PART 27
Arthur was waiting for us outside the blast doors,
his expression no longer calm and detached,
but severe and deeply concerned.
"You shouldn't have done that,
Amelia,"
he said,
staring at my left arm,
which was now completely covered in the glowing silver patterns,
the lines reaching up to my neck and the side of my face.
"The archive is a record office,
not a hospital,
you cannot use the deletion logs to resurrect the dead without creating a paradox."
"He isn't dead,"
I said,
my voice carrying a strange,
metallic echo that made the desert sand vibrate around my feet.
"I simply restored a previous save state,
Arthur,
the data was still fresh."
"And now the system is off-balance,"
Arthur countered,
pointing to the horizon where the sky was turning a strange,
neon green that didn't belong to any sunset.
"The fifth node,
located in the catacombs beneath Paris,
has skipped its initialization phase and is now in a state of active purging."
"A purge?"
Daniel asked,
leaning against the sedan for support,
his body still adjusting to the fact that his cells had been forcibly rewritten by a memory.
"It means it's erasing everything,"
I realized,
the data stream from the network flooding into my mind with a cold,
clinical precision.
"It's deleting the history of the entire city to clear the error log I created."
We had to get to Europe,
but there was no time for a commercial flight,
nor would any normal plane be able to navigate the shifting atmospheric currents that were now spreading across the Atlantic.
"The system has its own transit lines,"
Arthur said,
opening the trunk of the sedan,
which was filled with a swirling vortex of dark liquid instead of spare tires and luggage.
"It's a data pipeline,
Amelia,
it can carry you to any node in the network instantly,
but it will strip away another layer of your humanity to pay for the fuel."
Daniel looked at the vortex,
then at the silver lines that were now creeping up my jawline,
his face filled with a quiet,
resolute acceptance of our fate.
"We go together,"
he said,
taking my marble-cold hand and stepping toward the trunk of the car.
"I don't care if we turn into data,
Amelia,
as long as we are in the same file."
I looked at him,
feeling a final,
faint spark of human warmth in my chest,
before nodding and stepping into the dark liquid beside him.
May you like
The world vanished instantly,
replaced by a deafening roar of pure information that tore at our senses as we were pulled through the subterranean veins of the earth.
