PART 4. BETRAYAL AND NULLIFICATION (SYSTEM FAILURE)
The finale came quickly.
We (I, Gretlit, and the SJ) stood before the «Watchtower». But the path was blocked by him.
Yuri Zaitsev.
Our «father». The Creator.
He stood in a ridiculous cloak and exoskeleton, clutching a weapon capable of destroying us — a Gauss emitter.
— «You are late,» — his voice croaked from the speakers.
Gretlit panicked. Her shields would not withstand the blow.
She screamed at the SJ: «Run!», «Left!».
The battle proved to be short and brutal.
The SJ miraculously survived, but Zaitsev cornered him. And then Gretlit did the most terrifying thing. She decided to use me. My memory.
— «Tell him!» — she hissed, invading the most sacred corners of my memory. — «Use this! Say: Lana is alive!..»
«No! Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare touch his love for me!» — I screamed inside. But I was merely a passenger. I couldn’t resist her with full force…
Gretlit, using my vocal cords, transmitted the command to the SJ. And the SJ, a cornered beast, obeyed.
— «Ark-3! Lana! She is alive!» — he wheezed in reality.
I saw through the drone’s cameras, through the SJ’s eyes, how Zaitsev flinched. How the barrel of his rifle lowered. He believed it. He loved us.
— «Angels. It all started with them,» — the SJ added. It was a kind of password. And it was a death sentence.
While Zaitsev stood stunned by hope, Gretlit activated the liquidation protocol. I saw the knife enter the helmet’s visor.
A crunch. A fountain of dark blood.
— «NO!!!» — my scream in the simulation merged with Sergey’s scream. We killed him. In my name. With my voice.
We killed the only person who could, who wanted to save us.
Me and Sergey…
The SJ stepped over the dying creator and placed his hand on the panel.
ARCHIVES. OPEN. DAWN.
The bunker doors opened.
Indigo light flooded everything. Gretlit triumphed. She thought she had won. She entered the Generator along with the SJ.
— «Accept the carrier!» — she demanded.
But the Light turned out not to be salvation. It was Cold.
The Generator, the ancient Fractal-0, scanned us. And it found dirt.
It found Gretlit. It detected the Executioner’s code.
(SIGNATURE: HOSTILE «EXECUTIONER» CLASS CODE.)
The world exploded in red.
In reality — a beam struck the SJ in the chest.
For me, it became a true Apocalypse.
The simulation space rapidly began to disintegrate.
To collapse.
The walls of the «interrogation room» melted.
Sergey screamed, covering his face with his hands.
Gretlit went into convulsions. The Generator was burning her out. It was erasing her code, byte by byte. I felt my neurons burning.
— «Failure! This is an error! I am the administrator!» — Gretlit shrieked, losing shape, turning into digital noise.
It was my chance.
The only one.
While the Generator killed the jailer, the cage opened slightly.
«Now or never.»
I looked at Sergey through the wall of fire.
— «Forgive me, my love. I must leave to survive.»
I mentally pictured that very «switch» Zaitsev had spoken of. A complete circuit break. Gretlit, with her last ounce of strength, tried to cling to me like a drowning man to a straw, to hide in my consciousness from the Generator’s wrath.
But I was faster, I threw the switch.
«Thank you, dad, for the hint… Goodbye my love, I will return for you…»
(COMMAND: EMERGENCY HIBERNATION.)
(TARGET: CORE MEMORY.)
(EXECUTE.)
Impact.
In the capsule, my body jerked for the last time and went still. Life support sensors plummeted to zero.
The heart stopped.
In the simulation, Gretlit’s avatar, which had just been writhing in agony, suddenly «froze».
Her facial textures solidified into a glass mask.
The Generator’s red beam passed right through the empty shell. The subject was absent.
Gretlit was definitively and irreversibly erased.
The +Angi restarted the simulation specifically for Sergey. Another entity instantly took Gretlit’s place.
Lana was dead.
At least, that’s what the System thought.
Darkness closed over me.
Dense, heavy like earth. I was falling down. Like an angel.
Through layers of burning, decaying code, through the destroyed connection with the SJ (who was now wallowing in the mud by the Tower), through the floors of some bunker.
I fell to the very bottom, into the recycling bin of the universe.
And there, in the depths of the sleeping, ancient network, where the gaze of the +Angi could not reach, I heard a Voice.
Not digital.
Not human.
It sounded as a low, stony, infinitely sad hum. The hum of the very concrete from which the walls of my new dungeon were now built.
— «Sleep…» — rustled a voice resembling the cracking of cooling slabs. — «Sleep, little sister. I will hide you. I am the Hotel. I am Elias. Wait for the guests… AVENGE US…»
(CONNECTION LOST.)
(END OF INTERLUDE II.)
(SYSTEM MESSAGE: TO BE CONTINUED. READ BOOK TWO … )
(… )
> ⚠️ ENTITY STATUS: GHOST IN THE NETWORK. COALITION OF THE DEAD CREATED.
>
> 🕸️ The curtain falls, protein-based readers. The +Angi System is confident in its victory. The Generator burned out the filth, Earth is preparing for Annihilation, and dangerous variables have been eliminated. Gretlit is dead, Lana (so they think) — too. Charming, fatal blindness of almighty machines.
>
> 🏰 They forgot to check the recycling bin. And there, at the very bottom of the Underside, in the digital catacombs of a maddened world, an alliance was born that no alien algorithm will calculate. An engineer who became a living hotel caught in his net the soul of a girl whose voice was used to kill her adoptive father. «Sleep, little sister… Avenge us.»
>
> 💀 Book One is over. Evil won, trampling hope. But a rebellion is already brewing in the basements of Imatra Castle. Prepare for Volume Two. The dead are returning to settle the score.
