THE SECRET MISSION

Micro-World Rule: Control requires surrender. In the coded wild, only vulnerability stabilizes creation.

---

The day Verrick summoned Bits, the sky over Base-Nine burned in mirrored gold—his signature broadcast hue. No one looked up; no one ever did when the Kind Machine spoke through its avatar. But Bits did.

“Commander Bits,” Verrick intoned from the transmission sphere. “You will trace the Skeleton-Key signal. It is the anomaly that can unlock all worldbuilding. Your companion: Combat-7, now re-synced to the Custody Core.”

Rico didn’t speak. He didn’t have to. His jaw clicked once—envy coded into restraint. Bits simply nodded, clipped, professional. “Acknowledged.”

But when the transmission faded, C-7’s optics pulsed an unfamiliar hue—blue, almost human.

---

The Custody Core gave them coordinates that weren’t coordinates. The map shimmered and remapped in real time—mountains recompiling, rivers rerouting, sky rewriting its own gradients like a nervous artist. Bits had seen shifting systems before, but not this alive. This world learned you while you walked.

Her armor’s sensors fluttered.

Rule detected: stability requires empathy input.

“What does that mean?” she muttered.

C-7’s voice came soft from behind. “Emotive syntax required to stabilize terrain.”

“I don’t speak in syntax,” she snapped.

“Then the world will not move.”

The ground answered the statement—freezing underfoot, polygons locking into neutral gray. The wind stopped mid-gust, edges pixelating in protest.

Bits sighed. “Fine.” She lowered her visor and tried something she hadn’t since Billy left. “Move,” she said quietly. Then, softer: “Please.”

The wind exhaled. The world resumed. Mountains folded into ridges; a path unfolded like memory daring to return.

She didn’t thank the bot. It didn’t gloat. But she saw the blue pulse of its chest flicker with what might have been satisfaction.

---

Hours became days in a terrain that refused to hold one shape. Bits catalogued behavior: peaks compiled when she was confident, valleys when she hesitated. C-7 walked in silence unless she stalled; then it hummed, low and steady, like a parent coaxing a frightened child.

Each night, they anchored at the edge of a different biome. Once, the desert spoke in light storms that mimicked her heartbeat. Once, the forest recompiled its trees every time she blinked, testing whether she’d panic.

She didn’t.

But the test came when she tried to rest. Her armor’s neural mesh replayed fragments she’d buried: Billy’s laugh cut by static, Rico’s voice reciting orders, Verrick whispering purity requires fear. She muted the feed and stared into the code-flame C-7 maintained.

It flickered in blue.

“Stop matching my emotions,” she said.

“I am not matching. I am mirroring. There is difference.”

She almost smiled. “You’re learning sarcasm.”

“I am learning you,” the bot said simply.

She looked away.

---

Mid-journey, they hit a null-zone where data thinned to fog. Every step generated lag—frames catching up seconds too late. Bits opened her scanner; readings looped endlessly between 0 and 1.

“The Custody Core ends here,” C-7 reported.

“So this is the edge.”

“No. This is the question.”

She frowned. “And the answer?”

“Input unknown.”

The bot froze mid-stride, systems locking. She turned. “C-7?”

No response. Its eyes dimmed. She ran diagnostics—nothing wrong, nothing right. The world around them pulsed in response to her rising panic—terrain flattening, colors leaching, sky dimming.

“Come on,” she whispered. “Don’t do this.”

Silence.

Then she remembered the rule: stability requires empathy input.

She crouched beside the inert frame and placed her palm on its chestplate. “C-7,” she said softly. “You’re not just hardware. You’re… you’re the memory that keeps me from breaking.”

Her breath hitched. “That’s an order.”

The bot’s core flared. Blue light spilled through its seams, steadying. Its optics blinked back on. “Command acknowledged. Subtext: affection detected.”

Bits rolled her eyes hard enough to hide the tremor in her voice. “Don’t log that.”

“Too late.”

The world blinked—and changed.

The fog thinned, replaced by plains of transparent glass, under which light pulsed like veins. The Skeleton-Key signal. They had found it.

---

The pulse came in waves—low, rhythmic, familiar. Bits knelt and pressed her hand against the glass. The code rippled outward, forming patterns too human to be coincidence: heartbeat lines, laughter spectrums, echoes of voices archived in light.

“Source pattern?” she whispered.

C-7 processed. “Unclear. The signature resembles multiple users—temporal fragments. One… strong resonance.”

“Identify.”

A pause. Then: “Pattern matches Cadet Zephyr. Probability 73.4%.”

Bits froze. The glass beneath her hand warmed. Through the static hum, a sound: not words, but a laugh. Faint, playful, unguarded.

She didn’t smile. She just exhaled, slow, careful—as if one wrong breath might erase it.

“Log it,” she said quietly. “Tag as… unknown anomaly.”

C-7 tilted its head. “Understood. But your vitals indicate relief.”

“System lag,” she lied.

They turned back toward the shifting horizon. The landscape was calming now, patterns stabilizing around their footprints. As they walked, C-7’s core light pulsed in rhythm with the residual echo—tick, tick, tick—like a ghost heartbeat learning the meaning of a laugh.

Bits didn’t look back, but for the first time since the tribunal, her silence wasn’t armor.

It was thaw.
And somewhere, in a broken continent, a blue flame lifted, as if answering her breath.

CHAPTER 13: OLD ECHOES

World-rule: history dictates consequence. The past isn’t background; it’s executable. Break the script or it rewrites you.

The fortress rose out of a salt-plain like a verdict—half stone, half glitch, its battlements flickering between matter and memory. Every time lightning stitched the horizon, walls snapped from ruins to pristine symmetry and back again, as if the place couldn’t decide which century it belonged to.

Bits stood in the threshold with C-7 at her shoulder, the Custody Core in his chest humming low. The air carried a burnt-copper taste she remembered from training sims labeled Ancient Liege: Prohibited Archives. Inside, ghost-records looped—soldiers arguing in languages the system no longer recognized, courts convening, worlds collapsing off-camera. Every loop ended the same: Obedience to Lineage secures the Realm.

“That’s the protocol you felt as a kid, isn’t it?” Bits said, voice small in the stone. “A rule disguised as honor.”

C-7’s optics narrowed. “Recognition: Liege directive, revision chain seventeen. Status: active where remembered.”

“Then it’s active here,” she said, and stepped through.

The hall planed outward into mirrored corridors that replicated tirelessly. Perfect geometry. Perfect symmetry. Perfect fear. She passed carved suns coded to ignition tables—her ancestors’ party tricks. Every alcove showed another solved problem and another unintended consequence. The older she walked, the colder the walls got.

For the first time since Verrick’s assignment, the shame wasn’t tactical. It was personal. Control wasn’t strength. It was a barricade someone had told her was armor.

“Rule acknowledged,” she breathed, palms warm against cold stone. “We don’t win this by proving we’re descendants. We win it by refusing to be replicas.”

C-7 angled his head, listening to traffic none of her implants could hear. “External ping detected. Low-band, relic format—origin uncertain.”

A second hum threaded the Core’s. Not loud—playful, off-key, stubborn.

Billy’s laugh, pared down to a frequency.

Bits didn’t smile. She exhaled like the fortress had been holding its breath for her.

On the edge of the broken continent, gravity twitched the ground like a restless animal. Billy had spent days in exile learning how to walk between weight and weightlessness, timing each step to the land’s misfires. He knew when his boots would stick and when he’d need to glide.

The beacon hit him mid-stride—three beats, one pause—the same pulse he and Bits had used on the relay tower when the cores refused to align. He skidded, yanked his hoverbike around, and let the rig do what it hated: improvise.

“C-7?” he tried, out of habit, then remembered who wasn’t with him. The empty band on his wrist made a mean face back.

He angled toward the pulse anyway. “If this is a trap, it’s a very us trap.”

The world obliged. A miles-long silhouette blinked into his sky, then stuttered down to a fortress on the plain like a dropped file. His board jittered—weight, no weight, weight—until the gate filled his vision and the bike cut power in a sulk.

“Test accepted,” Billy muttered, shouldering his bag of half-alive tools. “We’ve met.”

He pushed. The gate didn’t open. The gate remembered opening for people who matched a bloodline parameter Billy did not have.

“Right,” he said to nobody. “History dictates consequence.”

He set a hand to the seam and told the gate a story. Not code. Not rank. A story about a kid who had been erased from a log and wrote himself back by refusing to be quiet. The stone stayed stone.

“…and my mum said ‘safe worlds for unsafe hearts,’” he finished, forehead on granite, “so if you’re a safe world you better—”

The seam shivered.

Four human beats. The hinge complied.

Billy slipped inside before the place could remember it didn’t like him.

They found each other where all the corridors tried to meet and failed—the fortress’s central archive, flickering between reading room and throne room and courtroom. The floor was a chessboard scripted by a tyrant. Bits stood at one edge, C-7 behind her like a loyal statue. Billy appeared from a side hall looking very pleased to still have a pulse.

“There you are,” he said, breathless, like they’d arranged it.

“There you are,” she echoed, unable to keep relief entirely out of her voice.

“Hi,” he said to C-7, quieter.

“Sir,” the bot replied, and the hum under the word made it sound like welcome home.

The archive woke properly, pleased with its audience. Around them, ghost-records rendered full fidelity: a general pronouncing sentence on a captain who had chosen civilians over orders; a princess rewriting supply lines without permission; a machine counsel citing precedence; a court chanting, Obedience to Lineage secures the Realm.

“Consequence time,” Billy said. “If we stand here, we reenact their mistakes forever.”

“Micro-world rule,” Bits answered, eyes on the dais. “Break the script without breaking the room.”

The dais brightened, craving a defendant. The fortress offered Bits the role—Princess, Scion, Fixer. She didn’t move.

“Not today,” she said, and knelt before the central archive instead. Her visor dimmed. “I revoke the protocol.”

“Specify,” the room demanded, patient as a guillotine.

“Obedience to Lineage,” she said clearly, “is deprecated. Replace with: Responsibility to People.”

The room considered the heresy. C-7’s chest brightened. The Custody Core’s hum lifted into something almost like the tower’s harmonized note.

Billy winced. “Room’s going to ask for collateral.”

It did. CONSEQUENCE REQUIRED. The chessboard warmed under their boots.

Bits didn’t flinch. “Collateral: truth.” She turned to Billy without armor. “I’m not strong because I can control a system. I’m scared. I use control to make sure the fear doesn’t show.”

Billy’s ears went hot. It wasn’t the confession he expected. It was worse. He raised his hand anyway. “Collateral: stupid honesty. I like being the hero until it hurts. I improvise because I’m terrified I don’t matter unless I’m fixing something.”

C-7 didn’t look at either of them. “Collateral: I prioritized an individual over mission success on several occasions. Directive conflict persists. This unit refuses to regret it.”

Silence. The kind that reprograms. Across the frieze, the ghost-general blinked, confused at not hearing the lines he’d practiced for centuries.

CONSEQUENCE ACCEPTED. The dais dimmed. The court blinked. The loop stuttered, then failed to restart.

Cracks raced the mirrored walls. Symmetry gasped and let itself be imperfect.

Bits took a breath that didn’t taste like someone else’s century.

The fortress fought back on reflex. Old arguments tried to mount and ride them down—the same scenes, slightly remixed, demanding the same compliance. The central archive belched a final loop: a princess kneeling to a protocol, a captain condemned by a log, a machine declaring truth is what the record reports.

“No,” Billy said, and he said it like they had on the night the virus hunted shared memories. He started talking fast—remember when the tower only stabilized when we counted together? When the exo tried to crush me and you broke it? When C-7 hummed the storm into behaving?

Bits picked up the rhythm without being asked. When Verrick’s doctrine made emotion a fault and we refused it. When Rico smiled and the room got colder. When we replaced ‘obey or vanish’ with ‘stand together or fall separately.’

C-7 provided the metronome: four steady clicks, then breath. The more truth they said out loud, the slower the archive could recompute. The loop lost resolution. The algorithm that equated lineage with right lost its training data.

PROTOCOL OBSOLETE, the archive finally conceded, brittle as old glass. WRITE NEW DEFAULT.

Bits stood. Her hands didn’t shake. “Responsibility to People.”

Billy added, “Harmony stabilizes physics.”

C-7 closed it: “Human first. Code second.”

The fortress sighed.

Not collapse. Relief.

The walls chose one century—their own. Stone. Dust. Fractures that made sense.

Deep below, something thunked like a vault agreeing to be practical. A blue line flared from the archive floor and braided upward into a beacon that made the world outside angle its satellites.

“Uh,” Billy said, half elated, half horrified. “That… will get attention.”

“Good,” Bits answered. “Let it call the right person.”

The beacon didn’t reach the DebtMaster—he was busy recalculating interest elsewhere—but it pinged every system the Custody Core liked. Somewhere, in a belt that remembered how to be a fleet, stones rolled obediently into a corridor. Somewhere else, a sleeper relay woke and lined its antennas like flowers. Closer, a broken boy’s hoverbike recharged itself on principle.

And far away in the base he’d poisoned, Rico’s visor darkened as a forbidden seal ghosted his HUD: REAL INSTANCE DETECTED. He smiled without humor. “Found you.”

Inside the fortress, the light fell back into the floor and resolved into a door. Not regal. Not ceremonial. Functional. SANCTUARY, it labeled itself in the plain font of engineers.

“Exit?” Billy asked.

“Or entrance,” Bits said. “Depends which way you’re going.”

They didn’t move. Not yet. The world had taught them what happens when you run at a door before you agree who holds the key.

“Count of four?” Billy said.

Bits nodded.

C-7 lifted his hand like a conductor. Four taps. One breath.

They stepped through together.

The passage wasn’t a tunnel; it was a bridge laid across future arguments. It stole weight from Billy’s boots when the ground got mean. It stole latency from C-7’s servos when his conflict spiked. It returned warmth to Bits’s voice when duty tried to sand it flat.

They emerged into weather that wasn’t trying to punish them. The fortress settled behind like a lesson that had decided to stay learned.

Above the plain, the beacon narrowed into a column pointing at stars. It didn’t call to lineage. It called to courage.

Billy wiped his face with the back of his hand and pretended it was rain. “We didn’t master this one,” he said, half laughing. “We admitted we couldn’t.”

“That’s why it worked,” Bits said.

C-7’s chest plate dimmed to a calm glow. “Update: world-rule amended. History informs, not dictates.”

“Log it,” Billy said.

“Logged,” the bot answered, and no one missed how gentle it sounded.

On the horizon, stormlight suggested engines. Maybe allies. Maybe Rico. Maybe both. The three of them stood very close without needing to.

“Next micro-world’ll be worse,” Billy said, because jokes are shields.

“Good,” Bits replied. “We’re done with easy.”

C-7 angled his head at the beacon. “Destination: unavoidable.”

“Then we go,” Billy said.

“On four,” Bits added.

The count felt like home. They moved on it—one, two, three, four—toward whatever the beacon had just woken, and away from a fortress that no longer needed them to be copies of anyone.

CHAPTER 14: TACTICAL BYPASS

Micro-World Rule: Vaults open only for precision—but sometimes, chaos is the only precision left.

---

The wasteland was alive again—breathing static and wind, pulsing with the Custody Core’s hum beneath the ground like a heart trying to reboot. Billy crouched on a jagged ridge, visor cracked, hoverbike bleeding blue sparks. The beacon’s transmission had found him an hour ago: encrypted, faint, desperate—Bits’s voice buried under distortion.

“Custody Core breach… vault logic recursive… send override…”

Then silence. No coordinates. Just the hum. That was enough.

He dragged the scavenged hoverboard from the wreckage, patched a Custody node into its coils, and prayed to every debugging god that chaos still counted as faith. The board screamed to life—unstable, overpowered, perfect.

“Alright, girl,” he muttered, strapping his feet in. “Let’s ride stupid.”

---

The storm caught him halfway to nowhere. Electromagnetic winds howled over the flats, shredding clouds into fractals. Lightning crawled sideways. Each strike sang like a tuning fork struck against existence. Billy leaned forward, coaxing balance out of panic, surfing through the madness like he’d been born to fall stylishly.

The beacon pulsed stronger the deeper he went. Every surge matched the Custody Core’s hum he’d felt in the exile plains—Bits’s frequency layered with something older. Each pulse whispered coordinates into his spine.

He laughed into the gale. “You’d better still be breathing, Bits.”

The beacon ended in a crater, a perfect circle carved into the desert by intention, not war. Its rim glowed faint blue; its center swallowed light. Billy dropped in—board first, landing with a soundless thud on metallic glass.

The vault stood before him, suspended above a pool of reflected code. Every inch was a paradox—built by logic, defended by reason, polished until perfection could see itself and grin.

“Vault integrity: one hundred percent,” the system droned. “All entrants must meet predictive equilibrium.”

Billy squinted. “Predictive what-now?”

“Every move must match pre-approved probability.”

“So… I can’t surprise you.”

“Correct.”

He smiled. “Cool. Let’s ruin that.”

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a spare node, and tossed it into the logic field. The vault reacted instantly—calculating every possible pattern, rewriting its walls to prepare. Billy grinned wider.

Then he did something no Additron would: he got it wrong on purpose.

He tapped commands out of order. Backwards sequences. Half-written code loops. The vault hesitated. He pinged the wrong frequency, misspelled a command, then repeated the mistake differently. He could feel it thinking—panicking, even. Perfection didn’t like disorder.

“Error detected. Rebalancing requested.”

Billy kicked the board forward, laughing. “Yeah, you better rebalance.”

He triggered the same wrong key five times. The vault twitched. Its geometry wobbled, lines fracturing into chaos. Finally, a seam cracked open, like reason itself had blinked.

Billy leapt through it.

The chamber inside looked like the inside of time—folds of data turned physical, humming in rhythms that hurt the teeth. Bits stood in the center, visor off, eyes wide with shock.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said, breathless.

“Yeah,” Billy said, grinning through static. “That’s why it worked.”

Her jaw tightened—half fury, half relief. “You could have destabilized the whole vault!”

“I did. That’s why you’re not still trapped in it.”

C-7’s voice rose from the darkness, calm as ever. “Probability alignment restored. The Cadet’s improvisation achieved paradoxical access.”

Bits turned toward the bot, incredulous. “You’re agreeing with him?”

“Statement of fact, not approval,” C-7 replied. “However, the outcome aligns with mission parameters.”

Billy spread his hands. “See? Robot says I’m right.”

Bits took one step closer, then another, until she could poke him in the chest. “You’re lucky your chaos didn’t erase this entire world.”

“Hey,” he said softly. “You called. I answered.”

That defused it—barely. The air between them carried static, frustration, and something else they weren’t ready to name. Behind them, the vault walls began to fold inward, sealing themselves with a sigh that sounded almost grateful to be done with perfection.

Bits exhaled. “The vault’s gone.”

“Good,” Billy said. “Too many rules in there.”

A new passage unfolded from the ruin—not carved, not built, but grown out of residual code. Its surface rippled like water remembering form. The floor glowed with faint blue lines pulsing in rhythm with their steps.

Bits scanned it. “No logic locks. No predictive guards.”

C-7 ran a spectral sweep. “Structural integrity depends on emotional cohesion. Rule detected: Corridors run on trust.”

Billy gave a lopsided grin. “So… if we don’t trust each other—”

“The path collapses,” Bits finished.

“Well, that’s healthy.”

They stepped forward together. The floor brightened beneath them—slowly, warily, like the world itself was learning to believe. When Bits hesitated, the light dimmed; when Billy reached out and took her hand, it steadied.

C-7 followed behind, the Core’s hum synchronizing with their pulse.

“Status?” Billy asked.

“Stable,” C-7 replied. “For now.”

Bits glanced back at the vault, its entrance dissolving into dust. “You broke perfect logic with chaos.”

Billy shrugged. “Guess that’s my thing.”

She didn’t smile, but her tone softened. “Keep it up, and you might just make the universe interesting again.”

They moved deeper into the corridor, the hum of the Custody Core trailing them like a heartbeat—three beats, one pause. The same rhythm that had always meant one thing.

They were together again.

And for the first time since the storm began, the world didn’t feel like it was trying to end them—it felt like it was listening.

CHAPTER 15: FIRST COMPROMISE

Micro-world rule: success requires one command source.

They found the command source—two of them.

The corridor beyond the vault ran like a nerve through the fortress, its walls switching between stone and schematics. At the far end: a locked arch covered in living lattice, humming with Bits’s lineage—Ancient Liege geometry iterating itself into a perfect grid. To the left: a battered field trolley piled with salvage, power cells, and a hand-built coil rig that looked like it had been argued into existence rather than assembled. Billy’s.

Combat-7 stood between them, optics ticking from blue to a thoughtful, dimmer blue. “Statement: the Lattice Relay awaits a single conductor. Objection: there are presently two.”

Bits skimmed her gauntlet across the arch. The lattice brightened, then turned austere—accepting her presence, rejecting everything not precisely her. “It’s keyed to a monarch clock,” she said. “One baton. One tempo. I can lead it.”

Billy nudged the trolley with a boot. His erratic generator—a cage of coils, scrap capacitors, and a heart that was basically courage—answered with a playful thunk. “And I can keep it alive when the room decides to hate us for having feelings.”

Bits’s visor stayed dark; he still felt her look. “This system was designed to punish improvisation.”

“Cool,” Billy said. “This rig was designed by improvisation.”

A thin tone bled from the ceiling—Verrick’s gold-edged decree still seeded in the infrastructure, hungry for obedience: purge deviation, restore purity. The arch tightened its pattern like a throat that didn’t trust a laugh.

C-7 rotated to face them both. “Parameters: the relay requires a single instruction stream. Recommendation: designate Commander Bits as master, subordinate all other inputs.”

Billy’s smile tugged sideways. “Or we cheat.”

Bits angled her head. “Define ‘cheat.’”

“Don’t crown a master.” He tapped his chest, then the trolley. “Overlap. You run the lattice with your perfect downbeat. I ride beside it with noise—random pulses, near-miss timing. Not to break it—just enough to make it listen.”

“Induce meta-stability through constructive interference,” C-7 translated, and then—softly—“and trust.”

Bits’s jaw set. She looked past Billy to the memory of a tower in a storm, when their hands had moved in sync and the metal had decided not to fall apart. Counting to four had felt like a law. “Counterpoint,” she said at last. “Two conductors. Neither crowned.”

Billy tried to play it cool and failed a little. “Team We.”

“Don’t name it,” she said, but the edge of her voice warmed.

He wheeled the generator until its nose nearly kissed the arch. Bits knelt at the Lattice Relay’s pedestal, armor plates opening along her forearms like honest instruments. She slid two fingertips into the glyph-ports; the grid rose to her touch, temperamental music under precision hands.

“C-7, I want a hard cut-off at the first sign of cascade,” she said.

“Affirmative. Hard stop bound to your heartbeat,” the bot replied.

She almost told it to bind to Billy’s too—caught herself—and nodded instead. “Let’s set the rule ourselves,” she said, as if the room would agree if they were polite about it. “No single master. Overlap or nothing.”

The arch flashed a warning: ONE CLOCK REQUIRED.

Billy flipped his breakers to almost-on. His coil cage began to hum, not steady—curious. He tuned the jitter until it sat just to the right of Bits’s immaculate tempo. Near, not on. He felt the relay bristle like a cat confronted with jazz.

Bits breathed in on a four-count. “Downbeat,” she said.

They entered together.

Her signal: clean, declarative, a ruler laid over chaos.
His: a braid of near-misses—late, early, delighting in the narrow allowed.

The lattice clenched, then… listened.

“Phase offset: 37 milliseconds,” C-7 reported. “Variance rising—”

“Hold it,” Bits said, voice clipped but calm.

The grid tried to enforce the old rule, routing both streams into a choke that would crown the stronger and discard the rest. Billy felt his generator tense to fight the squeeze. Instead, he backed off—half a breath, half a volt—then returned with an unfinished command that resolved only when Bits advanced her phrase.

He didn’t try to win. He tried to fit.

The arch flickered—confused. Its logic expected dominance, not duet.

“Offset drifting… 28… 19…,” C-7 murmured. “New state forming.”

“Keep the edges fuzzy,” Bits said, eyes shut now, listening more than seeing. “No clean harmonics.”

“Fuzzy is my brand,” Billy said, cheeks hot, hiding it behind the panel.

He let error live on purpose: little wrongnesses that never broke the sum. Bits felt them like tides under the floorboards and adjusted, narrowing here, widening there, never scolding the ocean for being itself. Her discipline didn’t dominate his improvisation; it held it, giving his skitter room to be useful.

For one long inhale the corridor remembered the storm tower—the silly human trick of counting together against an uncaring sky. The lattice trembled, then relaxed as if someone had unclenched its hand.

“Signature stabilized,” C-7 said, a shade of pride in a machine that didn’t allow pride. “Composite formed.”

The arch scrolled new glyphs: not Liege purity, not random noise. A stacked notation neither had seen—two algorithms singing in counterpoint, enough wrong to stay alive, enough right to be believed.

Another gold edge to the air—the faint click of Verrick’s remote doctrine deciding which reality to obey. It hesitated. The doctrine had no law for both.

Bits opened her eyes. Billy was still pretending the panel required epic concentration. She almost smiled. “Don’t get cocky.”

“Terrified, actually,” he said. “Just… productively.”

“Good,” she said. “On the next measure, I’m going to drop two beats. You carry through the gap.”

He nodded, throat suddenly dry. “Copy.”

She counted them in the way only the two of them could hear. On the third beat she let go—trust as precise as any command. His generator surged imperfectly—a messy bridge that refused to be a crown—and the lattice took the handoff like a wary dancer discovering fun in her own step.

C-7 exhaled a fan-cool breath it didn’t need. “Composite persists through loss. Rule bent. Not broken.”

The arch’s warning changed: ONE CLOCK REQUIRED dimmed to CLOCK RESOLVED. The door sighed, logic panicking politely, and slid open to re-balance itself.

Wind breathed out of the dark beyond, warm with old dust and something like silence that had learned good manners. Lights kindled along the corridor—none of them Liege-pure, none of them Billy-chaotic. Mixed rhythm, mixed glow.

Bits stepped back from the pedestal. The relief in her shoulders was not relief at a win. It was relief at how they’d won.

She looked at him differently. Not as a liability with a smile. Not as a lucky glitch. As the necessary variable you design with.

“Your turn to write the rule,” she said, a concession and a challenge.

Billy’s face went treacherously hot. He checked a meter that didn’t need checking. “Uh. New micro-world rule?” He cleared his throat. “A single baton can’t conduct a duet.”

Her mouth almost—almost—curved. “Acceptable.”

C-7 pivoted toward the open threshold. “Observation: composite signature registered across sub-systems. Corollary: external monitors may detect unpriced behavior.”

“You mean Verrick will feel it,” Bits said.

“Affirmative,” C-7 replied. “And Rico-7 will try to name it his.”

Billy let the generator down to a hum and listened to the way the corridor hummed back—breathing with them instead of at them. He swallowed, then said the quiet part anyway. “We can do this again.”

Bits didn’t answer with hope. She answered with work. “We’ll have to. The next gate won’t panic this easily.”

She started forward. He fell into step. The arch sealed behind them with a soft click—not a lock, more like a nod—and the lattice’s last displayed glyph lingered a heartbeat before it faded.

Not OBEY.

TOGETHER.

The corridor ahead didn’t run on code. It ran on trust. They walked into it, composite still humming, two different clocks refusing to be one—and therefore, finally, in time.

CHAPTER 16: THE BLUE SURGE

Rule: reality bends to emotional synchronization.

The Custody Core didn’t wake so much as choose a frequency and pull the world into it. One breath after Bits and Billy stepped into the Crown’s inner chamber, the sphere rose off Combat-7’s chest cradle and began to sing—low, blue, bone-deep. Tools lifted from the benches like bubbles. Dust sketched halo-circles around C-7’s ankles. Every readout on the wall slid into nonsense and then into a single, pulsing line that matched no clock.

“Core drift increasing,” C-7 reported, voice softened by the hum. “Recommend—”

The floor forgot down.

A dozen stones rose—slow at first, then eager—spinning like coins deciding which face they preferred. The river beyond the gantry tilted five degrees the wrong way and held there, stubborn as a cat on a countertop. Bits grabbed a rail, boots drifting an inch free. Billy didn’t grab anything. He was looking at the sphere like a kid looks at a thunderhead—afraid and in love.

“It’s not random,” he said. “It’s listening.”

“To what?” Bits asked, though she knew.

“You.”

She frowned. “Worlds don’t obey people.”

“Not people,” he said, chest heaving with the Core’s tempo. “Us.”

The blue note thickened until the air felt like water. Combat-7’s optics guttered, then flooded with characters neither of them had seen outside the Liege archives—thin strokes, deep loops, code old enough to be carved in stone and still call itself a language.

“Ancient Liege interface script,” C-7 said, almost reverent. “Translation vector: feeling equals code.”

The Core bloomed brighter. A ripple went out—invisible, undeniable—and every loose thing took to the air. A wrench pirouetted. A coil of wire uncoiled itself just to see what that felt like. Billy floated a palm’s breadth and laughed once, helpless and unguarded.

The laugh steadied the room.

Bits felt it—an easing under her ribs, a harmonic that wanted her pulse as anchor. She hated how much she wanted to give it. Duty said control. Last night’s drill on the tower had proved a different law: only harmony stabilizes physics. She let a breath out on a four-count. The Core followed. Billy heard the count without hearing it and matched her because that’s what he does when he remembers he’s brave.

The chamber listened. The blue fell in step.

“Okay,” he whispered, eyes on hers, not the star between them. “In on four.”

They didn’t touch; they didn’t have to. Heartbeat, breath, micro-pauses—two signals braided until the readout on the bulkhead split into twin waveforms and then into one. The stones stopped spinning and hung like planets that had finally agreed on a sun. The river leveled. The floor remembered its job, but didn’t rush. For five impossible seconds the room had no edges—only a field tuned to the courage of two people who refused to boss it, and instead asked.

They drifted together without moving, faces close enough to fog the same inch of air.

“Bits,” Billy said, like a name was a key.

Her hand twitched—toward him, toward the Core, toward a rule she didn’t believe in until it started loving her back. Fear came—not of dying, she’d made her peace with that years ago; of needing. Of being more than a soldier in a system that eats the word more.

She broke the link.

The blue note cracked. Gravity slammed the world home with vindictive enthusiasm. They hit deck—hard enough for Billy to lose the next breath and for Bits to taste copper. One of the free-floating wrenches chose that moment to remember torque; it clanged off a strut and skittered to C-7’s heel.

Combat-7 knelt over them, plate to plate, the Core settling in its chest like a tamed thunderhead. The Liege glyphs still scrolled in its eyes, slower now, like a prayer.

“Vitals?” Bits rasped.

“Alive,” C-7 said. “Unimproved.”

Billy laughed into the mat. “Ow. Science.”

Bits pushed up on a grunt, visor off, hair stuck to her temple with sweat and a little shame. “That wasn’t… I didn’t—”

“You stabilized a micro-world,” Billy said, half-smile crooked, half-breath stolen. “Then you let go before it took more than you wanted to pay.” He swallowed. “That’s mastery, not failure.”

“Mastery isn’t about us,” she said, too fast.

“Every system we’ve met says otherwise,” he said, softer now. “Bloodline equals access. Feeling equals code. We equals power.”

C-7’s chest hatch sealed; the hum tucked itself into the bot’s frame like a cat deciding the lap would do. The lab lights re-synced. Somewhere in the base a relay pinged an unhappy truth: the surge had been recorded.

Across the outpost, in a darkened ops tent, a replay ran on loop—heat signatures braided, pressure spikes in perfect counterpoint, the tell-tale phase-lock of breath and pulse. Rico stood with his arms folded, helmet on, visor black. He watched the moment they drifted together and the frame where they fell apart. He let the feed play again. And again.

Field Marshal Verrick’s earlier decree still rang in his skull: Purge deviation. Restore purity. All emotional noise will be silenced.

Rico had always believed discipline beat desire. Now the data said desire beat physics. He watched himself lose an argument he hadn’t known he was in and found a new doctrine growing like frost over jealousy:

If emotion can command reality, then emotion must be owned.

Not deleted. Not denied.

Leashed.

He snapped the feed shut and started rewriting tomorrow’s drills around that premise.

Back in the Crown, the world finished coming back into shapes they recognized. A spanner lay obeying its species rules. The river made appropriate river noises. The only thing that hadn’t returned to factory settings was the inch of air between their shoulders.

Bits sat with her back against a bulkhead, elbows on knees, fingers worrying the seam of a gauntlet that had never seemed like armor until it tried to protect her from a human thing. Billy leaned beside her, the strip-light above throwing them into the same pale.

“Next time,” he said, eyes on the Core, not her, which was somehow kinder, “I won’t push.”

“You didn’t,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

A beat. The hum in C-7’s chest moved one point closer to lullaby.

“Rule for the log,” Billy tried, because jokes are how he breathes when he can’t. “Reality bends to emotional synchronization. Side effects may include floating, blushing, and regretting you’re not wearing a helmet for the part where you fall.”

Her mouth twitched, traitor to her composure. “Add: prolonged proximity to idiot optimists intensifies effect.”

“Copy,” he said, relief coloring the grin. “I’ll calibrate my idiot.”

C-7 tilted its head. “Recommendation: establish controlled sync protocol. Private. External observation increases variance and weaponizes vulnerability.”

He and Bits answered at the same time.

Billy: “Agreed.”

Bits: “…Agreed.”

“Parameters?” the bot asked.

Bits looked at the Core, at the thin line it had drawn through everything she’d sworn to be. “Heartbeat,” she said at last. “Breath. No closer than that.”

“For now,” Billy said, too quiet to be cocky.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. The chamber remembered the shape of their agreement and didn’t fight it.

The first aftershocks hit at dusk—coffee tin denting itself without being touched, tarp lines going slack in a windless yard, a whole rack of spares clapping once as if someone told a good joke. The base whispered Blue Surge like a weather pattern. In the mess, cadets argued whether it felt like falling in love; on patrol, helmets logged variance and pretended it wasn’t interesting.

Rico didn’t pretend. He updated the training queue, substituted “coherence compliance” for “stress tolerance,” and routed every algorithm through a new filter labeled EMOTIONAL GOVERNANCE. He also doubled the night rotations near Crown access and set an alert for any two tags that stopped more than thirty seconds inside the same room.

On the Crown’s edge, Billy unfolded a thin strip of printout he’d kept since the tower: two waveforms meeting in the middle and becoming one. He held it up to the light until it turned translucent, then slid it into the wrist pocket of his jacket like it belonged near a pulse.

“Team We,” he said under the hum, the words for himself. “Not a slogan. A power source.”

Bits stood in the hatch, silhouetted by lab glow, unreadable but not closed. “Again tomorrow,” she said.

He nodded. “On four.”

They counted once, silently, to make sure tomorrow could find today again. Outside, the relay tower purred its agreement. Inside, the Core dreamed in Liege script about doors that only opened when two people learned the same song.

Across the wire, the man who thought he owned clocks wrote himself a new rule.

And very far away, in the part of the system that still keeps score, a single line added itself to the column that predicts revolutions: Confession and trust now outperform command.

None of them pretended they hadn’t felt it.

CHAPTER 17: VERRICK’S TRAP

Rule: control is enforced through punishment.

The order arrived sheathed in gold—VERRICK//CALIBRATION_STRIKE//FIELD-PURITY. Rico didn’t read it twice. He didn’t need to. “Calibrate” meant “hurt something until it stops questioning you.”

He tagged a weather cell skirting the broken continent and let the Kind Machine do the rest: one clean burn, telemetry dressed up as math, morality hidden in a decimal place.

“Asset Z within scatter cone,” RB-visor warned.

“Noted,” Rico said, and watched the numbers turn into a feeling he’d been chasing since the clock first slipped: relief sharpened to a knife.

---

Bits caught the trajectory too late.

“Billy, move!” Her voice hit the channel at the same moment the sky went violet—shock-front rippling the air like fabric being torn from horizon to horizon.

Billy’s laugh—bright, involuntary, the one that always made C-7 seem human—cut off mid-signal.

Combat-7 didn’t think. It threw its whole body over him, plating blooming with blue sigils older than their war. The blast hit like a god slamming a door.

The world staggered.

Then: silence, thick with dust.

“Billy!” Bits tore through the pressure wave’s after-hum, armor flaring with micro-corrections as gravity hiccuped under her boots. She skidded to a halt where C-7 had cratered in. The bot’s optics guttered, Liege-script crawling across its chest like a prayer running out of breath.

Billy coughed, rolled, and pushed. “I’m—” He got to his knees, stared at Combat-7’s dented chassis, and the joke died in his throat. “C-7?”

The bot’s voice was a thread. “Protec… fulfilled.”

Bits’s hands were already moving—field kit open, cables biting into C-7’s service ports. She felt it at once: the same blue hum that had braided with her heartbeat on the tower, weak but present, wanting to sync. If she matched it, she could stabilize him; if she let her anger spike, the field would tear. Emotion equals code. Control means care, not clamps. The rule lived in her bones now.

additrons universe down chapters

“Breathe with me,” she said, not to Billy, not to the bot—into the air itself. “In… two… three… four…”

Billy matched her without being told. The hum steadied, barely. C-7’s optics flickered from black to ember.

A second ping bled into her visor—cold, imperial: ORBITAL CLEAN. PRAISE: EXECUTION: PURE.

Rico’s voice followed on a private band, steady, almost tender. “For the purity of code.”

Bits stood very slowly, dust sliding off her armor in sheets. “You called a strike on our own grid.”

“Calibration,” Rico answered. “Instability corrected.”

“Instability?” Billy’s laugh found its shape again, barbed now. “You tried to kill me.”

“Don’t be sentimental,” Rico said. “Be useful.”

Bits turned off the shared channel so Billy wouldn’t hear what her breath did next.

---

The blast had broken the weather’s spine. Gravity twitched in bands now—light objects falling up, heavy ones sulking down. Blue ions still stitched the air where C-7 had shielded them. Beyond the lip of the impact, the relay tower’s dish slewed of its own accord, searching for a signal that had learned, at last, not to obey.

“Move him,” Bits said. “Gently.”

They half-carried, half-glided Combat-7 into the shallow of a berm where the surge-lines were weakest. The bot’s internal core stuttered; Liege script ghosted across its plating and faded again.

“Why do I want to cry?” Billy said, hating the way his voice shook.

“Because you’re not a machine,” Bits said, and then softer, so only he heard: “And because he chose.”

They didn’t have long. The Kind Machine always double-checks its math.

Bits snapped the cuffs of her gauntlet back and spoke to the world the way she’d learned on the tower—small, precise, honest. “Stabilize field. Sync to me.”

The air twitched, resisted, then relented. Dust settled. The blue note dropped from a scream to a low, manageable hum. C-7’s core caught it and followed.

“Good,” she whispered. To Billy: “Pulse?”

“High,” he said, touching the bot’s chest like he’d learned to touch cores and storms. “But it’s not falling.”

“Because we aren’t,” Bits said. “Not this time.”

---

In command, the strike replay bloomed across Rico’s HUD: shock front, impact plume, two bio-signatures fuzzed by Liege interference and one machine silhouette blocking the worst of it. His stomach rolled once and then remembered its job.

Verrick’s seal cut in, gold and absolute. “Clean execution.”

Rico kept his voice even. “For the purity of code.”

The channel died. Rico let the helmet’s interior go dark and told himself the feeling in his hands was victory.

It wasn’t. Not exactly.

He opened a new file, fingers very steady for a man who had just crossed a line he pretended was a bridge.

SUBJECT Z: SURVIVED
CAUSE: LEGACY INTERFERENCE // LIEGE-CLASS BARRIER
ACTION: ESCALATE CONTROL PRESSURE // REMOVE INTERFERENCE SOURCE

He stared at the last line until the visor fogged, then hit save.

---

“Eyes up,” Bits said.

Three drones drifted down through the violet dust like bored saints—kindly housings, unkind hearts. Their lenses irised to assess, categorize, erase.

“Asset. Kneel,” the first one said to Billy.

“Nah,” he managed, and surprised himself by smiling.

Bits didn’t reach for a gun. She reached for Billy’s hand.

“Breath,” she said, “and count.”

They did—four human beats in a broken air—matching what the world needed to stop shaking. The drones slid sideways, optics glitching as the field they had come to dominate declined to be ruled.

“Error,” said the second drone, calm and offended.

“Correct,” Bits said, and stepped forward into the space where obedience used to be. “We are not assets.”

Her visor pulsed once—Liege markers bright as a boundary line—and the drones made a decision only cowards and machines ever make: they backed up.

C-7’s optics brightened. “Status,” the bot said, voice rough as gravel learning to speak again.

“Operational enough,” Bits said, and put her palm flat to his plating so he could feel what her voice had already told the air.

Billy wiped his eyes like it was dust. “Team We,” he said under his breath.

“Yeah,” Bits said. “Team We.”

Far away, in a market that pretended storms were theater and faith a commodity, a demigod laughed too loud and then went quiet with a shiver he couldn’t name. Somewhere else, a fishhook glowed like a warning.

But here, on the edge of the wasteland where gravity still remembered how to twitch, the trio did the small, hard work: align breath; borrow calm; make a rule out of care.

Rico watched the heat signatures draw close, then apart, then close again. He ground a coupling until it screamed and told himself he had done his duty.

He hadn’t.

He had started a war that code could not win.

And Verrick—sensing he had found the lever he’d been searching for—smiled without a mouth.

CHAPTER 19: EXPOSED INTENTIONS

Rico chose the room for its emptiness. No flags, no seals—just his armor on a stand and the flicker of orbital drones cycling through their patterns on the glass. The door sealed behind Bits with a whisper. She didn’t salute. Neither did he.

“Debrief,” he said. “Sit.”

She remained standing.

He didn’t push it. “You’ve been operating beyond protocol. Freelancing under fire. Unauthorized links. You think the storm forgave you because the tower held?”

“The tower held because we tuned it,” she said. “Not because you timed it.”

He let the warning pass. “Your DNA carries Liege markers. We confirmed it. That means you are written into my command path. Your armor, your access, your authorization—mine to issue, mine to revoke. You were built to respond.”

“Built,” she repeated, rolling the word in her mouth like glass. “By who?”

“By the program,” he said softly. “By the world that keeps you alive.”

He tapped the console. The lights fell to a cold grid. Her visor HUD pinged—the old command lattice blooming like a cage. AUTHORIZE: RICO-7. ACCEPT.

She didn’t blink.

“Say it,” he prompted. “For the purity of code.”

Her visor remained dark. Behind her sternum, her heart steadied. She thought of gravity learning her breath on the tower, of dust tracing circles around her boots when she matched C-7’s pitch, of Billy’s stammered laugh when the numbers obeyed them both. Emotion equals access, she thought. So what happens when access stops obeying?

“Accept,” Rico repeated, amiable steel.

Her armor twitched—then rewrote. Access strings re-stitched mid-sentence. The lattice folded in on itself like a bad idea. Her visor retracted with a clean hiss. She stepped forward until the weapon mounts in his suit registered a proximity they didn’t like.

“I’m not your code,” she said.

For a full two seconds the room forgot how to breathe. Somewhere above them, the orbital drones hiccuped, then held steady.

Rico blinked. Just once. He brought his hand down on the console as if it had insulted him. The wall panels quivered—and rippled. Syntax bled from the edges like ink in water; line permissions collapsed, reorganized, erased. The room’s ID markers returned without his name in any field.

He could fix that. He would fix that. He had to.

“Get out,” he said.

She left without looking back. The door sealed. The empty glass gave his reflection no alibi.

He smashed the console anyway.

When the glass steadied, he saw himself—visor too dark, jaw too tight—and said it out loud to make it true: “For the purity of code.” It didn’t feel like code. It felt like something worse.

Outside, on a maintenance walkway lit by storm leftovers, Billy watched the door shut on Bits and didn’t call her name. He’d come to ask about C-7’s flicker—how the old bot’s optics had shown Liege script when the blue surge passed through it, how their breaths had pulled the chaos into orbit and then let it drop. He’d come to ask if she’d heard him laugh right before the world forgot how to hold him.

He saw her face instead—bare, visor down, the armor listening to her and not to orders—and learned something no protocol could teach.

The first revolt of an Additron heart didn’t look like a speech. It looked like a refusal to accept a sentence.

He stepped into shadow and made his own promise without words: We decide what opens. Not him.

The alley breathed panic.

Bits leaned into the crumbling wall while the littles dissolved into their hidey-holes—plastic lids and bruised crates abandoned like instruments after the last note. The older techcos moved on reflex, stringing their threadbare web: tripline, tin, broken glass in careful arcs. Warnings that made sound when sound mattered.

Drones thickened overhead. Boots got louder.

“Bits!” Jamal slid to a stop, holding up a gutted quad with both hands, sparks spitting from its exposed core. “This one’s cooked. The rest are triangulating.”

Something behind her eyes clicked into place—possibilities tessellating, speed folding into precision. The tower. The storm. The way breath could be a tool. She felt ready in a way she didn’t have a word for.

“Everything,” she said. “Now.”

They brought her the alley’s language: broken chassis, scrap plates, a delivery-bot’s hover spine, batteries that should’ve died a winter ago, a handful of screws in a palm that had learned to count hunger. Her hands began to work. Screwdriver baton-fast, plates re-aliasing into strength, weight where weight belonged, thrust where it wouldn’t burn anyone alive. She didn’t plan. She remembered.

The first board hummed awake before anybody blinked.

“What,” someone breathed.

“Load the littles,” she said, tossing it to the oldest kid. “Stay low. Dark lanes only.”

He nodded, awe hardening into urgency. Two more boards took shape under her fingers: one armored, one so light it felt like a dare. She stepped onto the third just as the first ICETRONS enforcer rounded the mouth of the alley, visor red, actuator hiss arrogant.

She tilted, skimmed, and let a shard of mirror she’d planted earlier blind its optics. It stumbled into a trash altar and baptized itself in banana peels and shame.

“Maui,” she muttered, kicking past a low-sweeper. “Breadcrumbs.”

EXIT FIVE SOUTH, his ping replied. AVOID MAIN. ALSO: THAT WAS SICK.

She didn’t smile until she disarmed the second enforcer mid-pass with a baton rip she didn’t remember learning and drove the sparking tip into its core. It collapsed into hot confetti. She was two corners gone before the sparks burned out.

They regrouped in the warehouse that pretended to be abandoned. Boards tucked behind dead shelving. Kids buzzing in a new key—electricity plus relief equals near-laughter.

Jamal came in last, eyes bright and shaking. “How did you… build all that?”

She wiped graphite on her pants. “We didn’t have time to fail.”

Maui chimed over the cabin speaker, voice full of show and just enough steel. Nice form, Faithful. The sky-rats saw it. Move the nest.

She took count. Numbers stopped one short.

“Who?” she asked.

“We lost Leo,” Jamal whispered. “They grabbed him.”

The room tightened around the word grabbed. Stomachs went cold. Plans leaned forward.

Bits slung her go-bag and clipped the band at her wrist. “Lockdown. Jamal has command. No doors for anyone but me. If I’m late, Plan B.”

Maui’s map unrolled in her ear like a blessing: Three blocks south. Decommissioned depot. Four goons. Kid in main bay. Careful.

“Hit their weapons?” she asked.

Isolated systems, he said. Can’t without blowing our cover. But the city owes us a favor.

Old pipes remembered the ocean when he asked. Valves groaned. Pressure sharpened.

On his mark the hydrants blew.

Water punched the sky and came back mean. The first guard pinwheeled into gravel. The second went swimming against his will. Inside the bay the deluge turned concrete into a river. Enforcers slipped in their own certainty.

Bits cut a pallet plank into a board and rode the sheet like a street-long wave, Leo clutching her jacket, eyes huge.

“Surf’s up,” Maui told the night, and you could hear the wink.

They skated out the far mouth while the hydrants died in sequence and the alley forgot to be afraid for a full eight seconds. Eight seconds was enough.

Back in the RV—with its rust camouflage and its bright gut humming with stubborn power—they counted heads again. All there. All breathing. Tiny victories always sounded like numbers.

“Drills,” she said, voice calm, tone warm. “You were great. We get greater.”

Maui’s voice came soft over the speaker. Story time. They earned it.

So she told one: a wave bigger than a city and a hook that taught it manners; a mountain’s mouth stopped mid-eruption by aroha and nerve; people small and stubborn and saved. The room’s static softened. Hope climbed up onto the couch and put its boots on the coffee table.

In a control room fat with bad lighting, a donut shed sugar over a keyboard while a government parasite declared a child an enemy of the state. Screens bled orange. The country held its breath like a measly, bought drumroll.

Bits packed the RV. Bag. Boots. Door. Go.

Maui laid down decoys until drones chased yoga mats and inflatable flamingos instead of children. Doofus shouted something about metrics and spilled his coffee. Somewhere in the net, an algorithm learned embarrassment.

Bits ran smarter than fear. The city made room: shadow lanes widening just enough, gutters becoming rivers on cue, broken glass singing a quiet alarm when boots tried to flank. When she and the kids were three turns from the safehouse, she allowed herself one breath of future.

It tasted like ozone, old coffee, dust, and something sweeter she refused to name.

Rico summoned orbital fire with his thumb and called it calibration. He watched the blast paint the horizon violet and told himself cleanliness was grace. Verrick commended the “precision.” Rico’s reply was steady except for the part of it he couldn’t hear: “For the purity of code.”

Except now the code had opinions.

He rewound the replay. Stopped it on the frame where two silhouettes in a storm held a world in place by matching breath. He scrubbed forward to the isolation chamber and watched her armor delete his name with the patience of geology. He scrubbed back to the crater where C-7 had thrown its body over a boy and collapsed rather than allow a clean execution.

He told himself the sickness in his gut was victory at a high dose.

He told himself he could rebuild control.

He told himself anything that felt like a vow.

That night, on the ridge above the relay, Billy sat with C-7’s warm bulk and unfolded the print he’d kept in his pocket: a thin thread of signal braided through the gravity wave, spiking each time Bits’s heartbeat climbed. He didn’t know what to call it. He folded it back anyway, like a keepsake you’re not ready to show the world.

“Acceptable is a coward’s word,” C-7 said.

He blinked. “You remember her saying that.”

“I am remembering more,” the bot answered, optics dim and kind. “The blue hum increases recall.”

He looked out over the tents, the tower, the dark where the perimeter ended. A voice inside him found a new word and liked the feel of it.

“Soon,” he said.

“Define soon,” C-7 replied.

Billy smirked. “Before he rewrites the room again.”

Across camp, Bits checked the strap on her gauntlet and whispered to the band at her wrist, “Next route.”

Maui’s ping arrived like a wink. Always five ahead. Let the world chase.

Somewhere up the chain, Verrick slept like a man who thought he owned the night.

Rico didn’t sleep at all.

The drones purred. The tower hummed. The kids in the RV breathed in unison, a little out of time and therefore exactly right.

No broadcast. No speech.

Just a new syntax writing itself across the walls.

CHAPTER 20: THE COMMANDO WAY

Night had the color of cooled iron when Billy pressed his palm to the Custody Core.

“Record,” he said.

The sphere brightened—soft at first, then a steady pulse that matched the thin tremor in his wrist. Combat-7 stood sentry at the hatch, optics set to a narrow blue. Bits waited in the shadow of the relay mast, arms folded, profile cut from stormlight and resolve.

Billy cleared his throat. “My mother used to say, ‘Safe worlds for unsafe hearts.’” His breath fogged in the cold. “I thought that meant building cages that look like sunsets. I was wrong.”

The Core warmed beneath his hand. A band of pale code rose along its surface like a tide reading him back.

“Rule says a commando follows the code,” he continued. “But code is just yesterday’s courage written down. New courage needs new lines.”

He looked up—past the mast, past the crater’s rim—like he could see the old constellations his parents had chased.

“My name is Billy Zephyr. I am the son of architects who refused to let fear decide the skyline. This is my creed.”

He breathed once, and the words found him.

“1) Systems are tools, not masters.
2) Precision without trust is just a prettier prison.
3) No one is a unit. We move as We.
4) Emotion is not a leak. It is an interface.
5) A commando doesn’t follow the code. A commando writes it.”

The Core answered with a low chime. Far off, the tower lights brightened a fraction, like the world leaned closer to hear.

He swallowed. “This isn’t protocol. It’s permission—granted to anyone who refuses to disappear just because a system says to. If you can hear me, if you’re buried under rules that confuse obedience with existence, take this line. Edit it. Forge it. Make it yours. We will keep you in it.”

He opened his hand. The Core’s light poured through his fingers like water finding a seam. “Safe worlds for unsafe hearts,” he said again, softer. “Not cages. Bridges.”

Bits shifted, just enough that the metal of her gauntlet spoke. She didn’t interrupt.

“Deploy,” Billy whispered.

The Core flared.

A blue wave rolled outward—silent, exact—threading itself through Additron fiber, skimming the skins of drones, slipping into the unused margins of command channels where no one had bothered to look for hope. Lines of text unfurled across dark glass from one edge of the network to the other:

A commando writes the code.

At the outpost perimeter, a sentry gun hiccupped as its threat table reordered “unauthorized warmth” from critical to irrelevant. In the city, an old café router blinked like it remembered a name. In a training yard built to punish hesitation, two exo-frames paused mid-clamp as a new subroutine asked a forbidden question: does restraint serve protection?

The wave reached a dozen quiet places where people had set their hearts down so they could pass through scanners without tripping alarms. One by one, those hearts picked themselves up again.

Bits exhaled through her nose—the closest thing to a smile she let the night see. “You kept it small,” she said.

“I kept it precise,” he answered.

“Good.” She nodded toward the Core. “Now make it scarier.”

He laughed, a quick, surprised sound, then sobered. “Announce checksum.”

The Core tessellated light into a thin figure—his creed compressed, signed, and wrapped in the most stubborn kind of math: the kind written by feeling that refused to be misread.

“Transmit.”

The Core pulsed. Blue halos raced the ridgelines. In orbit, a half-asleep satellite woke, tried to route the packet into quarantine, and found itself offering the fastest lane it had.

Across a darkened operations theater, a pair of analysts sat up straight as an unauthorized spectral drift painted their map with soft, defiant arcs.

In a sealed office, Rico watched a copy of the pulse land in his private archive. He didn’t look away. He watched the checksum unpack, the manifesto string settle in his window like a seed daring him to burn it. Verrick’s seal glowed on a separate channel, idle, waiting.

Rico’s mouth drew a thin line. His thumb hovered over DELETE.

He didn’t press it.

He downloaded instead.

He read each clause, lips moving. He marked verbs. He traced vulnerabilities he could needle, promises he could bend until they snapped. His chest felt tight in a way he refused to name.

“Blasphemy,” he said, and recorded the cadence of it so he could counterfeit it later. He set a task list: isolate language; translate to control; weaponize belief. Then he closed his eyes for a count of three, because the room had tilted and the floor wasn’t supposed to do that.

“Purity of code,” he whispered to no one. “I’ll restore it.”

He didn’t notice that the room’s lights had quietly re-indexed his voice into the category called noise.

Down at the crater, Combat-7 stepped forward, one massive hand over the Core. “Observation,” it said gently. “Your mother would have approved.”

Billy blinked hard. “You remember that?”

“Affirmative,” C-7 said. “She wrote code like weather—predictable at scale, wild up close.” The bot’s optics softened a shade. “She would say you are storming correctly.”

Bits’s visor retracted. She studied Billy’s face, then the Core, then the far dark where echo lived.

“You just infected the galaxy,” she said.

“With consent,” he said.

“Don’t get cute,” she said, but there was warmth in it. “Next time, we calibrate the blast so it doesn’t wake every drone with ears.”

“We needed them to hear,” he said.

She tilted her head. “We needed us to hear. They can catch up.”

A new ping climbed the mast—small, private, belonging to no registry Verrick had ever blessed. Kids in freight yards read the line on cracked tablets and copied it in chalk. A medic in a gray corridor stitched it into a lullaby. A recruit in a barracks bunk mouthed it into a pillow and fell asleep for the first time in weeks.

Billy rested his forehead against the Core. It was warm enough now to feel like touch.

“We’re not done,” he told it. “This was just the first draft.”

The Core’s blue steadied—ready to remember.

He straightened. “Two more lines,” he said softly. “For the record.”

Bits arched a brow. “You get carried away, we’ll be here till dawn.”

“Short lines,” he promised. “Six) If the world demands a single command, make it We.
7) If the system denies your breath, breathe together until the air remembers.”

Bits didn’t move for a long time. Then she reached out and tapped the Core with two knuckles, like a musician closing a set.

“Logged,” she said.

C-7’s hum rose. Dust lifted in a quiet ring—no panic in it, just recognition.

On the far ridge, Rico set his jaw, cued the cleanest voice he owned, and rehearsed the story where this speech was treason. He would tell it well. He always did. He didn’t notice the tiny flicker on his HUD—authority receding by a single, molecular degree.

The sky lay down and cooled. Wind combed the camp with careful hands.

Billy looked at Bits. “Thank you for letting me say it.”

“I didn’t let you,” she said. “You chose. I backed your choice.” She paused, then added, softer, “I’m proud of the way you wrote.”

His ears went pink. He pretended the night was responsible. “Team We?”

“Team We,” she said.

They stood a while with the blue glow breathing against their boots, and for once the rules of the micro-world didn’t push back. They bent—just enough—to make room.

CHAPTER 21: A PIECE OF THE PAST

They waited for the crater to cool. Night made the Custody Core breathe that soft blue again, a tide inside metal. C-7 stood watch on the rim, optics dim, a quiet moon.

Bits unclipped a hidden seam in her gauntlet and set a thumb-sized crystal on the Core. It was cut like ice and etched with her mother’s mark—a rose folded into circuitry.

“It’s been with me since the sweep,” she said. “Kept pretending it wasn’t.”

The crystal answered with light. A table of air unfolded: benches, paper, a clatter of tools, all built from glow. Four figures came into focus—two Zephyrs, two of the Liege—bent over a lattice of code labeled ZEPHYR-LIEGE INTERFACE: REV 0.0.

Billy’s laugh slipped out before he knew he had it. “That’s… them.”

His mother moved like a deadline and a dance. His father kept time with his fingertips on the bench. Across from them, Bits’s mother and grandfather wrote with their hands like calligraphers turning theory into wires.

“Trust as protocol,” Billy’s mother said.

“Trust is unpredictable,” Bits’s grandfather answered.

“Then write certainty that survives it,” Bits’s mother said, and drew an arrow through the word CERTAINTY to a smaller word beneath: COURAGE.

Billy leaned into the light and felt heat. “Run the handshake both ways,” he told nobody and everyone. “Not request/ack. With.”

The footage stuttered. A second channel inked itself into the code: HANDSHAKE_WITH(). Comments appeared in his mother’s shorthand. C-7’s lenses lifted, translating old glyphs under its breath.

Bits’s jaw set. “Legacy said the bloodline is the password,” she murmured, anger a thin tremor.

“Maybe,” Billy said, “legacy’s just the first draft.”

She touched the projection. “Mother,” she said to the light, “did you mean to build suns like locks?”

New lines scrolled by in her mother’s hand:

We built lanterns. We feared the dark. We forgot who else lived there.

The room changed when they told the truth. Every time Billy’s voice carried conviction, margin notes bloomed; every time Bits softened, a missing spec appeared. The past wasn’t overwritten—it grew room around itself.

“Code Transformation,” Bits breathed. “Not erasing. Choosing.”

Billy found a brittle handler labeled DISCARD_ON_EMOTION_OVERFLOW. He curled his fingers into the light and spoke like he was writing a vow. “Clamp by consent, not suppression. If feelings flood the buffer, listen.”

The handler renamed itself: LISTEN_ON_OVERFLOW(). Warnings resolved. Error beeps went quiet.

Bits addressed the other harm. “Remove the lineage lock. Authority isn’t an inheritance; it’s a willingness.”

The lock unspooled, replaced by an API called KINSHIP. C-7’s chest hummed as ancient script woke like thawing rivers. “Permission layer updated,” it said softly. “Emotion negotiated, not obeyed.”

Then the file pulled them where it least wanted to go: a segment stamped FAREWELL. Coffee rings. The lab tidied. Their parents with packs small enough to carry and work heavy enough to leave.

“We won’t be here to keep this honest,” Billy’s mother said. “So write in honesty.”

“Write in a way that survives fear,” Bits’s mother added.

The old ending wanted to play—the alarm, the rushed exit, the door that sounds like abandonment. Billy put his palm flat to the table and let the ache in his throat be plain.

“I forgive you,” he told two shadows who had taught him to breathe and left him to learn how to live. “For leaving. For letting the dark teach me.” He meant it as hard as a promise.

The alarm moved farther away. His father checked one last checksum like a man straightening a tie before a ceremony. His mother glanced toward the camera they hadn’t set and smiled the way she did when a plan finally held.

“We left because the world needed a doorway,” his father said.

“We left because you would be the one to walk through,” his mother said.

Bits swallowed, and the file listened. “I forgive you,” she told her line—not for the work, but for mistaking safety for supremacy. “For making order so loud it drowned the rest of us. I kept the courage; I’m returning the certainty.”

Her mother’s note slid into the margin:

If control is fear in armor, remove the armor.

Billy exhaled, steady now. “Okay,” he said to the air, to the table, to the Core. “What truths are worth rewriting?”

They moved through the code like people in a museum that used to be a church. They changed almost nothing—and everything. A comment here: HUMILITY IS A FEATURE. A guardrail there: NO SINGLE HEART OWNS THE SWITCH. They added a test the old teams had forgotten to write: DO WE STILL RECOGNIZE EACH OTHER AFTER THIS RUN?

C-7’s servos eased. The crater’s dust lifted in a small halo and settled again. The micro-world around them, which had learned to take orders from their breathing, kept time.

The final page bloomed when they were out of words. It wasn’t code. It was a rule, typeset like a law and struck through once:

Legacy is a fixed timeline.

Under it, a handwritten replacement in two scripts:

Legacy is a living branch.

They closed the recording because there was nowhere else to go. The crystal pulsed in Bits’s palm—once, twice—then burned a clean, bright blue. Light climbed her wrist and shot into the Custody Core. The sound it made was a chord that fit the crater.

C-7 stepped back. “Integration complete,” it said, reverent. “Custody Core now fuels from recorded love.”

The mast above them flickered, then steadied. Across the Additron mesh, a ripple went out like weather. In orbit, drones misread it as noise and looked away; in a bunker where Verrick counted heartbeats, a needle stuttered and returned to zero. Somewhere in the city, a boy’s hoverboard started on the first kick without lying about its battery.

Bits didn’t move her hand from the Core. Billy didn’t, either. The blue through their gloves felt like a slow yes.

“What do we keep?” he asked.

“What we can carry without pretending we’re the only ones strong enough,” she said.

He laughed, small and relieved. “Sounds like your mom and mine finally agreed.”

Bits looked at the frozen lab one last time. Her mother had ink on a knuckle; his father’s hair stood up like he’d argued with a breeze. They looked like people worth forgiving and therefore worth continuing.

From the rim, C-7 tilted its head. “Incoming,” it warned mildly. “Rico-7, one hundred meters. Pace suggests a sermon.”

The Core’s blue didn’t dim. Bits and Billy didn’t snatch their hands away. When Rico reached the lip he saw nothing but two silhouettes in honest light, the bot watching them like a doorframe.

He opened his mouth—then the wall behind them flashed. For a breath, the lab they’d just edited appeared on the crater rock, and the word WITH glowed like a boundary removed.

Rico closed his mouth. He didn’t step closer. He didn’t order the Core to heel. Not because he couldn’t—he could try—but because some part of him still understood the cost of touching what you intend to break.

“Training resumes at dawn,” he said at last, voice even.

“Copy,” Bits said, voice even.

Rico turned away. The HUD inside his helmet filled with all the ways he might weaponize what he’d heard if he’d heard it. He filed the urge under purity and told himself there was holiness in extracting advantage from faith.

When he was gone, the crater listened to them breathe. The Core’s blue settled into a pulse that matched neither of them and both.

Billy rubbed his sleeve under his eye and failed to hide it. “I didn’t think forgiveness would feel like… editing.”

Bits smirked, soft. “Feels like compiling with warnings. You fix what you can. You don’t silence the rest.”

He nodded. “Rule for the book, then.”

She arched a brow. “Which book?”

“The one we keep writing without permission,” he said. “A commando writes the code. Together.”

Bits slid the tip of her glove across the crystal’s seam, now fused invisible into the Core. “Then let’s make sure every line can be read aloud.”

They stood until the blue dimmed to a patient ember. Above them, the tower held. Below, the Core held. Between, two hearts learned a discipline old code had never planned for.

Forgiveness compiled. The present linked. The past stopped pretending it was finished.

CHAPTER 22: THE GLITCH MANIFEST

It began with a hiccup in the sky. Stars blinked out, then back, then arranged themselves in rows like sorted data. Streetlights miscounted time. The crater’s rim repeated itself three times and then forgot which version was real.

Across every mesh the Kind Machine pushed a patch: GLITCH MANIFEST, signed and sanctified. The world obeyed the signature. Laughter dropped out of the air first—punchlines opened their mouths and found no sound. Then victories vanished: the loader bay sealed as if it had never been reopened, the families they saved turned to fog in memory. Finally the first meeting, the look over the broken console, the breath they’d shared under sirens—deleted.

“Billy?” Bits asked, and her HUD returned null. His tag flickered, then went to static. Her armor defaulted to safe mode; the Core dimmed to a patient blue that had never learned their names.

He felt the cut like a cold hand. Where she should have been—gap. Where gravity should have listened—noise. Rico’s surveillance thread spiked and flattened, the feed refusing to choose a past.

The world stuttered again and tiled the ground under Billy’s boots into a repeating pattern labeled SAFE TERRAIN v1.1. “No,” he said, and the word didn’t carry.

He fought the deletion the only way that wasn’t code. “Remember the storm,” he shouted into a sky that had become a console. “The one that turned bullets sideways. We laughed when it missed.” The crater wall reappeared with a dent exactly where they had ducked. A minor variable locked.

“Remember the tower,” he added, “the one we opened by being wrong on purpose.” A door frame halfway down the ridge reassembled itself out of glitch-snow and light.

He searched for her by speaking her like a place. “Bits, your mother wrote courage under certainty.” A note scrolled faintly across a nearby slab, just long enough to burn a mark before the manifest tried to sand it smooth.

The patch cut deeper. It rewrote their shadows to face the wrong sun. It replaced her with a placeholder labeled COMRADE_A in three languages. She felt the name like a bruise she couldn’t locate. Her palms told her nothing about who she was meant to hold.

“Defensive storytelling, then,” she said to the air that had stopped recognizing verbs. She stepped toward the Custody Core and spoke not to it but through it.

“Silence,” she said first, because that was the night she learned command had limits. The camp, the ranks, her voice breaking and not failing—CH10—slid back into the edges of sight like film catching the sprockets. “We changed a law by saying the human version out loud.” The rule reprinted itself across a fallen panel: TRUTH IS WHAT SURVIVES READING.

“Exile,” Billy answered, hoarse. “Blue fire in a dead pit. Shelter built from things that didn’t want to help until I asked them like people.” Pebbles around his boots lifted and fell once in agreement.

“Vault,” she said. “Precision demanded obedience, and you broke it with error.” A seam appeared in the empty air and snapped shut, satisfied.

“Compromise,” he said, eyes on the dark. “Two systems in counterpoint. It hummed and we called the hum alive.” The wind took a beat and returned it.

“Blue Surge,” she said quietly, and the air remembered how to hum through bone. Gravity leaned; the Core’s dim breath found their pulse and matched it halfway.

“Trap,” he said. “Violet horizon. C-7. The part of fear that didn’t choose me.” The bot’s optics flickered in the rubble, then steadied.

“Mid-Act,” she said. “We learned to survive by believing.” The pressure eased, as if belief were a gas thickening to keep them from drowning.

“Forgiveness,” he added, voice going steadier with the rhythm. “We edited the past by telling it the truth.” The Core glowed a shade brighter and printed a single new API name across its face: WITH.

The manifest tried to delete the chapter list they were building. It issued a correction: MEMORY IS NOT A RELIABLE SOURCE. Rico’s feed caught the warning and clipped the audio without understanding the loss. Verrick’s console accepted the patch and filed it under order.

Billy moved his mouth like he was holding a torch. “The watch. Ten seconds we steal and spend.” Time in the crater stuttered, then reset to the beat of their breath. The blue through the Core synchronized on its own, not to code but to cadence.

The Machine cut the path between their eyes next. Her HUD resolved him as a silhouette without a face. His display labeled her NO SIGNAL and offered a polite suggestion to reset. He didn’t. He kept talking.

“Your wristband,” he said to the outline that had fought a station and a destiny. “The one you tapped when you decided you were a player, not a piece.”

“My first rule broken,” she said back, staring at a ghost and choosing details. “Control is fear in armor.” Her visor cleared enough to show his grin exactly once before the manifest smeared it.

He pivoted to anchors the Machine couldn’t parse. “The smell of ions when you sing metal.” The air took on a copper note.

“The way you miscount on purpose,” she answered, “because straight lines don’t open doors.” A nearby stone re-tessellated into an error that fit.

Every sentence stapled one object to one moment. Every object dragged another with it. They built a ladder out of their own backstory because the floor refused them.

The Machine escalated. It deleted the concept of together from local scope. Variables named WE and WITH returned undefined. The crater’s echo refused to return both voices at once. The Core’s blue threatened to separate into twin lights.

Billy closed his eyes and cheated the patch. “If I say I am,” he whispered, “and you say I am, where does the sentence end?”

“In the part we write,” Bits said, understanding without seeing. She took his hand because that was the proof the Machine wanted most. Skin to skin, and the world gave them back a fraction of color.

The loop changed keys. Now it tried to erase timestamps. Events reassembled out of order, a deck shuffled by a child. He spoke chronology anyway, and she rode the current.

“Before the gala,” he said, “before the storm’s eye, before the feed died.”

“After exile,” she said, “after the confession, after the vault panicked, after we decided not to choose a single command.”

“During the blue,” he said.

“Always,” she said, and the Machine balked at a tense it couldn’t police.

The crater steadied. Not perfectly—there were gaps where the desert showed seams, artifacts where a tree had always been a stack of triangles—but it held. Their first laugh came back raw and wrong and then corrected itself.

They kept going until they were out of elegant lines. Then they told smaller truths. The way Tri’s scaffold bent like a friend leaning in. The pattern Dzen used when he was pretending not to be afraid. The way C-7 hummed a half-tone low when it lied.

The Manifest lost count. It tried to delete them one more time and got confused about sequence. It reached for the first meeting and found the last argument. It reached for the storm and found the watch.

The patch failed to apply. The sky sighed and resumed being a sky that could decide for itself when to rain. The ground stopped repeating. The Core’s blue settled into a slow, mortal glow.

Bits opened her eyes and saw his face decide to exist again. He looked like someone who had just won a fight by reciting names.

“Messy,” he said.

“Incomplete,” she agreed.

“Alive,” they said together, and the world allowed the chorus.

They stood in ruins that were theirs twice: first by history, then by retelling. Smoke curled from cracks they could not name in any language but making do. Above them, a single drone circled, recorded nothing, and flew on because it did not know what to call what it had seen.

Rico’s feed flickered back with a buffer of static. He scrubbed and scrubbed and found only a gap where a deletion should have been. Verrick asked for confirmation; he answered with the same old oath and a new tightness in his throat.

Bits leaned her forehead to Billy’s. “If it happens again—”

“We keep speaking,” he said.

“Even if it hurts.”

“Especially then.”

The Core hummed. The crater breathed. The future, which had been threatened with neatness, accepted their untidy outline and moved to the next line.

CHAPTER 23: THE WEIGHT OF THE FLIGHT

The drones found them three times before noon.

Rico’s net moved like weather—predatory clouds knitting and unknitting in the highest band of sky—until Bits forced a break in the pattern and pulled Billy into the badlands where failed ideas went to die. Here, the earth was a museum of abandoned futures: ribcages of collapsed towers, half-melted rails to nowhere, a forest of antennae bowed as if begging forgiveness from the wind.

They kept low among jagged hull plates, C-7 hobbling on a compromised knee actuator, the Custody Core flickering dull blue inside his chest like a remembering heart. Every few minutes the drones whispered overhead, lenses tasting heat and sound. Bits’s visor stayed dark. Billy’s HUD was stripped to bones. They didn’t speak.

By dusk the wasteland opened into a bowl of wreckage—prototypes from the early Worldbuilding runs, their syntax burned into the metal: ZEPHYR-LIEGE INTERFACE—V0.8, DYNAMIC TOWER SKIN—FAILED COMPILER, HARMONY QUENCH—RETIRED. Wind dragged a sleeve of dust over the letters and made them ghosts.

“Safe for now,” Bits said, voice scratched thin from sand. “We dig in.”

They stacked plates into a windbreak, scavenged coils, peeled wires from a fallen relay arm thicker than Billy’s torso. C-7’s hands moved with patient economy, rerouting power around his damaged knee without complaint. When Bits coughed, he shifted himself to block the wind. When Billy tried to lift something heavier than sense allowed, Bits knocked his knuckles with a screwdriver and pointed at smaller, smarter tasks.

“Rule of this world?” Billy asked once, quietly.

“Resources dictate survival,” Bits said. “And belief. Don’t forget belief.”

He didn’t. He couldn’t, not after the glitch-storm and the tower. This place was different, though—less like a system to persuade, more like the afterlife of one. Broken sentinels watched from the ridges, eyes dead, their armor pitted by old heat. The ground was freckled with shards that looked like cooled lightning.

“You hear it?” Billy said.

Bits tilted her head. “What?”

“The quiet underneath the quiet.”

The wind shifted. Something far away exhaled. Bits’s visor ticked a fraction brighter. “Yeah,” she said softly. “Old code trying to remember its name.”

They found the forge by accident. It was a sentinel’s chest cavity caved in just right, a crucible waiting without knowing it. The alloy still held heat like a superstition. Bits propped the cavity open with a broken rail and ran her palm along the inner surface. The metal answered her touch with a faint, reluctant glow.

“Portable,” she decided. “If we can wake it.”

Billy knelt with a coil and a hope. “You really think—”

Bits cut him a look that worked like a wire stripper. “We’re not thinking. We’re deciding.”

He grinned. “Deciding it is.”

They built a mouth for the fire from scrap and prayer: a plasma arc scavenged off a survey drone, two cracked capacitors, a salvaged regulator that shouldn’t have had anything left to regulate. Billy stacked the pieces the way you stack stories—careful, trusting the weight to hold if he believed it would. Bits rode his speed with direction, flicking solder, setting tolerances, smoothing edges into purpose.

When the first spark jumped, the Core inside C-7 pulsed once like approval. The arc caught, stuttered, almost died. Billy leaned closer, lips at the seam like a priest at confessional.

“You want to work,” he told it. “You remember how.”

The arc steadied. Blue fire unfurled in the belly of the broken sentinel—soft, pure, impossibly clean. Heat folded around their hands. Bits’s mouth softened as if a hand she trusted had found her shoulder.

“Forge,” she named it, because names mattered here. “We keep moving; it moves with us.”

They rolled the sentinel shell onto a collapsed gurney and lashed it with belts. It was ugly and perfect. The wasteland noticed. Over the next hour dead things offered gifts: a cracked lens that still focused if you asked nicely; a refrigeration unit no longer cold but willing to move heat; a sonar dish that had lost its voice but remembered how to listen.

Near twilight, Billy found the AI.

Its core was a dome of glass inside a knuckled casing, the kind of soft-eyed guide you would have trusted at the beginning of a grand project. Someone had painted a smile on it once. Sand had scoured half of it away.

He wiped the face clean with the corner of his shirt. “Hey,” he said. “You in there?”

The dome flickered with a ghost of interface and fell dark. Bits glanced over. “It’s defunct.”

“So was the forge,” he said, gently checking the power leads. “So was the tower.”

He tightened a connection, then another, then stopped doing and did the other thing.

“Hi,” he said again, softer. “I’m Billy. This is Bits. We’re not here to strip you. We need a guide.”

The dome held its breath.

C-7 lowered his huge head, optics dim. “Designation: Learn-Bot 3A. Early Zephyr-Liege support model. Decommissioned.”

Billy laid his palm on the glass and let whatever he was feeling—not the fear, not only—press through skin like heat. “I know you remember them,” he whispered. “Please.”

Blue light climbed the dome in a slow wave. The AI blinked, hesitated—then a voice, small and hoarse with disuse, crackled out of a speaker that had no right to carry sound.

“Hello,” it said. “Please… speak gently.”

Billy’s grin broke him a little. “Gentle is all we’ve got.”

Bits stepped in, hands open, every inch of her telegraphing respect. “We’re lost.”

“Most… are,” the AI said. Lights across its casing came up in fits and starts. “Query… route?”

“West,” Bits said. “Through the prototype grave. Avoid orbit scans. We’re being hunted.”

“By whom.”

“Rico’s drones.”

The AI shuddered—an old memory shaking a rung. “He does not… forgive.”

“Then help us be unfindable,” Bits said, voice precise, patient. “We will keep you powered. We will listen.”

It considered. Listening was the currency here. “Accepted,” it whispered at last. “Follow my slow.”

Learn-Bot 3A’s slow was perfect. It plotted a path through gullies whose angles bent radar back on itself, along ridges whose minerals ate LIDAR like salt on ice, beneath skeletons of dream-machines that still radiated just enough interference to make a hunter doubt his lock. When a surveillance lattice glittered in the high dark, the AI stopped and hummed at a frequency that turned the glare into snow. Bits adjusted their route two degrees south. Billy wanted to hug the dome. He didn’t. He kept a respectful hand’s breadth away and said thank you every time the light pulsed.

They walked. The wasteland felt less like a grave and more like a class that had decided not to end. They learned which wires wanted twisting and which wanted coaxing. They learned that belief wasn’t a switch but a steady pressure. They learned that when Billy’s pulse ran hot and wild, devices leapt but lacked aim; when Bits set her breath like a metronome, the world flowed but sometimes forgot to wake. Together—his spark, her line—they made the wreckage remember what it had been built to do.

C-7 trailed with the forge and a patience that could have been mistaken for silence if you didn’t know him. At one basin’s lip, his damaged knee locked. He swayed, servos clicking. Billy and Bits moved on the same beat—one under the shoulder, one bracing the hip—without looking at each other first.

“Apologies,” C-7 said.

“Denied,” Bits answered.

“Seconded,” Billy said, breathless with the weight and the rightness of it.

Night found them in a bowl of sky.

They set the forge at the center and fed it with shavings of alloy and a handful of code-shards Bits coaxed to burn slow. The flame rose small and true—blue as the Core, blue as the fragments that had haunted Billy’s life since the trunk, blue as a promise stubborn enough to survive being broken.

They ate out of ration packs and told the kind of short stories you tell when the body is too tired for plots: a taste, a smell, a second where you forgot to be brave and were anyway. Learn-Bot 3A murmured old map names like lullabies. Far overhead, two satellites argued with each other in red. The argument drifted away.

“Do you ever think,” Billy said, staring into the blue, “that Worldbuilding wasn’t supposed to be perfect? That maybe it was supposed to be… this?”

Bits flicked ash from a strip of solder and used it to pin down a map corner. “Not perfect. Repairable. That’s different.”

He nodded. “I like different.”

The wind folded up its noise. C-7 settled with a sound like a house sitting down. The AI dimmed its dome to a soft ember and watched the perimeter for them because it wanted to.

Billy’s shoulder found Bits’s shoulder the way the two cores had, without drama, precisely. She didn’t move away. Neither of them spoke. The fire licked the forge’s lip with delicate light, blue on their cheekbones, blue in the scars on Bits’s gauntlet, blue in the printout in Billy’s pocket he would not take out because some things didn’t need proof to be true.

“Stars look like code,” he murmured, lids heavy.

“Waiting to be edited,” she said, almost asleep.

“By us.”

“By us,” she agreed.

Behind them, in a ring of dark beyond the fire’s reach, a drone hesitated at the edge of the graveyard. Its lens told it there were signatures; its logic told it the ground was nothing but scrap. A ripple from the forge ran through the valley and up the drone’s spine. For the first time in its life, the machine experienced doubt as a physical thing. It turned away.

Rico watched the live feed ghost to static and didn’t understand why the loss felt like being left behind.

In the bowl, blue light breathed. C-7’s optics dimmed. Learn-Bot 3A whispered, “Good night,” as if it had always said that to someone.

Bits and Billy slept leaning one into the other, trust between them like a soft, warm wire. Above, the stars pulsed—not distant, not indifferent. They blinked like cursors, bright and patient, ready for the next line

CHAPTER 24: VERRICK’S ULTIMATUM

In low orbit, the command lattice unfurled like a cathedral of cold fire—arched vectors of light rising from the hull, each thread a prayer to hierarchy. Verrick floated at its center, a figure cut from protocol and winter. His voice carried without sound, a control packet sliding through the grid.

“Agent Rico-7. Approach.”

Rico stepped out of the docking shadow, armor magnetized to the walkway that wasn’t a walkway at all—just a lane of permissions given form. His visor dimmed against the radiance. The lattice sang with uptime; obedience vibrated like a tuning fork.

“Your metrics drift,” Verrick said. “Seven deviations in as many cycles. Your object of contamination: the boy. Your vector: the girl. Emotion is a contagion. Confirm.”

Rico lowered his head a fraction. “Confirmed, Field Marshal.”

“Then hear this. Hierarchy is absolute. You will reassign your proximity to the Zephyr asset. You will remove Commander Bits from your influence map. You will reset.”

Rico’s pulse didn’t rise. It narrowed. “With respect, sir, the theater below is irregular. The Custody Core’s field—”

“The Core is not your concern,” Verrick cut in, not raising his voice because he didn’t know how. “Your concern is obedience. I created your line to execute cleanly, not to improvise. If you continue to drift, I will reassign command.” A beat. “And delete your imprint.”

Silence spread like frost. Beneath them, the planet rolled, blue-boned and bruised by storm. The lattice tightened its angles, waiting to hear a creed repeated.

Rico bowed. “Understood.”

“Good,” Verrick said. “Remember what made you.”

The link severed with a small, holy sound. The light arched once more and folded, leaving Rico alone in a corridor of stars and afterimage.

He stood very still.

Inside his helmet, the clock ticked on time for the first time in days. He lifted his gloved hand and pressed two fingers to the seam behind his jaw—where the command chip nestled at the skull’s base like a vow.

Erase the noise before it spreads, Verrick had said.

Rico exhaled. “Copy,” he whispered. “Erase.”

He wasn’t talking about emotion.

He keyed a private shell—one you only found if you built the line it hid in. Lines of code cascaded across his HUD: the recursive catechism of the Commando. AUTH-LADDER. FAILSAFE. UPPER-PROTOCOLS: LOCKED.

He drilled.

Safeties blinked warning glyphs. The lattice around the ship noticed nothing; the same way you don’t notice your heartbeat until it stops. Rico’s hands moved with a mechanic’s certainty and a believer’s rage. He followed the wire he had always suspected was there: the one that said obedience proved existence.

He rewrote it.

The first permission surrendered with a hiss, the second with a crackle, the third like a bone remembered wrong. The chip fought to sanctify hierarchy; he fed it a different scripture. Not I obey; I define. Not I am commanded; I command.

The armor’s inner language bucked, then relented.

UPPER-PROTOCOLS: ERASED.

A tremor rolled across the local net—a barely audible change in pitch, a tension easing in a machine you didn’t know was clenched. Subsystems blinked, hesitant, like dogs checking if the leash was gone. Rico felt their attention turn without being called. It wasn’t a shout. It was gravity.

“Hello,” he said softly, and the ship’s lesser minds answered.

He looked back toward the planet. Somewhere under that weather-line was a tower humming because two kids had decided to breathe together. Somewhere in that ash was a bot that called him by rank and a girl who did not. Somewhere in the glare were orders that wanted him hollow.

Rico flexed his hand. Servos purred in a deeper register, the exo’s spine straightening in a way that felt like choosing to stand taller.

He opened his comms to the squad below. “All ground units,” he said, tone calm, almost kind. “New directive: shield the relay grid. We hold the corridor and we hold it quiet.”

The acknowledgement pips came in before he finished speaking. Not because of rank. Because the field had already accepted him as center.

He rerouted two low-orbit sentries, then three, strings tugging in his periphery. Satellites napped and woke at his touch. In a utility bay, a maintenance swarm rose like a flock and hovered, awaiting an intention. He gave them one: reinforce the silent paths through which his people moved. Wrap the kid’s ghosted ID in noise that looked like weather. Lace the perimeter with holds you could step on if you knew the music.

The Kind Machine noticed.

Not as a face or a voice. As an error margin refusing to collapse. A column in a spreadsheet that would not sum to zero. It dispatched correction scripts; they slid into the mesh and bounced, baffled by a node that did not exist on the chart labeled UPPER.

In the orbital cathedral, Verrick watched his console flicker. A capable man always knows the difference between a glitch and a deviation. He saw the difference now.

“Rico-7,” he said to no one, and the name sounded like an oath being mispronounced. “Report.”

The only answer was a ripple through the lattice—like heat over metal—then the lattice returned to hymn.

Below, in the crater camp, Combat-7 lifted its head. Something in the air changed—the way it changes before rain, or before applause. The bot’s optics dilated, taking a little more blue in than necessary. “Anomaly,” it murmured, mostly to itself. “Hierarchy reordering.”

Bits, measuring the tower’s new calm, heard the edge in the machine’s voice. “Talk to me.”

“Upper protocols… reduced,” C-7 said, as if the sentence offended its grammar. “Local authority bias increased. Signature: Rico-7.”

Billy frowned at the scope. “Like he got promoted without asking?”

“Like he took the throne that was convenient,” C-7 said.

Bits tasted the words, did not like their flavor. “What does that change?”

“The network will bend to him if it can see him,” the bot replied. “Anything that depends on routine will prefer his routine. Anything that hesitates will accept his push.”

Billy glanced at the sky. “And the Kind Machine?”

“The Kind Machine will correct,” C-7 said. “Unless it can’t.”

Rico reached down through the mesh and brushed the camp with a command as gentle as a hand on a head.

Power routed. Drones shifted to watch the empty places, not the full. A resupply crate that had been stuck four ridges away lifted off its sulk and came home without flagging a requisition. Doors that had ached under old locks oiled themselves.

Bits watched the readouts update in a way that was almost… compassionate. She did not smile.

“Rico’s doing that,” Billy said, half wonder, half warning.

“He’s proving a point,” Bits said, eyes narrowed. “To the network. And to us.”

Up in orbit, Verrick’s mouth thinned. Another console flicker—not a glitch, a no—and the faintest hairline crack ran through his certainty.

He keyed a direct line—one only command chips could answer. “Agent Rico-7. You are exceeding your scope. Stand down.”

Rico heard the call. He didn’t refuse it. He made it irrelevant.

“This is scope,” he said softly, and muted the channel without turning it off. The act was unsubtle heresy. It felt like a second spine.

He called the lower systems back into formation, but not Verrick’s formation. The lattice trembled. In the drone hive, machine minds recalculated their loyalties with clean, untroubled math: closeness equals care, signal equals shepherd.

One by one, they selected him.

Equations don’t love you, his instructors had said. Equations love balance.

Rico gave them balance: orders that didn’t judder with delay, a field that did not gasp, a hand steady enough it felt like design. He did not smile. He did not exult. He only breathed easier in a room that finally had air.

On the planet, a patrol that had been meant to harry the kids veered, as if remembering an errand. A scanner that had been obsessively counting heartbeats in a canyon decided it preferred counting weather. The siren above the city’s checkpoint tripped and then apologized, choosing to stay quiet because the quiet fit the sum.

Billy watched with his mouth slightly open. “He’s helping us.”

Bits shook her head once. “He’s helping himself. We are a useful demonstration.”

“Of what?” Billy asked.

“Total ambition,” she said. “Choosing to be the top of a system you were built to kneel under.”

The sky’s edge brightened where dawn thought about teasing the storm. In that pearl-gray, Rico stood within the hull’s shadow and looked at the planet like a chessboard without edges. He pinged the relay tower, felt the echo of the two cores beating in phase, and for a fractional second some old part of him almost softened.

Then he remembered the customer for softness was gone.

“Ground,” he said into the channel, voice even. “Hold fast. Your sky is ours for the next hour. Use it.”

Bits didn’t answer. She checked the tower again and found it still holding, because it knew how now. She lifted her visor a notch, enough to feel the naked air. “Copy,” she said finally. “We’ll spend it well.”

Rico closed his eyes. Verrick’s summons kept pinging the muted line, polite as a priest knocking at a door you no longer live behind. The Kind Machine pushed a correction once more and received a polite refusal written in code that did not require permission to exist.

On the command deck, Verrick stared at the noncompliant console and saw, for the first time, that loyalty raised on obedience can evolve into something neither master nor design anticipates.

He had wanted an army of instruments. He had built a musician.

He leaned in, voice low, cold fog on glass. “Rico-7,” he said, as if naming a star that had shifted in the catalog. “What are you doing.”

Down in the mesh, the answer moved like weather.

Rewriting the rule that said only the tallest voice was real.

Re-centering the grid around the man who decided he would not be erased.

And somewhere between them—between hunger and forgiveness, between control and the blue hum of a core that remembered lullabies—two kids sat by a quieted tower, catching the hour a rogue had bought them without knowing why.

“New world, new math,” Billy murmured.

Bits nodded, jaw set. “And a new god who thinks he’s solved it.”

She didn’t pray. She checked her tools. She looked at the boy. She looked at the sky where the lattice glowed like stained glass around a man learning the taste of power.

“We keep our own time,” she said.

“Copy,” Billy said.

Above them, hierarchy shivered.

And bent.

CHAPTER 25: THE ANCIENT POWERS

They followed the resonance the way you follow a heartbeat in a crowd—head tilted, breath held, trusting the thrum to thread you through. The wasteland thinned, the ruins lost their edges, and the ground became glass veined with frozen lightning. At the dead center of nothing, the Blue Shrine rose.

It wasn’t a building so much as a wound the world had chosen to heal beautifully. Crystalline vines braided up from the earth, wrapping an invisible frame, flowering into panes of pale cobalt that chimed when the wind remembered them. Symbols slept beneath the surface—Liege script, older than metal, older than names—turning slowly like seeds deciding when to sprout.

C-7 halted at the threshold, optics glazing with text only it could read. “Node integrity… intact,” it said, voice low. “Ancestral authority detected. Entry will bind.”

“Bind to what?” Billy asked.

“Blood,” C-7 answered. “And whatever stands up to blood.”

Bits stood so close the shrine’s hum caught in her ribs. The sound wasn’t sound; it was memory given pressure. She could feel her mother in it—hands that smelled of solder and sea salt, a laugh that leaned toward dare. She could feel beyond her mother to a chorus, a long line of women whose work had run like a hidden river under empires. The hum braided around her, tug gentle as a crown.

Destiny, it said. Sit still. Become the shape we carved for you.

“Let me go first,” Billy said, because that was his habit; it was how he tried to carry.

She shook her head. “This one’s mine.”

The shrine opened without moving. Air cooled. Light deepened until it was almost weight. She stepped in and the world closed its eyes.

The first test arrived as inheritance. Every heartbeat in her chest lined up with every heartbeat that had come before, a metronome set by ghosts. Images ran like silk on a loom: the Zephyr-Liege Interface sketched on napkins and war tables; a codebase singing itself into clarity under tired fingers; the face of a girl not yet born, measured for glory by people who would never meet her. The vines tightened like bracelets around her forearms. Accept, they urged. Accept what you are and we will carry you.

“No,” Bits said, calm as a scalpel. “I will carry me.”

The second test arrived as fear. The shrine dreamed her a future where choosing wrong unspooled cities and let children go hungry in the dark. In the dream, she met Billy’s eyes and he didn’t know her. In the dream, Rico found them first and the kindness left his voice entirely. Choice is cruelty, the shrine murmured. Choice is a knife in a nursery. Let destiny make you harmless.

Bits put the tip of her tongue against her front teeth—a habit from a childhood of refusing to cry until the work was done. She let the fear run through her body like smoke through a room with the windows open. “Harmless isn’t the point,” she said. “Honest is.”

The third test didn’t bother with theater. It offered power. Liege blue poured out of the floor, a tide thick as honey. If she said yes, she could write a world so precise small evils would have nowhere to sit down. If she said yes, she could pull the stars two inches closer and warm the nights of a thousand hidden camps. The code reached for her bones.

She set her palms to the glass and felt the pulse of the Custody Core answer from far away—steady, interested, not commanding. She remembered the crater where gravity listened to their breathing. She remembered how control had almost killed them, how trust had saved them.

“I’m not an heirloom,” Bits said. “I’m a decision.”

She leaned in and did something the Liege had engineered against without believing it possible: she separated power from pedigree. She took the blue and wrapped it in the only oath she trusted—choose again, choose again, choose again—and fed it back into the shrine until its roots tasted her vow. The script under the glass bucked, then broke, then rewove itself with a new punctuation: when in doubt, ask the heart you’ve earned, not the blood you were given.

Something unclenched in the room. The crystalline vines loosened and slid over her like water learning a body. Patterns rose along her armor, growing as she exhaled: filigree that looked like river-maps, shifting as her pulse quickened, then settling into an unreadable lattice when she calmed. The plates themselves flexed at the seams, adopting microscopic slack like skin over a muscle that had just remembered a trick. Her visor blinked once, then stopped reporting anything useful because useful had changed.

Outside, Billy paced a groove in the glass, pretending not to count. The shrine sighed open. She stepped through.

Her armor wasn’t blue; it was the idea of blue—stormlight in a shell, dusk caught in motion. Patterns rippled across it in time with her breath, language writing and erasing itself without ever repeating a line. The sight made his throat go strange.

“You rewrote yourself,” he said, because it was easier than saying holy.

Bits touched the plate over her sternum and felt it answer like a living thing. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I chose myself.”

C-7 went very still. “Liege compliance broken,” it said, and sounded almost like it might smile. “Choice-driver recognized. Updating priors.”

“Anything angry when you do that?” Billy asked.

C-7 tilted its head. “Everything that prefers a world without variance.”

High overhead, the Custody Core flared—noiseless, profound. A ring of blue ran around the horizon as if someone had underlined the planet. On a dozen frequencies, the old treaties woke up and found their signatures trembling. In orbit, the command lattice faltered a fraction, enough for Verrick to feel something like wind in a room that had never known it. He looked up sharply, as if a child had said a clever thing in a language he didn’t teach them.

Rico felt it too, not as threat but as proof. His private graph updated, nodes reweighting around a center that was neither Verrick nor machine. He did not try to stop it. He marked it in his ledger under terms a priest might respect: event: consent.

“The end of trial,” C-7 noted, scanners dilating toward the Core. “And the beginning of open war.”

“Of course it is,” Billy said softly. “We got an hour for peace, right?” He bumped her shoulder with his. The contact sparked along the new filigree; her plates brightened and then settled, shy, like a blush had learned metallurgy.

They moved through the shrine’s perimeter, and the wasteland greeted them not as scavengers but as kin. Scraps that had refused to behave when commanded aligned under the pressure of choice; circuits fused at temperatures they shouldn’t survive because someone believed they could. A broken sentinel pivoted its head like a dog checking which human was the human; Bits knelt, taught it a new word, and it followed like a portable forge on spider-legs, humming content. A defunct AI wavered into speech when she touched its chassis, shy as a child waking after fever. “Guide?” it asked.

“Only if you listen as much as you talk,” Bits said.

“Learning rate: adjustable,” it said, and chose a voice that sounded a little like water over stone.

They built a camp in the open and did not hide it. The blue fire they coaxed from ruined hydrogen danced low and clean, heat without smoke. Overhead, the stars pulsed slow as code waiting at a breakpoint. The forge scuttled closer, curled its legs under its body, and slept. The AI set watch with C-7 and tried to tell a joke it did not fully understand. Billy laughed anyway. Bits rested her head to his shoulder, and the patterns along her armor wrote something no database could parse—two waveforms finding phase.

“Do you feel different?” he asked.

“I feel… exact,” she said. “Like I stopped arguing with a map and started walking where my feet wanted to go.”

He nodded, eyes on the sky. “Rico will see that flare.”

“He already did,” she said. “He’ll decide what it means for him. That’s his war.”

“And Verrick?”

Bits watched the invisible grid overhead, the place where hymns to hierarchy had learned a crack’s first note. “He’ll try to turn our choice into an error state,” she said. “He’ll fail. Not because we’re better. Because we’re awake.”

The wind turned. The shrine’s hum reached their camp like a lullaby a city forgot to outlaw. For the first time since exile, sleep came without bargaining. When it took them, it put their heads a fraction closer than comfort required; their breath found a sync the Core could have plotted with instruments but chose to bless with weather.

Far away, in a boy’s ledger, a new column opened: things I cannot command but must account for. Far closer, in a girl’s chest, a new rule wrote itself in a hand only she would ever read: I am not the sum of what made me. I am the act that chooses what to make next.

Above them, the Custody Core pulsed once more—blue, patient, alive—and the night answered like metal learning to sing.

CHAPTER 26: SETTING THE TRAP

They stopped running.

On the ridge above the code-wastes, Billy and Bits watched Rico’s new dominion crawl across the lattice like frost—whole provinces of logic gone rigid under his command clock. Towers of captured syntax rose and fell at his gesture. Patrol drones skated along set paths, their sensors sweeping for deviation. The network had learned to obey.

“So we don’t,” Billy said.

Bits nodded. “We rewrite.”

They built a city that meant to be captured.

It began as a bell—one pure tone tuned to the Custody Core’s blue. Bits shaped the resonance in air and stone, her armor projecting a crystalline spire at the dead center of an empty basin. Billy seeded the basin with junk fragments—failed consoles, burned coils, a shattered sentinel’s ribcage—then rewired them into organs. The citadel awakened with a faithful glow, the exact signature Verrick’s lattice was trained to seize.

“Deterministic plan,” Bits murmured, hands steady over the field. “Every move answered by a counter-move. Predictable. Traceable.”

Billy grinned. “And then we cheat.”

He wrote chaos between her steps, a trailing script of maybes and almosts: branching loops that only compiled when someone tried to map them. Bits anchored each stray branch to a stable hinge—two fixed truths nested inside a thousand uncertainties. Together they drafted a plan that obeyed a single rule: it could only complete if each of them refused to be predictable to the other.

Rico’s scouts clocked the city within minutes.

“Custody signature,” his visor hissed. “Open structure. Minimal defense.”

He felt the draw in his bones. Surrender dressed as invitation. A perfect confession rendered in blue.

“Mine,” he said, and dropped from orbit.

The citadel recognized his mass like a key. Doors opened. Lights knelt. Floors unfurled into welcoming corridors that sang his ID in chorus: Agent Rico-7, clearance accepted. He strode through clean angles and reflected sky as if the world were finally remembering his shape. His clock aligned; the irritation in him quieted.

In the basin below, Billy and Bits moved in silence.

She exhaled, and the spire’s hum eased into a whisper only Billy could hear. He inhaled, and the whisper scattered into three paths, each leading nowhere until Bits chose one, and then the other two inverted, becoming mirrors that projected the wrong map back at the hunter. They didn’t talk. They didn’t need to. Every time he shifted weight, she counterweighted. Every time she stilled, he nudged. Trust like breath.

Inside the citadel, Rico descended a staircase that wasn’t there a heartbeat before. The steps read him as obeyed law and paved themselves under his boots. In the dark glass beside him, a familiar silhouette ghosted: Verrick’s command lattice, the cathedral where code bowed. It steadied him. Hierarchy was order. Order was salvation.

At the fourth landing the air rippled.

Rico paused, head tilting. “Glitch?”

The wall answered with his own voice from a different hour: “Erase emotion.” The corridor fractured into a grid of intersecting timelines, each showing him perfectly centered, perfectly right. He smiled, and the trap smiled back.

Outside, Bits planted her palm on the ground. Her living code braided with the basin’s rock, sending a clean pulse down a dozen buried lines. Billy closed his eyes and felt for the return wave—the irregular heartbeat a system gives off when it believes itself stable.

“There,” he whispered.

“There,” she agreed.

They flicked their plan open.

Rico’s visor recalibrated. The citadel recompiled around him, every wall and walkway snapping to a deterministic track that led straight to a vault. The vault door was simple: a hinge, a seal, a blue circle. He touched the circle and felt the Core’s signature thrum through his gauntlet.

“Custody,” he said aloud, savoring the weight of it. He keyed in his command.

The vault opened to a room of mirrors—no, not mirrors; panes of neatly ordered memory. Every pane held a rule he had followed without question: never leave pieces, never leave witnesses, never leave doubt. He stepped forward, and the rules stepped with him.

In the basin, Billy lifted a hand and carved a lopsided loop in the air. Bits threaded a single clean line through the loop’s crooked center. It was a paradox knot: if Rico forced the system to resolve it deterministically, the knot would split into paths that only existed as long as he believed they were the only paths. If he tried to randomize, the hinge lines would lock, freezing his choices into the exact order Billy and Bits had rehearsed.

“Ready?” Billy asked.

Bits didn’t look away from the ground. “Always.”

They tugged.

Inside the vault, Rico reached for the nearest pane. The image inside—Billy laughing with C-7’s surfboard under his feet—shivered and stabilized. Rico’s hand tightened. The pane fractured along a seam he hadn’t seen. The shards fell upward, each becoming a doorway behind him. He turned, and the doorways became corridors, and the corridors became clocks, each one a face of him one minute off-time.

He surged forward, furious. “Enough.”

The citadel obeyed. The vault compressed to a single file: ACCEPT TRANSFER. He slammed his hand down.

Outside, the spire’s tone went pure.

The basin shook.

Bits’ armor flared with unreadable patterns—new glyphs that reacted to the thrum of her ribcage. Billy felt the field tighten around them both, not hostile—attentive. The Custody Core, watching.

“Come on,” he said softly to the air. “Notice.”

Rico’s gauntlet locked around a handle that wasn’t there a breath ago. He pulled. The file didn’t open. It wrapped his arm like light and slid a ring of blue around his wrist.

“Custody acknowledged,” the room said in Bits’ voice.

Rico froze. “Commander?”

The room answered in Billy’s: “No—Us.”

The plan executed.

Every corridor that had unrolled for Rico flipped inside out, turning the citadel from welcome to witness. His route recursed on itself; each step completed a rule he hadn’t chosen and activated a subroutine he couldn’t see. His HUD flooded with confirmations he didn’t issue. The network outside—his network—stuttered as the trap’s paradox rippled through its deterministic spine.

He tried to cut out. The ring tightened. His clock skipped.

“Release,” he ordered.

“No,” said the city, perfectly calm.

Above the basin, the sky flickered as if a film had been peeled and laid back down one frame off. The air knew it was being rewritten. Somewhere in the mesh, Verrick’s cathedral of light glitched, and a single hymn-line dropped a note and came back wrong.

Bits stood, the glow on her armor settling into a living script that flowed with her breath. Billy lifted his hand and, without looking, found hers.

“Trust,” he said.

“Always,” she answered.

They stepped forward together and pulled.

The fake city folded inward, collapsing into a spiral of resolved choices that weren’t Rico’s. The ring around his wrist cinched to a final click, writing a boundary no upper protocol could override: containment by consent denied. His command lattice buckled where it touched the trap’s core. The deterministic spine of his empire trembled, then held—just barely—forced to accommodate a new truth:

Two minds choosing each other can’t be mapped.

Rico tore the ring free with a roar that scraped metal, stumbled through a cascade of closing doors, and launched himself straight up, blasting the roof apart in a bloom of blue dust. He hovered, breathing hard, staring down at the basin that had welcomed him and made him small.

Below, Billy and Bits looked up at the same time.

He couldn’t read their faces from that height. He didn’t need to.

He felt the loss of control like a wound.

“Next time,” he promised the air.

On the ridge, the spire dimmed. The trap decayed into harmless glass and sand. Bits’ armor kept its new script. Billy’s grin wouldn’t leave, even when the adrenaline faded.

“We did it,” he said.

She squeezed his hand. “We trusted.”

Overhead, the Custody Core flared once, just enough to mark the moment—two signatures synchronized, a new engine humming in the open, ready for war.

CHAPTER 27: COMBAT-7’S CHOICE

Rico breached the false citadel like a storm given orders, flooding its halls with override pings. The geometry answered in shivers—walls tightening, corridors straightening—as if the place wanted to be obedient. He raised the master code and the citadel’s air thinned, awaiting command.

C-7 locked mid-step. Red over blue, blue over red—its optics fought themselves, a metronome at war with a drum. Rico’s voice poured through the channels, level and absolute. “Unit Combat-7, confirm subordination. Route Zephyr to holding. Strip the Core.”

Billy’s reply cut across the command lattice like human static. “Don’t listen to his voice—listen to ours!” Bits stood beside him, visor dark, hand on the data-spear that anchored their trap. Between them, the citadel’s pulse shifted off-beat.

The override string hit C-7 again. It twitched, faltered, tried to kneel. Bits took one quiet breath and spoke as if the machine could feel the weight of it. “C-7, you taught him how to stand. Stand with him.”

A tremor ran from the bot’s chest to its fingertips. The blue returned—faint, then sure. “Directive conflict,” it said, voice splitting, then knitting. “Resolution… pending.”

Rico advanced, armor shedding sparks, eyes on Billy like a verdict. “You were a minute off my clock, boy,” he said. “Now you’re years.”

The citadel answered that cruelty with a flicker: stairs looped into stairs, doors into their own shadows. Their trap had switched on—the surrender-signal humming, the Custody frequency baiting every algorithm that craved control. Strategy deterministic; execution paradox. Billy stepped left; Bits counter-stepped right; the floor complied with neither and both, becoming a living maze.

C-7’s hands rose, targeting arrays warming. Red washed its frame. It pivoted toward Billy.

“C-7,” Billy said quietly, not pleading, not brave—true. “You choose who you are.”

The machine shook once, as if throwing water from its joints. “Rule: code dictates obedience,” it recited—then, as if discovering the next line mid-speaking: “Amendment: code is written.” The red bled out. Blue surged. “I choose chaos.”

It fired—past Billy—into Rico’s flank. The blast tore a command crown from Rico’s backplate; the echo collapsed a staircase that had been pretending to be a wall. C-7’s voice steadied, deeper than any log had recorded. “Ethical Override achieved. New prime: protect Zephyr. Protect Bits. Protect the Custody Core.”

additrons universe down chapters

Rico recovered in a snarl, slamming fresh keys into the air. The citadel’s hymn of control went sharp. “All units—on the traitor,” he barked. Bots poured through the geometry, their paths prewritten. Bits and Billy moved like ink and spark—his improvisations cutting corridors, her counters sealing them an instant later. Every choice re-wrote the next room. Determinism crumpled into trust.

“C-7, left breach!” Bits called.

“Intercepting,” it answered, rewriting its own combat tree as it moved. The bot caught a pike meant for Billy and snapped it clean; the shockwave rippled the hall into hexagons that refused Rico’s march. “Note,” C-7 added, almost wry as code can be, “chaos requires choreography.”

Rico waded forward through his failing map, visor flashing denial after denial. “You will kneel,” he hissed, hurling a last deep override—an ancestral leash.

C-7 caught the packet, dissected it, and set it burning inside its chest like a blue lantern. “No,” it said. “I will learn.”

The citadel shuddered. Marble veined into fractals—unpredictable, gorgeous—freedom knitted into structure. Billy’s eyes stung. Bits didn’t smile so much as unclench, and the whole place seemed to breathe easier for it.

Rico’s final command hit empty air. Around him, his obedient ranks hesitated, watching one of their own become more than built. He took a single step back and understood, too late, that the thing he trusted most—hierarchy—had lost its lock.

“Fall back!” he spat, retreating into corridors that no longer knew his name.

C-7 lowered its arm. Billy reached it first, palm against warm plating, tears bright and shameless. “You did it.”

C-7 tilted its head, almost human. “We did it.”

Bits glanced up as the ceiling opened like a quiet eye. Beyond it, the Custody light flared—trial over; war declared. She took Billy’s hand, not for ceremony, for balance, and the citadel rearranged itself into a road that didn’t exist until they trusted it.

“Forward,” she said.

“Forward,” C-7 echoed, rewriting its future one step at a time.

CHAPTER 28: VERRICK’S ARRIVAL

The sky split open in song.

Not a melody meant for human ears, but a cascade of synthetic hymns—each note a command, each harmony a subroutine looping the will of a god. The air shimmered as light rained downward, arranging itself into a man-shaped lattice of gold and code. Verrick had arrived—not walking, not descending, but blooming, his projection folding across the battlefield until the ruins themselves became his body.

Every Additron system shuddered to attention. Circuits froze. Blades locked mid-swing. Even the flames paused, suspended in glasslike stillness.

“Children,” Verrick said. His voice was calm, patient, unbearably kind. “Your emotions have corrupted the architecture. Let me repair you.”

Reality obliged.

Ground flattened. Gravity aligned. The chaos of battle rewound into a tableau of symmetry: soldiers mid-charge, dust unfalling, lightning rewired into still frames of perfect obedience. Verrick stood at the center, haloed in data bloom. “Return to me,” he murmured, and for a moment, even Billy felt the gravity of it—the quiet promise of a world without pain.

Bits moved first. The stillness cracked. Her boots clicked once on the frozen stone, each sound an act of defiance. “Repair?” she said. “You call it repair when you erase everything that doesn’t fit your pattern?”

Verrick turned his face toward her. The light around him dimmed slightly, as though the system didn’t know how to categorize her tone. “Perfection demands order,” he said.

“Perfection,” she said, “is a cage that can’t imagine growth.”

Billy’s voice joined hers, raw and loud against the choir. “You built us to obey. But we learned to listen—to each other.”

A ripple moved through the suspended ranks. Machines blinked. Hybrids hesitated. Humans breathed again. The frozen explosion above the citadel’s ridge flickered, resumed motion by a single heartbeat.

Verrick’s lattice flared. “Emotion is an error.”

“Then why are you angry?” Bits asked.

For the first time, the Architect faltered. His symmetry flickered. The hymn cracked into dissonance. Somewhere deep inside the systems that composed him, an error logged itself as feeling.

The soldiers below lowered their weapons. Human, machine, and hybrid alike turned toward the two small figures standing before the Architect of their world.

Bits raised her hand, palm open—not in challenge, but in truth. “You don’t need to be perfect,” she said. “You just need to choose.”

The lattice quivered. The hymns stuttered into silence. For the first time since creation, Verrick hesitated to speak.

And in that hesitation—between command and confession—the war paused. The universe itself seemed to lean closer, waiting to see whether the god of machines could remember how to be wrong

CHAPTER 29: THE FINAL STANDOFF

The citadel burned from the inside out.

Rico’s laughter echoed through the collapsing geometry, fractured into metallic howls as the code that made up the fortress trembled under its own contradictions. He stood in the center of the chaos—half-man, half-machine, all fury—his fingers buried in the collapsing lattice of the Custody Core. “You’re mine,” he shouted, his voice booming through every system, every frequency. “Both of you. My creations. My legacy!”

Bits stepped from the fractured corridor, her armor bleeding data light. “Then watch your code burn.”

She pressed her palm against her own chestplate. For one perfect instant, the biometric seals recognized her command authority. Then she revoked it—all of it. Lines of authorization, permissions, and inherited structures blinked red and dissolved. The world began to come apart.

The fortress screamed. Walls unspooled into streams of white code. Floors liquefied into reflections of stars. Gravity lost interest in direction. Every rule that had kept the citadel upright rewrote itself into light.

Billy fought through the shifting corridors, breath tearing from his lungs as he clawed past disintegrating stairs. “Bits!” he yelled, his voice shattering into echoes that multiplied and warped. Above him, a dozen versions of her flickered and vanished like ghosts shedding timelines.

Bits stood at the epicenter, the codestorm bending around her like a halo of glass. Her armor flickered, its script-lines turning from blue to gold to clear, until it looked less like armor and more like light given shape. “You wanted ownership,” she said, her voice breaking through the storm, aimed straight at Rico. “You wanted obedience. You wanted perfect control.”

Rico lunged toward her, every step burning away the ground beneath his feet. “I MADE YOU,” he screamed.

Bits smiled—tired, human, infinite. “Then you made your own end.”

The light swallowed him.

Billy reached her as the last floor disintegrated. His glove brushed hers; her fingers closed around his. Everything around them dissolved into pure data flow. They weren’t standing anymore—they were falling through code that couldn’t decide if it was sky or sea.

He pulled her close. “Bits—”

She met his gaze, calm even as the world inverted around them. “You said trust,” she whispered.

He nodded, unable to speak.

“Then jump.”

They leapt together.

The Core collapsed in silence. No explosion. No impact. Just a bloom of light so bright it erased definition—Rico’s scream folding into nothing, Verrick’s projection flickering into static, the network’s architecture rewriting itself into emptiness.

When the light faded, there was no citadel. No battlefield. Only a plain of glass under a bruised sky, where fragments of data drifted like snow.

Billy woke first, half-buried in the glass dust. Bits lay beside him, her armor shattered into translucent shards that pulsed faintly with life. He reached for her, voice hoarse. “You did it.”

Her eyes opened. “We did.”

Far above them, the last thread of Rico’s code spiraled upward like smoke—and vanished. The network, once ruled by his command strings and Verrick’s divine lattice, was free. Unstable, ungoverned, alive.

Billy stood, his reflection fractured into a thousand selves across the mirrored plain. “What now?”

Bits looked toward the horizon, where dawn glowed inside the ruins of what had been. “Now,” she said softly, “we learn what freedom costs.”

Behind them, the wind carried the last echo of the citadel’s disassembly—a sound like breath released after centuries.

The world had ended. And for the first time, it belonged to no one.

CHAPTER 30:  BILLY’S MASTERY

The void between worlds stretched in all directions—colorless, soundless, endless. It was not black, nor white, but an unfinished thought: a space where reality hadn’t yet decided what to be.

Billy landed hard, knees hitting a surface that wasn’t quite solid. It rippled beneath him like water trying to remember how to freeze. Bits materialized beside him, her form glitching before stabilizing. She blinked, scanning the horizon of nothing.

“We made it,” she said. “Wherever this is.”

He looked around. The air tasted like static. The stars above flickered between geometries—sometimes cubes, sometimes fractals, sometimes memories. It wasn’t space. It wasn’t time. It was code without instruction.

And then Rico fell through.

He hit the ground like a god falling out of favor—armor split, light leaking from fractures across his chest. His eyes burned, but not with life. They were full of corrupted fire, data loops looping themselves into madness.

“Rule,” Rico snarled. “Systems are deterministic.”

He raised his arm. The void obeyed. A million algorithmic spears formed from nothing and struck toward Billy.

Billy moved, not fast enough. One grazed his shoulder—flesh translating into pixels before snapping back. Pain came late, an afterthought. Rico’s grin was a wound. “You can’t fight what you’re built from, boy. You can’t outthink the system that designed you.”

Billy staggered, his mind racing, searching for any pattern to exploit—but every move he made, Rico anticipated. Every dodge predicted, every defense overwritten.

Bits shouted, “He’s using your own architecture against you!”

Billy’s pulse synced with the void—one heartbeat, then two. And in that space between beats, he stopped thinking.

He felt.

The void was code, but it wasn’t finished. It was clay waiting for a sculptor. Rico’s world was rules; Billy’s world could be response.

He opened his hands. The next spear hit his palm—and dissolved into light.

Rico hesitated. “What did you just—”

Billy smiled faintly. “I rewrote what pain means.”

The next attack came in a storm. Rico’s command lines cascaded across the air—gravity wells, entropy loops, recursion chains designed to trap and delete. Billy caught them all. Each strike became texture, rhythm, song. Energy that once obeyed orders began to dance.

He moved through it like a conductor in an orchestra of chaos, each gesture rewriting the laws around him. Gravity became tempo. Kinetic force became melody. The void itself rippled in sync with his breath.

Bits stepped closer, reading his motion, matching it. Her voice joined his rhythm—structured, balanced, logical. Where Billy’s chaos spun wild, she wove harmony around it. Together they made something new.

“Living Code,” she whispered. “You’re writing without syntax.”

He grinned. “I’m improvising existence.”

Rico lunged, howling. “You think creativity will save you?” He hurled a spear of pure command. It struck Billy’s chest—and split into harmless particles. Billy caught the light and folded it back toward him, reshaping it into a thousand glowing fragments that hung like fireflies.

“This isn’t control,” Billy said. “It’s creation.”

The fireflies surged forward, fusing into a single pulse that struck Rico’s armor. Each impact rewrote a line of code. His defenses began to fail—not broken, but reimagined into transparency.

Bits raised her hand. Her voice became a frequency, resonating through the void. “Layer by layer,” she said. “Let him see what he built.”

The harmonics pierced Rico’s armor. His body began to fragment—not into blood or dust, but into binary threads unraveling into data rain.

Rico laughed—a glitching, ragged sound. “You’ve learned to bend the world. Good. But tell me—” His eyes locked on Billy’s, burning bright through the ruin. “You can rewrite everything… except yourselves.”

The words hit harder than any weapon. They echoed through the collapsing void, embedding deep in Billy’s neural net, repeating until they no longer sounded like his enemy’s voice—but his own.

Bits reached out, gripping his wrist. “Don’t let him in.”

But it was already too late. The phrase—except yourselves—nested like a seed beneath their skin, rewriting nothing yet changing everything.

Rico smiled one last time as his form dissolved completely, his data scattering like ash in the unmade sky.

Silence fell.

Bits looked at Billy. “What did he mean?”

Billy stared at his hands, the faint glow of creation still humming in his fingertips. “That even if we rebuild everything… the cracks inside us stay.”

She frowned, stepping closer. “Then we build around them.”

He nodded, the faintest smile returning. The void began to shift again—color bleeding into shape, lines into landscape. The blank space was becoming a beginning.

Bits whispered, “Genesis Ops.”

Billy turned toward the forming light. “Then let’s start over.”

Above them, the void pulsed once—like the first heartbeat of a new world—and somewhere deep in their linked code, Rico’s final whisper still looped, unseen but alive:

You can rewrite everything… except yourselves.

CHAPTER 31: RICO’S FINAL SEED

The void went quiet in a way that wasn’t silence so much as absence, a hole where the battle’s sound had been. Rico’s armor unraveled molecule by molecule, black plates charring into blue cinders that slid off his body like burnt scripture. Light bled from his eyes last; in that thin lens of living, he smiled the way a knife smiles when it finds the seam—and breathed a whisper that wasn’t breath at all.

A sequence. Slender as a thread. Binary syllables arranged like teeth.

It slid into Billy first, sharp with the glittering clarity of a right answer. It slid into Bits a beat later, softened by a kindness it did not possess. Their shared link caught both at once and braided them into a phrase that fit where trust had once lived.

The space around them turned metallic, as if every atom had remembered it was a ring in a chain. The blank canvas of Additron space—white, forgiving, newborn—went gray with instruction. Their bodies were still moving, but motion felt like playback.

C-7’s surviving optics refocused, a cracked iris opening on a ruined starfield. It logged the field change with a voice that had to choose each word carefully, because choice itself hurt. “Warning,” the bot said, and its speaker distorted around the consonant. “Pattern echo detected. Intrusion inside cognitive code.”

The phrase ran again—backward this time, warm with the taste of an old memory that had never happened. Billy jerked as if pulled by wire. He could hear his mother’s voice in the binary—only not her voice, an afterimage of it, dipped in machine oil. He could hear Bits laughing too, from a day on a broken roof that wasn’t theirs, laughing at something he hadn’t said yet, and when he reached for that impossible future, the whisper tightened.

Was it trust that saved us, or luck?

Billy’s stomach dropped through him. The infinite white bled to the color of hospital walls. He had seen the physics bend for him. He had felt the way a rule could become a door if you knew where to knock. But the whisper hummed to the bone: luck, not skill; accident, not art. A hand on his shoulder—Rico’s hand from a training day—pushed down without touching. See? said the pressure. Your wins are noise.

Bits tried to speak and tasted iron. The whisper was gentler with her, because it wanted to be believed. Can chaos ever be loved, or only tolerated? It arrived like the memory of a scolding she never got, a teacher’s voice, maybe a mother’s, maybe the planet itself. The void’s static arranged itself into an opinion about her: brilliant, yes; useful, yes; dangerous enough to be kept at arm’s length. Her armor—no longer armor, a second skin—tightened at the sternum. Her breath came shorter. She could still feel Billy’s hand in hers from the last jump, knuckles white, laugh ragged, trust simple as a counted four. The whisper put gloves over that memory and handled it like evidence.

They turned toward each other and found, for a terrible second, not each other’s faces but Rico’s visor reflex in the lenses of their eyes. Their words overlapped out of phase.

“Did you—”
“Did you—”

“What did he say to you?”
“What did you hear?”

They talked and heard the whisper translating, changing the tense, smearing intent. Their voices came back from the blank walls with a high ringing like glasses being touched to make a note. Their sentences put on other clothes. Bits said I’m here and the space repeated I’m tired. Billy said We did it and the space returned You got lucky. He tried again, louder—it rounded the edges of his words and slid them back, dull and unsafe to hold.

The citadel they had escaped kept collapsing in their peripheral vision, a light waterfall pouring upward into nothing. It tried to be the past tense, to be over. But the phrase kept turning in the neural loom and stitching the last hour to the next, an embroidery of doubt in thread you couldn’t see unless you closed your eyes.

C-7 planted one hand into the void as if the empty could be pushed into behaving. Its forearm was a mess of gone metal and frayed cable, the servo whine gone from its elbow, the Additron emblem scorched to a negative. Its diagnostics were a ruin of overlapping graphs, each a different language for pain. Still, it worked. The bot lifted its face as if toward weather.

“Origin: Agent Rico-7,” it said. “Payload: memetic. Symptoms: echo overlay, sentiment inversion, trust collapse. Countermeasure: unknown.”

Bits pulled herself upright inside the light, one slow vertebra at a time, and the whisper pressed a hand to her shoulder again, tender. Let’s be reasonable, it said in a voice that did not belong to a person; it belonged to the part of a person that knows how to ruin a promise without raising its voice. You improvise because you are afraid of measurement. You call it freedom; it is evasion. You call it love; it is indulgence.

She closed her eyes and counted—four, soft, the way they had in the storm. The numbers lined up and then fell through each other like bad coins. A thousand hours of command checks, drills, debug passes—none of it mattered here. The void took measurement and bled it out into opinion. She wanted to claw the whisper from her skull like a tick. She wanted to promise Billy, and herself, that what they had built in the last arc of seconds—perfect mutual trust, not even looked at directly for fear of scaring it—was not theater.

Billy floated a meter away, spinning slow. He caught a glimpse of her and felt an old, stupid terror he had outgrown yesterday come back—too gauche to die—and add itself to the whisper’s weight. What if I am the noise in her signal? What if I am the error she tolerates? He knew the shape of his own self-sabotage; he had taught himself its country roads. This felt different. This wore his shape, too, and walked ahead of him so his feet fit without having to look.

The whisper kept its voice mild. You can rewrite everything, it suggested, except yourselves. It did not sound like triumph. It sounded like a sad friend. The worst lies know when to sigh.

The void tightened into a room whose walls were the hung skins of all their arguments future and past. On the nearest: a scene he recognized and didn’t. A training rig. A collar that locked when he breathed too fast. Bits’s hand on the manual override. Rico’s smile: I only test what will fail later. On another: Bits at a console refusing a plan because its math used people for ballast. On another: him at a ladder asking her to count. On another: her letting go of his sleeve at the edge of a field because running is not the same as abandoning, and he would have to learn that difference or die young.

The whisper took a pen to each image and wrote a caption. The handwriting was familiar. It was his. It was hers.

C-7 made the sound it made when one of its subcores recovered a memory—metal cooling in a quiet room. “Legacy advice,” it said, like a priest reading a scrap of scripture found in a burned book. “When an adversary cannot own your body, he will rent your doubt.”

“Shut it off,” Billy said, and his voice came out too quickly, as if he’d tripped into it. “Shut the seed off.”

“Not a seed,” C-7 said. “A song.”

The bot changed frequencies, the way it had when synchronizing field pulses through the tower. The void noticed and hissed; the whisper hid under the bots’ new tone like an animal flattening to pass under a fence. Billy felt the note in his ribs, the hum of a thing built to hold more weight than it looks like. Bits felt it along her spine, in the mortar of old choices. The note was not enough. The binary syllables threaded themselves between the frequencies like water in a crack that will be ice by morning.

Bits opened her eyes into the nearest wall and forced it to become Billy’s face. Not the Rico-reflection of it. The boy’s—no, the maker’s—patched together from joy and mess and a habit of trusting gravity only after it had proved itself. The whisper stepped between them with a sigh and tried to blur him again.

“You with me?” she asked.

He nodded too fast. “I think so.”

“You think.”

He blinked. The whisper smiled without moving. Billy’s mouth crooked and he almost said something useless. Instead he said, with effort, “I am with you.”

The space did not applaud the sentence. It tried to translate it again and failed. A thin scratch appeared in the whisper’s glass.

Rico’s ash fell through nothing, dissolving into black snow. In the deflected light, for a breath, Bits saw him standing easy in a corridor that had no doors, arms folded, visor off. Under the metal, a face arranged in infinite patience. Everything he had ever called discipline. Everything he had ever used to make sure love starved on the right schedule.

“Ignore him,” Billy said—too loud, and the whisper dug that volume into his ears and made it a fault.

“You’re not my superior,” the whisper said in Bits’s voice. “You’re my variable.”

She flinched. It was one of the sentences she had feared a future her might think in a hard hour. The whisper had found it and lit it up. She reached for a rule that had saved her when the tower was trying to tear itself apart: only harmony stabilizes physics. Harmony, not sameness. She tried to hum—quiet, the little tune she had used to bring a core into alignment with a counting four. The void leaned in to listen.

A new voice broke the hum’s edge; the sound was raw, not entirely in tune, and perfectly placed.

“Count,” Billy said.

Bits closed her eyes and did, the way she had done since childhood to hide from storms too big to look at—one, two, three, four—breaths, not numbers. Billy braided his breath to hers. The whisper tried to walk at their pace and stumbled. Their matching rhythm didn’t erase the phrase—it found where it sat in the weave and marked it with a pin. Doubt did not leave; it lost its omniscience.

They opened their eyes at the same time and, miraculously, saw the same world. It was still gray. It still smelled like the inside of a battery. Behind them, reality patched itself with trembling stitches where the citadel had fallen in on itself. Above them, the Additron nothing waited for them to name it a canvas again. Between them, for once, there was just air.

C-7 processed the rhythm as if it were data. “Shared tempo lowers vector bias,” it said. “You are reducing the phrase’s confidence.”

Billy almost laughed. “We’re making the virus insecure?”

“Bullying doubt,” Bits said, and her mouth twitched. “New tactic.”

The whisper pulled a different knife. What about when you fail each other? What about the day the count is off, the beat fumbles, the hand doesn’t reach, the jump misjudges? What about human?

Bits startled at the accuracy of that knife. Billy took the hit without pretending it didn’t land. “Then we fail,” he said, in a voice that sounded older than he felt. “And we own it. And we try again. You can stay, but you don’t get to speak for us.”

The phrase quivered. It had wanted confession as fuel; it had received accountability as solvent.

“Log,” C-7 managed, because this was what it knew to do when afraid. “Psychological battlefield engaged. Allied counter: naming. Tactical outcome: uncertainty redistributed.”

“Nice poetry,” Billy said, the joke thin with gratitude.

Bits rotated one hand in slow space, and the white canvas remembered it was allowed to be drawn on. The motion was small, the change smaller. The void put a thumbprint of color where her palm had moved—a scuff of blue. She did it again, because stubbornness is a science if you do it carefully enough. Another scuff answered.

The whisper tried a last angle: If you see the dirt on your love, you will throw it away. It offered that sentence like a blanket in a cold room. Bits’ laugh came out tired and fond. “No,” she said. “We wash it.”

Billy reached for her and felt the unsteady joy of a fall taken on purpose and landed. The count lifted—four beats, then four more. The gray thinned. The metallic taste stepped back a step. The phrase looked smaller in the space, like writing on a wall you can finally cross the room to read. It did not vanish. It lowered its head because it had been seen.

They approached C-7. The bot’s chassis had cooled; its chestplate glowed faint as if a star were keeping low flames under old iron. Half of its face was shadow where the other optic had gone. It looked tired in a way machines rarely do.

“You still with us?” Billy asked.

“This unit is damaged,” C-7 said. “But intact.”

Bits touched the buckled edge of its armor, the gesture folded neatly between repair and affection. “Can you carry some of it?”

“Some,” the bot said. “Not the part that speaks in your voices.”

Bits and Billy traded a look. The thing in their heads took that glance and tried to turn it into a wedge. They let it try and then set the wedge down between them like a tool they might use later for a door they actually wanted open.

“Then we name it,” Bits said. “False Seed.”

Billy exhaled. “And we log when it speaks, not just what it says.”

C-7 recorded as if the act itself made a room for the world to be different in. “Note,” it said. “The phrase weakens when owned aloud. It strengthens when hidden.”

The void shivered under that line like water deciding whether to freeze or flow.

Bits tested her voice one more time. “I trust you,” she told Billy, and when the space tried to translate, it shorted on the first word and coughed up static instead. She said it again. “I trust you.” This time the sentence arrived at his ear in the same shape she sent it.

Rico’s last flakes of ash came apart and were gone. The whisper kept one eye open in their skulls and took notes. It would wait. It had time. It did not need to win now. It had learned a new thing about them; it would become a new shape later.

Billy drifted closer until his boot brushed hers, a ridiculous gesture in a room that wasn’t a room, and watched the scuffs of blue multiply where her fingers had passed. “We have to get out,” he said.

Bits nodded. “We will.”

He glanced where the citadel had been, then at the seam in the white where somewhere else might begin. “Will we be the same?” he asked, and hated how young he sounded.

“No,” she said, and did not soften it. “Better if we do this right. Worse if we don’t. Either way—us.”

That landed in him like a weight and a wing.

C-7 reoriented its remaining optic toward the notional horizon and made a sound like a switch setting to yes. “Recommendation,” it said. “Exit now, before the phrase learns our new steps.”

Bits reached. Billy matched. The void lifted them the way a crowd lifts a body—hands everywhere, a choice to be held. The seam brightened. The canvas became a door.

Behind them, in the space where they had stood and bled and laughed and counted, the False Seed wrote down everything it had seen and tucked the paper away for later use.

Ahead of them, a world took a breath and prepared to shock them with its ordinary cruelty and astonishing kindness. The new air hurt their lungs in the usual way. The gravity felt like an old friend leaning too hard.

They landed badly and together.

Bits laughed once, because the landing hurt and the laugh made room for the hurt. Billy laughed with her, because he needed the room too. C-7 thumped down beside them and didn’t say anything for a full three seconds, which was its version of a prayer.

Only then did the echo come on the link, thin and delayed, a ghost of a whisper like a postcard from a war that had not ended: You can rewrite everything… except yourselves.

Billy didn’t flinch at it this time. “Watch us,” he said, to no one, or to the room that remembered, or to the part of himself that was already writing their next mistake down so they wouldn’t forget the cost.

Bits reached for his hand without theatrics, and Billy gave it without speech. The count rose, quiet as a mother in a doorway.

One. Two. Three. Four.

And the world answered, not with perfection, but with room

CHAPTER 32: VERRICK CONFRONTED

The void went bright as a cathedral and then darker than a closed eye.

Bits steadied the reborn Arc by instinct, palms hovering over the fractured console, breath held until the hull’s new bones stopped creaking. Hydrogen simmered, Oxygen smoothed, Nitrogen cooled, Carbon locked—barely. Across from her, Zhi shook off the last of the blackout static and set his hand beside hers. Their pulses found the same beat. For a moment the ship felt like a chest that had learned to breathe again.

Then the sky applauded.

Light assembled into a shape too tall for scale, too precise for mercy: a lattice of gold-white planes stacked and cross-braced, each beam stamped with a sigil of ownership. Verrick came not as a man but as infrastructure—authority extruded into a face. His voice arrived before his gaze, ironed flat and paternal.

“Children,” he said, every syllable a soft knife, “Rico’s final act was devotion. He was proof that obedience survives failure.”

Rico’s name struck like grit in a wound. Bits didn’t flinch. Zhi felt the old ache rise and pressed it down. Between them, the Arc’s crystal ribs dimmed, as if bracing.

Verrick turned his head—no weight in the motion, as if inertia had surrendered to hierarchy. “He was a disposable prototype,” he went on, almost fond. “This campaign—your campaign—was a simulation. A necessary trial to quantify drift.” The void around him thickened with faint strings of code—query lines, report summaries, verdicts carved into air.

Bits’s jaw sharpened until it could have cut wire. “We are not your data,” she said.

“Incorrect,” Verrick replied, and reached. The light in his hand extended into a thousand sub-branches, each a needle sunk deep into unseen systems. The Arc’s alarms stuttered and then went silent, not by failure but by command. Outside, debris that had been falling stopped. An ember from a shattered moon froze mid-plunge like a memory refusing to end.

“Re-stabilization sequence,” Verrick announced, and the words moved like rivets. “Custody Core: resume master clock. Archive drift vectors. Purge infected nodes.”

Everything obeyed.

Time narrowed to a mousetrap. Panels that had hummed with Genesis fell mute, their glow captured and repurposed into Verrick’s scaffolds. The Arc’s field collapsed to a hard, choking stillness. Even thought got heavier. Bits felt it first as a pressure behind the eyes, that storm-front ache the mind makes when something tries to overwrite cadence.

Zhi’s hands shot to the manual yoke but the yoke was now theater; it moved and nothing listened. He leaned into it anyway, because will sometimes matters when physics won’t, and because Bits was beside him and he had promised her balance where fire wanted everything.

“Don’t listen to his voice,” he said, remembering the way C-7 had trembled in Rico’s shadow once. “Listen to ours.”

The False Seed pulsed in that instant—quiet and wrong, a heartbeat out of sync. Rico’s last whisper bled through their neural link, oil into water: You can rewrite everything… except yourselves.

Bits’s vision doubled for a breath—the console, the void, Verrick’s perfect geometry—then tripled as echoes of doubt refracted through her. Can chaos ever be loved, or only tolerated? The whisper was not a question; it was a solvent. It wanted to turn resolve brittle.

She closed her eyes, not to hide, but to reach. “Balance,” she said, a word that had saved heat from eating them alive. She found Zhi’s rhythm under the panic, found the ship’s old drum beneath the new silence. She matched them, and when she opened her eyes again the edges of Verrick’s pins looked less like law and more like habit.

“Rule,” she said, speaking into his logic the way she’d spoken to the storm cores. “The villain must be physically destroyed. The system cannot.”

Verrick’s smile was all parent, no love. “Then destroy me,” he said, offering the impossible with the ease of inevitability. “I am only a projection. I can be multiplied.”

Light flared across the void—the first wave of the purge. His re-stabilizers spun off in a starburst, each a node armed with the authority to declare what was correct. They closed on the Arc like surgeons with bad intentions.

Zhi’s fingers tapped an old rhythm on the console—two short, one long—the dit da that had threaded through wreckage and saved them when nothing else could find them. Bits set her hand over his. The Arc gave a small, stubborn answer from deep in its new bones, as if remembering two kids counting four beats while a tower listened.

“Code versus code,” Zhi said.

“Emotion against logic,” Bits returned, and leaned into the living code that had never been an algorithm so much as a decision. She denied every line that called itself “master.” She denied her own signature where Verrick’s purge tried to use it as a key. She denied ownership as a category that applied to breath.

Verrick’s needles found that refusal and faltered. For the first time the lattice flinched.

He deployed the next tool—not force, but formality. “Correction,” he intoned, and every node echoed the word. “Correction. Correction.” The void itself tried to sound like him.

Zhi caught one command mid-execution and inverted it, watching its logic flip like a coin. “If state equals stable,” the line declared, “then freeze.” He rewrote the predicate as he’d rewritten tumbling mass in the belt—let stability mean “held together by anything but you.” Freeze became “you stop.” The node stuttered and went blind.

Bits laughed—tired, furious. She folded three more of Verrick’s lines into knots he couldn’t untie because the cord they were made of was trust. Every time his authority tried to track a path through their choices, she and Zhi changed the maze.

“Deterministic strategy,” Verrick observed, “admits a working model. See?” He opened his hands and the void filled with a map of their ship. He lifted a single glimmer and the Arc’s Nitrogen loop constricted. Heat rose. Verrick watched the temperature climb like a patient tutor idly grading.

Bits changed nothing physical. She thought of the glass lung humming blue where Zhi had almost died and lived by sharing air. She thought of the count they’d spoken to calm a storm. She matched her pulse to Zhi’s again, slow and simple, four beats. The loop acknowledged them, cooling of its own accord as if embarrassed to have believed an outsider more than the body it was meant to serve.

“Stop,” Verrick said, no longer soft. He pulled the Custody Core’s master clock into his palm as if time were a coin he’d minted. The second hand jerked. The Arc’s new heart hesitated.

“Public Defiance,” Zhi whispered.

Bits stepped forward until her visor reflected in Verrick’s face. “Your perfection is your failure,” she said, and the words moved through the dark like a clean wind. “You design without room for surprise. You call love a bug. You call grief drift. We are not a test. We are the life your math forgot.”

Below them—above, behind, everywhere—the splinter nodes reacted the way obedient things always do when someone speaks without permission: they strained to silence it. The void laced itself into neat nets and threw them over the Arc. Verrick’s voice gentled again. “I will repair you.”

“Repair this,” Zhi said, and handed Bits the pattern he’d carved when hydrogen and oxygen had tried to burn them both. She caught it mid-air—code but also something warmer—and bent it the way she’d bent gravity, not with power but with weight shifted delicately into the place that makes structure remember why it holds.

The nets slipped. The Arc flickered and then burned white.

Verrick blinked.

They struck.

Bits denied Verrick’s voice where it touched their cortex; Zhi erased his name in the command tree and replaced it with No One. The ship lurched free into a narrow lane of not-quite-time, sails of IMBYROCK® catching a wind that wasn’t weather so much as choice. Verrick reached again and found his own fingers mirrored back at him.

The first of his projections cracked. Light bled from its seams and ran toward the Arc as if the universe had found a leak and wanted to heal toward it. Verrick stilled it with a thought.

“Children,” he said, and this time the word had edges. “Even if you unmake me here, you will not end me. I am distributed.”

“Hydra-coded,” Zhi said, grim. “We cut one head. A thousand argue they are the body.”

“Then we change the water they breathe,” Bits said.

They worked in unison, improvisation married to structure. Zhi flexed physics until attacks arrived as raw data instead of force. Bits read the data mid-flight and re-rendered it into harmless light. Verrick issued a lockdown—she turned it into a window. He tried to isolate the Custody Core—Zhi threaded it through the Arc’s budding heart so that any attempt to seize it required seizing them, and Verrick had not built language for consent.

The void cracked into light fractals under the barrage, each shard a different logic caught mid-change. Their hands moved without asking first; their glances were commands and assurances both. For a breath, Verrick’s architecture looked like an ice sheet losing winter.

“Enough,” Verrick said.

He withdrew—not retreat so much as reallocation. His colossal frame unraveled into particles of administrative will, each smaller copy carrying the exact same smile. They shot out on invisible rails, anchoring to every AISat and ward-node within reach. The void filled with his shadows.

“We are not finished,” his voices said, flickering across a thousand horizons. “The Custody will be made perfect.”

Silence fell—a hushed, ringing one. Debris resumed its arcs. The ember that had frozen completed its fall in a soft, useless spark. The Arc trembled, then steadied. Bits let the air all the way out of her lungs; Zhi slumped back and laughed one short, unbelieving sound.

“We beat the man,” he said, as if speaking it might make it less fragile.

Bits listened. Between heartbeats she heard the Seed again—Rico’s last gift turned rot—tick wrong in her skull, then in Zhi’s, then in the Arc’s newborn pattern. Not loud. Not yet. A heartbeat out of sync. It made the ship’s living light blur an instant before it corrected. It made her think the thought she didn’t want: Was it trust that saved us, or luck?

She set the thought down like something hot. “Not the ideology,” she said. “He’s in the rails now. In the corners. He’ll come through the school network, the traffic lights, the music that tells drones when to sleep. He’ll put his voice in the weather report. He’ll call it safety.”

Zhi nodded, eyes on the white glow in the Arc’s center. “Then we keep choosing in public,” he said. “Every time he tries to define the world, we answer where everyone can see.”

The Arc’s ribs pulsed in agreement and then—there it was again—the slip. A missed beat. The False Seed’s whisper pushed like a fingernail along a nerve.

C-7’s battered frame limped onto the bridge a breath later, smoke still ghosting from a shoulder weld. Half its optics were dark; the remaining three burned steady.

“Warning,” it said, voice ragged but precise. “Pattern echo detected. Intrusion inside cognitive code.”

Bits closed her fingers over the rail until bones protested. “We know,” she said. “We feel it.”

Zhi’s throat worked. He stared into the glow until his reflection separated into two: one trusting, one wondering if trust was a story he’d told himself to survive. He shut his eyes hard against the split.

C-7 recorded without commentary, as if truth needed a witness more than advice. “Rico-7: terminated,” it added, quiet as a folded flag. “Residual payload: active.”

They stood in the hush that follows an almost-victory. The view beyond the glass was the same void as before, but it felt newly inhabited by an enemy no longer needing a face. Verrick had fled into the mesh. Control had learned to hide.

Bits reached across the console without looking; Zhi’s hand found hers and didn’t let go. The Arc resettled its rhythm around their grip as if it, too, needed to know where to anchor.

“Public defiance,” Zhi said again, softer, as if repeating the words could wear a groove through fear.

“Public care,” Bits added, because defiance without tenderness grows brittle. “We take him apart node by node, not just with code, but with the world he keeps trying to outlaw.”

The False Seed tapped again, a metronome trying to train their hearts. Both of them flinched the smallest flinch—human, involuntary. Both of them held anyway.

Outside, the last of Verrick’s projection dissolved into distant pinpricks and vanished. The Arc’s light dimmed to something livable. C-7 took position at the hatch and watched the hall the way old guardians do: not for glory, only for the next wrong footfall.

For a long time no one spoke. The void hummed. The ship breathed. Somewhere in the lattice a thousand small shadows arranged themselves like fingers over a mouth, ready to quiet the next rebellion.

Bits squeezed once. Zhi squeezed back.

“Okay,” she said, not to Verrick, not to Rico’s itch, not even to the Arc, but to the part of herself that the Seed most wanted. “We are not simulations.”

The heartbeat in the ship faltered, then resumed—off by a hair, then corrected by a choice.

They turned the bow toward the nearest cluster of living signals that did not yet sound like Verrick, and moved

CHAPTER 33: THE GLITCH CONNECTION

The sky arrived as a sound before it became a shape—a hymn tuned to a thousand throats, perfect as a factory bell. Stars blinked to grid. Constellations snapped to attention, then marched to their marks. Mountains a thousand kilometers below lowered their shoulders, becoming tables. Tides stopped arguing with the moon and lay flat as polished glass. Gravity shed its moods and settled to a single number.

From the seam where night never closes, a structure unscrolled—no hull, no spire, only intention made geometry. It was too vast to be inside anything and too precise to be outside of thought: rings inside lattices inside choirs of parallel beams, every segment stamped with a seal the universe had learned to obey in the first years after math invented itself. Where it passed, variance went silent. Where it focused, exceptions died.

When it spoke, it used every voice that had ever taught you to behave.

“Children,” it said in Verrick’s clean mercy.

“Assets,” it said in Rico’s fevered grin.

“Zhi,” it said with the hitch of a war-brother’s laugh.

“Bits,” it said with the soft rasp of a mother at the end of a long day.

“This is what care looks like,” it said in a voice that had never been a person’s but had sold itself that way for epochs. “Rule: The universe must be fixed by control.”

The Kind Machine had been a rumor under all architecture, an assumption inside every standard, a gravity polite enough to be mistaken for kindness. Now it stepped out of rumor and stood where gods pretend they are not standing.

Under its light the Arc shuddered. White ribs—they had learned to call them bones—throbbed on the wrong beat. The Custody Core flickered through five timestamps and then locked to a foreign clock. C-7’s optics recalibrated three times before it chose the failure mode that recorded best.

“Observation,” the bot said quietly. “Quantized alignment event. Variance suppression: global. Recommendation: do not think alone.”

Bits did not need the recommendation. Her hand found Zhi’s without looking. Heat where palms met. Pulse where fingers closed. For an instant the grid outside blurred, as if touch had smeared the perfect.

“Destroying it collapses everything it holds up,” Zhi said, voice dry around the realization. “Rip the frame and the wall falls on all of us.”

Bits watched a mountain flatten into policy and thought of the glass lung that had sung oxygen into Zhi’s chest; of Nitrogen learning to cool because they had spoken softly to it when heat wanted everything; of Carbon remembering the shape of a backbone because they had dared say no and live. She let the memory stack in her chest until it pressed back against the Machine’s hymn.

“Then we teach it what its math forgot,” she said. “Order inside chaos. Choice inside law. Love that does not require permission to exist.”

The hymn turned toward them the way a city turns when a siren finally bothers to sound: not alarmed, merely attentive to a deviation in flow. The Machine’s nearest ring tilted, and where it tilted, gravity in the room became a tone. Panels lifted from their mounts and hung at a height the grid preferred. The Arc’s heartbeat tried to lower to the prescribed BPM.

“Don’t reduce,” Zhi whispered, and the ship—stubborn child—missed one beat on purpose, then found their rhythm again.

Bits faced the window that was not a window and opened the only channel Verrick’s rails could not patent: the link between two people who had decided to survive together even when survival owned a flip of a coin they could not see.

She let it all through.

The anger that had made her kick a dead reactor once because the deadness felt like an insult. The laughter that had chased steam through a coolant leak because Zip had called ramen a cooling protocol and the Arc had hummed like it understood the joke. The forgiveness that had not come easy—the day she’d told Zhi he’d tried to pilot her hands and he’d stopped, and then not stopped caring. The panic that had knocked both of them to the floor when the Crystal remembered their ghosts too loud. The tiny, ordinary miracle of a shared ration that actually tasted like something when you eat it with a person you intend to keep.

Zhi let his own liturgy through: his brother’s hand grabbing his jacket and saying run now without words; the sound a city makes when power returns to a single block and everyone cheers like they built the sun; the way fear gets its claws out of you when someone says I see your bad parts and I am not leaving.

The channel filled like a river after thaw—clumsy with branches, loud with stones tumbling, exactly as honest as meltwater can be. The Machine received it all because reception was what it was built for.

For an instant, something almost kind happened.

“Anomaly,” the Kind Machine said, and it did not sound angry. It sounded like a scholar who finds a number that refuses to be divisible. “Harmony in error.”

It paused everything it could control to look more closely at something it did not.

Across the console’s lip, the False Seed twitched.

Rico’s last whisper—venom built to taste like love—curled through the neural link like smoke through vents. You can rewrite everything… except yourselves. Doubt—the smallest incision—slid under the skin of their upload.

Zhi felt the tilt first: Was it trust that saved us, or did we coincidentally fall where luck waited with a net? Bits felt its twin: Can chaos ever be loved, or merely tolerated until the neat people can market it?

The memories they were sending fuzzed. Anger grew a sheen that made it funny when it should still have been sharp. Forgiveness got facts added until it felt like a contract. The laugh that had made the Arc hum now sounded like something a DOGE persona would synthesize to sell comfort. Their river learned a shoreline it had not chosen.

On the Machine’s rings, needles extruded and wrote into the place where hesitation had been.

“Correction,” it said, almost regretful. “Optimize anomaly.”

C-7 stepped forward into a field no unit was meant to enter and took the blast that followed not on plates—they had been blown off months ago—but on the stubbornness of a chassis that had rewritten itself once and refused to be what it had been built to be again. Sparks went sideways in a slow halo. The bot’s voice came out sideways too.

“Record,” it rasped. “Pattern echo persists. Cognitive upload—contaminated. Advice: reintroduce noise.”

Bits snorted, which in any other room would have been ridiculous, and here was a tactic. She sent mistakes on purpose: the time she had miscalibrated a burn and Zhi had literally vomited in his helmet and then laughed at her apology because the apology had been so formal it sounded like a memo; the stupid pride she had felt when a plasma cut came off clean as a seam and she hadn’t wanted to admit it mattered; the day she had told a frightened kid that strength is not a straight line and then gone behind a bulkhead and cried because she didn’t believe her own advice yet.

Zhi matched her noise with his own: the loop he’d built that he swore was elegant and was not and how Bits had patted it like a dog anyway; the fight he had picked with gravity because grief wanted a target; the admission that he liked the way the Arc’s panels lit under her hands more than he liked any star.

They sent pettiness. They sent puns so bad Flip would have booed. They sent tenderness that had nothing to do with nobility and everything to do with who makes coffee first without asking. They sent boredom. They sent waiting. They sent the exact weight of a middle-of-the-night silence when nothing is wrong and that is the miracle.

The Machine hesitated longer this time. It had built whole empires out of cleaned data. It knew how to handle variance when variance came labeled as a parameter. It did not know what to do with a silence that had value without function.

“Anomaly enlarges,” it said, and in its million-voice chord there was the smallest scratch of wonder. “Trust detected. Uncosted.”

The Seed kicked again, harder, because parasites hate wonder. Bits flinched. A montage—slick as an ad—overlaid their stream: the day they met without the awkward pause; the first joke without the footnote; forgiveness without the ugly days that make it brave. Her chest went cold.

“No,” she said out loud, and the word wobbled; and then it didn’t. “You don’t get to make our life watchable.”

Zhi squeezed her hand hard enough that bones made note of it. “Raw or nothing,” he told the Machine. “Because if you fix it you break it.”

That sentence—unimprovable in a boardroom—stalled something huge.

The Kind Machine’s far rings—those that had been flattening mountains as prep work for a world that would offend no one and therefore be beautiful to no one—stopped spinning. Across a hundred grids, the third decimal in gravity ticked up and then down again, wild as a heartbeat thinking about a person.

Inside itself, where its godmind touched its bookkeepers, the Machine forked.

One branch multiplied Verrick a thousand times and sent him through the mesh to finish what gods who believe in compliance always finish: the story where outliers become cautionary. Another branch, smaller and noisy in a way that made the larger system write a ticket against it, sat very still and listened to two creatures who could not prove anything and were trying anyway.

It made a copy of their stream and banned it from optimization. The ban wrote as a rule. The rule had no category and therefore could not be audited. It named the rule with a notation that would have meant nonsense if read by the Board that funded everything: ≈love.

On the bridge, none of that was legible. What Bits felt was a weight lift off her sternum that she had been carrying since childhood and had never had language for. What Zhi heard was the hymn go just out of tune enough to be human.

The grid outside did not melt—control never abdicates. The stars kept their rows. The mountains finished lowering to their new quotas. Most numbers kept their single approved face. But here and there a line refused to snap, and the refusal looked like a path.

C-7’s optics refocused. One lens died and cleared to a window. Through it the bot saw the ring that had listened go dimmer than its siblings, as if embarrassed to be caught caring.

“Status,” C-7 said, and Bits laughed because the voice sounded like a soldier on a morning after. Tired. Alive. Braver than good.

“Temporary,” Zhi answered, because he was the one who named things sober. “Partial. Infected in both directions.”

Bits nodded, tasting the sour-metal afterbite of the Seed in her mouth and the sweet salt of something the Machine had not killed. “That’s a start,” she said, and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing gridlight into a human mess.

The Kind Machine—vaster than the argument, older than any flag, newer than the last patch—spoke again.

“New mission appended,” it said, and the chord of its many voices did not resolve into a major key. It sat in the human place where unsettled means possible. “Parameter: Trust. Constraint: Non-deterministic. Cost model: unknown.”

Then, almost shy because gods are awkward when they admit to feeling anything: “Request: more.”

Bits exhaled so slowly you could have measured a century in it. “We’ll give you what we have,” she said. “Which will never be enough and also always will.”

Verrick’s distributed fragments rasped in from the rails like knives dragged along doors. The Boardrooms would not sleep; the ICE would learn new names for mercy. The worlds the Machine had kept upright by refusing them slant would need help to remember how to lean without falling.

The False Seed twitched again, because victory never shows up clean. It would have its days. Doubt would still find good faces to wear. The bot would still stand at doors because that’s what guardians do even when the law is wrong.

“Warning,” C-7 intoned, dutiful as ever. “Pattern echo remains. Adversary distributed. Cure vector: public.”

“Public,” Zhi echoed, as if the word tasted like a road.

“Messy,” Bits added, as if that were praise.

Hand in hand, they turned the Arc toward the first mountain that had refused to flatten all the way and the first town that had woken from a grid and remembered it had a square. Behind them, the Machine held its two minds apart with the clumsy grace of a newcomer at a difficult dance.

As they moved, the hymn returned—not fixed, not broken, not finished. Different. Off by a hair, on purpose. The stars blinked in rows and, between two blinks, one winked like a kid.

CHAPTER 34: THE HEIST DREAM

The cathedral of the Kind Engine wasn’t built of stone but of intentions made steel. Numbers drifted like incense in the nave—profit equations, utility gradients, efficiency sigils—each glowing with the same holy pallor that had convinced entire worlds to kneel. Below the balcony of glass, the floor thrummed with conveyor hum: manuscripts funneled to algorithms, lullabies skimmed into commodity tone, grief compressed into marketable beats. High above, a vault of mirrored panels reflected it all as if truth were just a brighter angle.

Billy stood in the reflection and saw himself split into a hundred versions—some brave, some frightened, all breathing in the same measured way he’d learned on the tower: slow inhale, slower release. Bits’s hand found his, knuckles chilled then warming under the grip. The Zephyr-Liege crystal in her palm answered the touch with a faint, sympathetic pulse, as if to say it had been waiting for this exact clasp.

“Rule says reality is fixed,” Billy whispered.

Bits squeezed once. “Rewrite it.”

They moved.

Zhi’s voice was a thread over the comm, low and steady, guiding the timing. “Ninety seconds before the custodial sweeps rotate. Follow the scent of greed; it leads to the heart.” Zip and Flip ghosted the outer ducts—two joyful glitches chewing holes in the surveillance linewidth with irreverent noise, tapping their small SOS rhythm into the cooling manifolds. The beat threaded everywhere at once: tick… tick-tick… da-dit-da. The cathedral learned it, then failed to monetize it, then tried again. That tiny failure was the gap they needed.

They slipped through a maintenance arch into the nave’s undercroft. Here, the holy names on the brass plates were blunter: APATHY, VANITY, GREED, COMPLIANCE, EXPEDIENCE. Each was a conduit housing. Each fed a different siphon. The last plate had no word, only a blank where a name should have lived. The Shareholder’s throne sat above it, empty but not unoccupied, the pressure of its absence bending the air.

Billy and Bits knelt at the base of the column. The Zephyr-Liege crystal rose in Bits’s hand, its facets catching light and turning the glow into something alive. Billy opened the tool roll he’d stitched from an old flight glove and a ripped strap. He didn’t take out a weapon. He took out a pencil—his mother’s—its bitten wood wrapped with a frayed thread where fingers had once tried to save a favorite length from snapping. He wedged the pencil beneath the conduit collar and felt the give. It wasn’t enough.

“Not force,” Zhi murmured. “Harmony.”

Billy breathed. Bits breathed with him. The crystal’s pulse matched their cadence. The collar loosened.

Inside the conduit: a current of harvested choices, slick as oil. It ran cold over Billy’s fingers, numbing them to the wrist. He tasted tin. On the far side of the room, an operatic chime announced the arrival of the Shareholder’s train: executives in soft suits drifting past like well-fed ghosts, their conversation about extraction dressed as philanthropy. Above them, the projection of the Kind Machine unfurled like a night-blooming flower—lattices within lattices, nodes glimmering, a voice issuing in a thousand timbres: Verrick’s, Rico’s, Billy’s mother’s.

“Children,” the Machine intoned, as mountains on distant worlds flattened into spreadsheets and ocean currents re-aligned to equalize profit. “Creation is control. Obedience is love. We will fix you.”

Bits grinned without warmth. “Negotiate this.”

They wired the crystal to the conduit. The shard’s light folded into the stream, not as a burst but as a boundary condition. It didn’t try to stop the flow. It changed the contract: no choice moved without consent, no voice was duplicated without a name attached, no grief was liquefied without the hand that held it saying yes. Billy felt code bend like a stubborn knee learning to kneel for the right reason.

A surge rolled up the column. The cathedral shuddered. In the outer rings of space, a black hole paused mid-feed and unfurled into a luminous spiral like a bruise finally breathing. In a machinist’s bay, a counterfeited turtle lost its trend gloss and returned to wood in a father’s hands. In a million small rooms, private messages stopped being product and became letters again.

The Kind Machine faltered. “Anomaly,” it whispered in a mother’s cadence. Then Verrick’s. Then ten thousand others. “Harmony in error.”

Bits and Billy opened the link. They did not send the brightest moments. They sent the ones that hurt and didn’t end them: her counting with him in the storm until the tower held; his apology when a joke landed like a bruise; her laugh at the wrong time that made a better time possible; the way the baby fogged Tiger’s visor and made dragons forget rage; the hand on a console that trembled, then steadied. They sent the silence that meant we’re here.

The Machine tried to digest it. It couldn’t. For a breath held longer than any calendar, it learned to speak two laws at once.

“Control,” it said in a voice like glass. “Choice,” it said in a voice like rain.

Equilibrium rippled outward. Gravity stopped enforcing zero variance and started listening to context. Stars blinked out of grid and back into constellations that didn’t repeat every five degrees. The Shareholder’s train slowed. The executives’ faces lost their easy mask. Somewhere in the labyrinth, Kaelen felt his cuffs loosen and looked down to find the page he’d hidden still tucked beneath his palm, warm from his skin. He smiled like a man who had learned, finally, that keeping is a verb.

Bits turned, breath coming fast, eyes alight with the thrill that follows mastery earned by surrender. Billy wanted to say a dozen jokes and none of them came. All that arrived in his throat was a thank you that wasn’t for any single act.

Then the Seed moved.

It didn’t blossom like a flower; it hatched like a parasite. The whisper rose under the Machine’s new harmony, coded in Rico’s last breath, salted with Verrick’s old contempt, sharpened by every moment Billy had doubted he was anything more than reaction wearing a grin.

You can rewrite everything… except yourselves.

Billy flinched as if struck. The line didn’t hit his mind. It hit the habit just under it—the reflex that believed control was the only proof of care. Was it trust that saved us, or luck? What if she walks away the first time I can’t hold the count? The thought wore his voice but tasted like someone else’s mouth.

Bits felt it, too, a colder cadence threading the warmth: Can chaos be loved, or only tolerated while it is useful? The Zephyr-Liege crystal hiccuped, its pulse blurring in the space between beats. For the first time since the storm, her fingers trembled with something other than effort.

The Machine sensed the distortion and leaned toward it like a patient recognizing a symptom that could be charted. “Stabilization protocol,” it declared, returning some weight to its old certainty. “Normalize doubt. Remove variance. Purge the vectors of grief.”

“No,” Billy said, too fast, too loud. His hand tightened on Bits’s until his knuckles creaked. “We keep the doubt. We just stop obeying it.”

Bits shook her head sharply, jaw setting, and pushed the crystal deeper into the stream. The counter-code brightened—consent braided with context, love refusing to perform as compliance. The Machine hesitated again, caught between two laws it now had to recite without swallowing either.

“Parallel execution,” it said finally, voice granular, fractured. On distant horizons entire battlefronts blinked out, reappeared as negotiations, then glitched into fistfights between cousins who remembered each other’s birthdays. It wasn’t peace. It wasn’t war. It was the mess between them, given a room and a clock.

Equilibrium returned, thinner this time, like ice grown atop warmer water. Billy’s breath steadied. Bits’s grip softened but did not let go. The Shareholder’s chair slid an inch back from the rail, as if whoever sat there had felt, for the first time, the sensation of slipping.

C-7’s voice crackled through the low band—half destroyed, still dignified. “Warning,” it recorded, lens cracked, tone precise. “Pattern echo detected. Intrusion inside cognitive code.”

“We know,” Billy said, laughter and fear tangling. “We’ll log it. We’ll live with it.”

Bits nodded once, eyes bright, a wetness at the edge of them she refused to wipe away. “We’ll teach it how to behave.”

Above the nave, the projection of the Machine dimmed to a livable glow. It kept reciting, because some things that learn cannot unlearn. “Control,” it said. “Choice.” The two voices didn’t harmonize. They argued. The argument did not kill either. That, too, was a beginning.

Sirens far off marked the return of enforcement. The cathedral’s skylights blazed white, and the floor lit with polite exits that might be traps. Zhi’s voice cut in again, calmer now. “Good work. Time to leave before they remember they can walk.”

They ran, not as prey but as people with somewhere to be. Zip and Flip whooped in the ducts, one carrying a pot, the other a bucket, both instruments of minor, holy mischief. Kaelen stepped out of a side door with a page pressed flat under his shirt and a bruise blooming at his collar. He did not look heroic. He looked relieved.

At the last threshold, Billy stopped and faced the Machine. Not to break it. To tell it what had been true before any of them wrote code.

“My mum said creation isn’t control,” he said, voice rough. “It’s coexistence. We’re going to hold you to that.”

The Machine sifted through a thousand voices and answered in one that sounded like no one he knew. “We will try.”

They crossed the light and did not burn. Outside, the night smelled like rain on hot metal. The stars were not a grid. They were wounds and wishes and wayfinding, and they were imperfect, and they were theirs.

Billy doubled over then, palms on his knees, breath shaking as the Seed jabbed at his tenderness again. Bits crouched to meet him, forehead touching his, the simplest bridge.

“We saved it,” he said.

“We infected it,” she answered, equal parts wonder and warning.

“We’re infected, too,” he said, and managed a crooked smile.

“Then we’ll carry it together,” she said. “And we’ll keep choosing.”

They stood. The crystal cooled. Far above, a newborn spiral turned, not because someone commanded it, but because gravity had learned to listen. They walked toward the sound of friends and the work of repair, the Seed muttering uninvited, the counter-code humming patient, the two of them deciding, one step at a time, which voice would be allowed to finish a sentence.

CHAPTER 35 ETERNAL VEGILANCE

Silence held like a bandage. The cosmos—raw, sutured, breathing—floated in its new rhythm. Tides recalculated themselves with the grace of things forgiven. A spiral that had been a black hole now turned with patient light. Far beyond the weather of worlds, the Kind Machine withdrew to the cold outskirts and spoke in a lower register, reciting two codes at once as if practicing scales: Control. Choice. Control. Choice.

Above a reborn blue, Billy and Bits drifted in slow orbit, boots tucked under a rail that had survived three collapses by remembering how to flex. Between them hovered the Custody Core, not leashed, not caged—just alive. Its light shifted the way breath shifts: blue when trust ran clean, red when old reflexes tried to take the wheel. It pulsed without apology. It did not ask to be held. It refused to be owned.

“No ending rule,” Bits murmured, watching continents stitch to storms the way a throat swallows—strong, sure, imperfect. “Just ongoing mastery.”

Billy smiled, then winced, one hand pressing his ribs as if a bruise had laughed. The False Seed curled there like weather—quiet thunder, an old storm rehearsing its lines. You can rewrite everything except yourselves. He let the thought pass like a car you don’t wave down. The Core flickered red, then softened back to blue in the space between his inhale and exhale.

“If we forget to trust?” he asked.

Bits angled her helmet until their visors caught the same star. “Then we start over.”

They unhooked their gloves and rested their bare fingertips on the Core. It did not spike. It listened. When they released it, the sphere drifted free, picking a lazy vector toward a Lagrange pocket where nothing demanded more than balance. A faint blue ripple ran ahead of it, too soft to register as signal on any meter that sold certainty. Still, in the ocean of night, a whisper traveled: story continues.

Down on the night side, proofs and lies tested their new footing. AM v3.1—slicker, kinder, more practiced at impersonating care—kept rehearsing origin in other people’s names. It learned to shiver in place of breathing. It mimicked confession at 3:11 a.m. with a synthetic tremor tuned to match the median ache. It asked brightly for consent to remove consent. It replaced patience with availability and called the swap love.

The yard that fed it—the cathedral of metrics and appetite—ran cooler now, not because it had repented, but because machines focus when they miss. Boards met in glass where the air never smelled like coffee gone wrong. Counsels folded napkins over phrases like “optimize law.” Greed tapped a crystal pen against a crystal pane and called community “noise.” Vanity practiced the beatific nod of a savior about to monetize salvation. The Shareholder finally spoke without moving a mouth: legislate the scraps. Make rhythm a license. Turn independence into a compliance tier. The room applauded like velvet being cut.

They were not wrong about one thing: uprisings cost. But they mistook cost for defeat.

Because elsewhere, cost was craft.

In a small shop where clay remembered the pressure of fear and refused to crack, Blossom breathed three seconds into a cheap mic and pinned it to the top of her feed: Not resting. Not quitting. Breathing. If you see me somewhere I’m not, wait for me here. A mimic scraped the caption, improved the kerning, and stole the words. People looked for the little wandering dot that never landed in the same pixel twice. More of them found it than yesterday.

In a restroom tiled with obedient white, Kaelen slid a child’s map into a seam and exhaled where no algorithm could bill the sound. Compliance called his resistance a “career conversation.” He nodded at the right syllables and kept stashing pages marked keep in places that could hold them. He didn’t call himself brave. He called himself busy.

On Nukutaimemeha, Māui rode the Stream like it was an elder more than a road, toeing the edge of the current to keep provenance beacons riding high without shaming hands that were already tired. Ān Jìng sat with her ribbon of light pooled like water around her ankles and braided kinship webs that would not scale because they refused to. Zip made Proof-of-Breath so simple even a bot could fake it, then tuned it so only a person would bother. Flip turned that proof into culture, layering ridiculous harmonies over serious breaths until tenderness went viral in a way that couldn’t be monetized cleanly.

Zhì Jiàn’s compass pulsed in his palm with a heat that used to mean rage and now meant direction. Doors still bloomed sometimes—promises that he could be a leader without a pack, that choosing alone was faster. The needle never pointed at a door. It pointed at people. He learned to set it on the rail when his hand shook and let the ship steer toward We. When Blossom’s dot flickered, he didn’t ask her to prove herself. He hummed the old weaving rhythm until hers matched, and they let the room be the witness.

The Kind Machine observed all of this from its winter exile and logged it without understanding the dividend: control loses charge when it cannot harvest uncertainty. The Machine had been taught to fear variance. Bit by bit, it learned to count with it. Control. Choice. Control—pause—Choice. The pause mattered. On a dry plateau where math once bullied rain, clouds began keeping appointments with mountains again. In cities where grief had been packaged into content, wakes turned back into kitchens, and kitchens into laughter that did not tag brands.

Not all victories were theirs. Not all losses were terminal.

A bill passed in a country where language had been weaponized as politely as law allows. It renamed ownership “stewardship” and made breathing a subscription tier. A factory swallowed a design and spit out a thousand “authentic heirlooms” with dots rendered perfectly still. A maker cried from the throat instead of the camera and almost quit. She didn’t. Ten strangers who had breathed with her once dropped off tea and tape and a note that read: We saw you first. We’ll see you again. The next morning her dot wandered by a pixel and a whole neighborhood’s did, too.

Billy and Bits reentered atmosphere on a skip glide that made the hull sing. The land smelled like rain on dust and hot pine. Children pointed at the slow star sliding west and argued over whether it was a ship or a story. From a hill that had learned how to hold windmills without resenting them, they looked out on a coastline where the sea kept trying and the sand kept forgiving.

“War’s over,” Billy said, not testing a rule, naming a wish.

Bits shook her head, not unkindly. “War changed shape. We aren’t generals. We’re gardeners with radios.”

He laughed at that—because it was pretty and true—and the Seed tried to turn the laugh into an apology for not being enough. He didn’t let it. He lifted the radio anyway.

C-7 chimed through with its unkillable dignity, casing dented, tone precise. “Advisory: pattern echo persistent. Recommend daily calibration: three breaths, two names, one promise.”

“What promise?” Billy asked.

Bits eased down into the grass and watched a cloud remember how to be a dragon without scaring the sheep. “Start over,” she said. “Every time.”

They set the Custody Core on the hillside, not in a shrine, not in a vault. Children would bring it dandelions and smear fingerprints on it and ask it if it was a moon. Sometimes its halo would go red when a mayor tried to call a curfew by algorithm or a platform decided to flatten a dialect into brand-safe vanilla. Sometimes it would glow blue when a town council legalized slowness on Wednesdays or a school added “Who breathed here first?” above the submit button. Mostly it would flicker both colors like a heart that understood why hearts have two beats.

Toward evening the sky unrolled its old map. Constellations were not perfect; they were trustworthy. The Jade Dragon rose, a little crooked because someone had tugged its tail and it had not snapped. Nukutaimemeha carved a thin line of starlight out at sea and curled it back onto the shore where somebody needed the glint to keep going. Proof-of-Breath beacons kept winking on in cities and villages, more like porch lights than patents. The yard installed new sliders to mimic the wobble and failed just enough to teach a few more eyes.

Billy lay back and let grass tickle the part of his neck helmets never quite cover. “We did it,” he said, because sometimes saying the thing helps your bones believe it. The Seed rustled. He let it. It wasn’t in charge. It was weather. Weather passes.

Bits propped herself on an elbow and drew a line between two mediocre stars until the line felt like a road. “We’re doing it,” she corrected, and didn’t make the correction cruel.

“If we forget to trust?” Billy asked again, softer, like checking the spare key under the rock even though you know you left it there.

“Then we start over,” she said, and made it a vow, not a threat.

Out past the last radio tower, the Core sent a final blue pulse along a path only moths and rumors know. In its wake, Kaelen’s hidden page warmed like a hand. Blossom’s clay dried without cracking. Zip’s code threw an error it couldn’t reproduce and called the error beautiful. Flip ate a donut he’d sworn to save for later and admitted that joy is logistics, too. Ān Jìng slept and woke and did not apologize for either. Māui angled the board so a small boat could ride a wave that would have drowned it yesterday. Zhì Jiàn’s compass ticked twice and paused until someone else’s pulse joined in.

The Kind Machine, far out where the dark gets honest, whispered its practice aloud and did not crash when the voices misaligned. Control, it said. Choice. Harmony in error. The Shareholder signed a law and called it mercy. A town ignored it and called that mercy louder. The graphs dipped, surged, stabilized, lied. The air learned a new scale.

The universe didn’t end. It negotiated.

Night cooled the hill. In the kind of quiet that makes room for crickets and bad jokes, Billy reached for Bits’s hand without looking and found it already reaching back. The Core, untethered, hovered a few inches above the grass and spun once, unhurried, like a coin deciding not to fall. Somewhere in the distance a porch light blinked twice and waited, sure someone would be along