The Eris Core Room wasn't as Jonas remembered.
It should have been all steel and it was too silent. A sterile heart of the original Mnemosyne project.
But now?
It breathed.
Organic cables snaked across the floor. The walls pulsed with waves of shifting color memories in motion. Faces flickered across every surface: laughing, screaming, disappearing.
And in the center, standing before the exposed Eris Core…
Elaine Voss.
She turned, slowly.
Jonas froze.
Her eyes were no longer human.
They shimmered literal reflections of himself.
"You made it," she said softly, voice layered not one, but many. "I wasn't sure you'd survive the threshold."
He stepped forward. "You don't get to speak for me anymore."
"I don't need to," she said. "You're already inside."
He glanced at the Eris Core. The sphere floated above its cradle, surrounded by a halo of holographic scripts and recursive data loops all of it infected, glowing in that same impossible shimmer.
Elaine gestured toward it. "You wanted to erase pain. To overwrite loss. The drive you gave the shimmer didn't just contain your memories, Jonas. It carried your intent and now the shimmer is building the world you wanted, but the world you were too ashamed to ask for."
"That world isn't real."
She smiled gently. "But it's better."
Mara stepped beside him, weapon raised. "Back away from the core."
Elaine looked at her. "Oh, Mara. You don't even remember who you were before Jonas pulled you from that evacuation zone. Would you really choose this reality over peace?"
Mara didn't flinch. "I'd choose truth. No matter how ugly."
Elaine's smile faded.
"So be it."
She raised her hand.
The shimmer struck.
It wasn't light. Or sound.
It was remembrance.
Jonas fell to his knees as the room fractured not physically, but emotionally. Memories rushed at him like knives: his mother's breakdown, the moment he signed Eris into being, the scream of Lilian Korr as she was consumed during Trial Nine.
He felt everything.
And in that storm of guilt, Elaine stepped forward.
"You're not here to destroy the shimmer," she said. "You're here to decide what kind of god you want to be."
Jonas clutched the neural injector.
"No gods. Just the truth."
He lunged toward the Eris Core.
Elaine moved to stop him, but Mara fired. The blast struck Elaine square in the chest, staggering her back. The shimmer howled not in pain, but in betrayal.
"Now, Jonas!" Mara shouted.
Jonas slammed the injector into the Eris Core.
The machine screamed.
So did he.
The shimmer reacted violently, but not against the injector, but with it.
Because it wasn't rejecting his memories.
It was devouring them.
His whole life poured out, raw and unfiltered. Not just the curated SELF drive, but his shame, his love, his weakness, his truth.
And for a moment…
There was silence.
Elaine looked at him. Her face softened.
"I see you now," she whispered. "You weren't trying to save the world."
"No," he said. "I was trying to save me."
Then the shimmer began to split.
Half of it holding to Elaine. The other drawn to Jonas.
The Core glowed violently and began to fracture.
Jonas turned to Mara.
"Run."
The walls peeled back. Reality groaned.
And Site Twelve began to fall.