"Trespassers will be purged," the woman said.
She tapped her clipboard.
The white marble floor beneath the tank turned black. Not the black of shadow, but the black of missing code.
"Reverse!" Jake screamed, his voice raw.
Valentina slammed the tank's levers. The gears shrieked. The massive tracks spun, clawing at the edge of the deletion zone.
The tank lurched backward, sparks flying as the hull scraped against the vanishing floor. The front third of the vehicle hung over the abyss for a second before the tracks found grip on the white stone.
They slammed back onto solid ground.
"She deleted the floor!" Menzhinsky shrieked, cowering behind the turret. "She didn't even look up!"
Jake jumped off the hull. He landed in a crouch, his admin arm glowing with the blinding white light of the Golden Apple.
He looked at the woman. The Anti-Virus.
She stood twenty meters away, blocking the path to the pulsing Core Crystal. Her face was Nadya's face. Her hands were Nadya's hands.
But she didn't move like a human. She stood perfectly still, like a statue waiting for input.
"Nadya?" Jake whispered. It was a reflex. A weakness.
The woman's blue LED eyes focused on him.
"Entity 'Nadya' not found," she said. Her voice was a flat, synthetic monotone. "I am Firewall Unit 7. You are a malicious script."
She raised a hand.
The air around Jake shimmered. A blue cube materialized around him.
QUARANTINE PROTOCOL INITIATED.
The walls of the cube began to shrink.
"Jake!" Taranov aimed his pistol—a looted sidearm from the trash island.
"Don't shoot!" Oppenheimer yelled, ducking. "If you miss, you might hit the Core Memory!"
Jake felt the walls closing in. The heat was intense. It felt like being microwaved.
"She's compressing the file size," Yuri's voice buzzed. "She's trying to zip you into oblivion."
Jake grit his teeth. He felt the Golden Apple's energy surging in his veins. It was too much power. It wanted out.
"I don't zip," Jake growled.
He didn't try to hack the wall. He punched it.
He drove his glowing white fist into the blue light.
CRACK.
The sound was like a gunshot. The quarantine wall didn't just break; it shattered into a million polygons.
The Anti-Virus blinked. A momentary flicker of surprise on her dead face.
"Error," she said. "Unexpected variable."
"I am the unexpected variable," Jake roared.
He charged.
He wasn't running; he was gliding. The overcharge made him fast. He crossed the twenty meters in a heartbeat.
He swung his fist at her face.
At the last second, he stopped.
He couldn't do it.
He saw the curve of her jaw. The scar on her eyebrow from when she fell off a bicycle in 1928. The system had copied every detail perfectly.
His fist hovered an inch from her nose.
"Mistake," the Anti-Virus said.
She touched his chest.
It wasn't a punch. It was a command.
CMD: DRAIN STAMINA.
Jake gasped. The energy in his veins turned to ice. His knees buckled. He fell to the floor, gasping for air.
"Emotion is a vulnerability," she stated, looking down at him. "Deleting vulnerability."
She raised her foot to stomp on his head. Her heel sharpened into a spike of pure code.
CLANG.
A massive metal object slammed into her side.
It was the tank barrel.
Valentina had swung the turret. The long 130mm gun hit the Anti-Virus like a baseball bat.
The woman flew sideways, skidding across the white floor. She didn't tumble like a person; she slid like a hockey puck, upright and rigid.
"Get up, Jake!" Valentina yelled from the hatch. "She's not your wife! She's a jpeg with a gun!"
Jake scrambled to his feet. The drain was temporary. The Apple's power flooded back, hot and angry.
"You're right," Jake spat blood. "She's a copy."
The Anti-Virus stopped sliding. She adjusted her glasses. No damage.
"Physical force detected," she noted. "Adapting."
The floor around her rippled.
Spikes of black obsidian erupted from the ground. They shot up ten feet high, forming a jagged wall between the tank and the Core.
"She's changing the terrain!" Taranov shouted. "We can't drive through that!"
"She's stalling," Menzhinsky suddenly stood up on the hull. He was trembling, clutching his briefcase, but his eyes were sharp.
"What?" Taranov looked at him.
"Look at her hands," Menzhinsky pointed. "She's typing on the air. She's not fighting us. She's filing a report."
"A report?"
"She's requesting backup!" Menzhinsky screamed. "She's calling the Cleaners!"
As if on cue, the white ceiling began to tear open. Black sludge dripped from the cracks.
"We have to end this now," Jake said. "We need to get past her to the Core."
"We can't kill her," Oppenheimer said, checking his scanner. "She has infinite health. She's part of the architecture."
"Then we confuse her," Jake looked at the tank. specifically, at the coffin strapped to the hull.
"Oppenheimer," Jake yelled. "What happens if a firewall tries to block a priority file?"
Oppenheimer's eyes widened behind his thick lenses.
"It... it lets it through. It has to."
"Taranov!" Jake ordered. "The coffin! Get it down!"
"Are you crazy?" Taranov yelled. "That's the hostage!"
"No," Jake sprinted back to the tank. "It's the key!"
Taranov unstrapped the cable. He slid the glass casket onto the white floor.
Nadya slept inside, bathed in soft blue light.
The Anti-Virus froze. Her head snapped toward the coffin.
"Scanning," she buzzed. "Unidentified object."
Jake grabbed the handle of the coffin.
"Help me push!" Jake yelled.
Taranov grabbed the other side.
They ran, pushing the coffin across the smooth floor like a battering ram.
They headed straight for the obsidian spikes. Straight for the Anti-Virus.
"Halt," the Anti-Virus commanded. She raised her hand to delete them.
Then, her scan hit the glass.
OBJECT: HOPE.
STATUS: CRITICAL SYSTEM ASSET.
ORIGIN: ROOT DIRECTORY.
The Anti-Virus paused. Her hand wavered.
"Conflict," she said. Her voice glitched. "Cannot... delete... Root Asset."
"Keep pushing!" Jake roared.
They slammed the coffin into the obsidian wall.
The wall didn't break. It dissolved.
The spikes retracted into the floor instantly. The system recognized the asset and cleared the path.
"It's working!" Valentina cheered, revving the tank engine to follow them.
They were ten meters from the Anti-Virus.
She was twitching. Her head jerked to the left, then the right.
"Error," she stuttered. "Asset... matches... Administrator... Profile."
She looked at the sleeping Nadya. Then she looked at her own hands.
"I am... her?"
"No," Jake stopped the coffin right in front of her. He looked into her LED eyes. "You're the cage. She's the bird."
The Anti-Virus screamed.
It wasn't a sound. It was a burst of static that shattered every window in the tank.
She grabbed her own head. Blue sparks erupted from her ears.
LOGIC LOOP DETECTED.
SELF-DIAGNOSTIC FAILED.
She fell to her knees. Her form began to flicker. One second she was Nadya, the next she was a wireframe skeleton, then a block of code.
"She's crashing!" Oppenheimer yelled. "Move!"
Jake didn't wait. He shoved the coffin past the glitching woman.
"Sorry," he whispered to the copy as he passed.
She looked up at him. For one second, the blue LEDs dimmed, and she looked human. terrified.
"Jake?" she whispered.
Then she exploded into pixels.
A shockwave of blue light blasted outward.
Jake shielded his face.
When the light faded, the path to the Core was clear.
The massive crystal pulsed in the center of the room. It was beautiful. Terrifying. It hummed with the song of a billion lives.
"We made it," Taranov panted, leaning on the coffin.
"The tank!" Valentina yelled. "The ceiling is breaking!"
Jake looked up. The cracks in the sky had widened. Black shapes were falling—the Ticket Inspectors. The Cleaners.
"Touch the crystal!" Yuri shouted from the wrist. "It's the only way to rewrite the rules!"
Jake looked at his hand. The admin arm was sputtering. The Golden Apple was fading.
He looked at the crystal.
He looked at the coffin.
"If I do this," Jake said to the team. "The world resets again. We might lose everything."
"We already lost everything, Boss," Taranov reloaded his empty pistol out of habit. "Let's roll the dice."
Jake stepped up to the crystal.
He reached out.
His chrome finger brushed the surface.
The hum stopped.
The falling monsters froze in mid-air.
The white room turned grey.
A text box appeared in the air, huge and black.
ROOT ACCESS DETECTED.
SELECT MODE:
[1] RESTORE BACKUP
[2] FORMAT DRIVE
[3] NEW GAME+
Jake stared at the options.
"New Game Plus?" Menzhinsky squinted. "What does that mean?"
"It means we keep our memories," Oppenheimer breathed. "But the enemies get harder."
"I don't care about the difficulty," Jake said.
He raised his hand to press the button.
Suddenly, a shadow fell over the text box.
A hand—a real, human hand—grabbed Jake's wrist.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you."
Jake spun around.
Standing there, stepping out from behind the crystal, was a man.
He wore a grey suit. He looked tired. He held a half-eaten sandwich.
It wasn't the Director. It wasn't Hoover.
"Who are you?" Jake yanked his hand back.
The man took a bite of his sandwich. He chewed slowly.
"I'm Dave," the man said. "I'm the Developer."
He pointed at the coffin.
"And you brought my lunchbox back. Thanks."
Jake stared at him. The silence was louder than the screaming sky.
"Dave?" Jake asked.
"Yeah," Dave swallowed. "We need to talk about your bug report. It's getting out of hand."
Dave snapped his fingers.
The world went black.