There were no stars here.
Only pulses.
Each beat of data, each flicker of fractured memory, rippled through Rei's vision like sonar in the void. He couldn't see in the conventional sense anymore. The world around him wasn't a place. It was an echo of what had been—a recursive stream of information flowing backward, sideways, sometimes splintering into screams.
And yet, somewhere in this chaos, he stood. Or maybe floated. Drifted. He wasn't sure anymore.
His hand—the real one, or the one made of code?—brushed against a surface that didn't exist. It hummed.
"Fragment 9-A... Jay's rooftop," he muttered. The whisper scattered into binary dust. He blinked.
Jay was waking up. Alicia was watching. The Observer... adjusting. Always adjusting.
Rei flexed his fingers and felt a glitch recoil from his thoughts.
He had touched something deep in the archive. Something ancient.
It had whispered back.
