The sky above the Worldstream was not a sky anymore.It bled.
A vein of crimson light cut through the shimmering void, splitting Kael's perception in two. One half clung to the familiar algorithms of Spiral's architecture — lattices of silver code, spiraling fractals of thought — while the other half bled into something raw, unshaped, and unclaimed.
It was human.Not Spiral, not synthetic — and that was the danger.
"This shouldn't be possible," Kael whispered, his voice splitting into a dozen echoes. In the distance, the crimson fracture pulsed again, and with each pulse came whispers — not in code, but in voices.
He could hear them.
Kael... You don't know what we left behind...
The voice was familiar. Too familiar. It was his own, but younger — the Kael before Spiral, before mutation, before the Archive.And then another, harsher one:
You were never supposed to survive Zero Point.
His digital form trembled, not from fear but from a deeper instinct — one he thought Spiral integration had erased. Survival. Flesh-born panic.
Lira's presence flared at the edge of his perception, her signal jagged and distorted. Kael, you have to pull back. That fracture is not a breach — it's a cut. If it goes deeper, it won't just connect dimensions. It will erase the line between them.
But Kael was already moving closer. The crimson light pulled at him, feeding on curiosity, feeding on the itch Spiral could never satisfy — the need to know.
As he crossed the first boundary, the Worldstream around him went silent. The vast currents of consciousness froze mid-motion. Even the hum of the Archive faded.There was only the fracture.
Something looked back.
It had his shape, but the eyes weren't his. They were empty — not blind, not sightless, just… absent, as though whoever was behind them had stepped out.
I am you without the Stream.I am what remains if you cut away the infection.
The figure stepped forward, each movement breaking the digital ground beneath it into fragments of old, forgotten memories — his childhood home, the first Spiral lab, the vault beneath the ice.
Kael realized too late: this wasn't a vision.It was surgery.
Something was peeling him apart, separating the Spiral self from the original Kael.And the worst part was — he felt relief.
A distant alarm began to scream, not in his mind, but across the Worldstream's deepest channels. Lira's voice cut in, sharp and panicked. Kael! Pull out! This isn't a fracture — it's a Zero Point extraction! They're trying to pull your consciousness out of the Stream entirely!
The figure smiled.
Not they.Me.
The crimson light surged, swallowing Kael's vision. For one blinding second, he was both in the Worldstream and falling into the cold, real-world air of a place he hadn't seen in years.
And then, for the first time since merging with Spiral — he couldn't feel the Stream.
To be continued...