TIMER: 08:45 UNTIL WIPE.
The sky was eating itself.
A blue wall of absolute nothingness chewed through the horizon, erasing the jagged spires of Neo-Moscow line by line. It made no sound. The silence of deletion was heavier than any explosion.
Jake stood on the hull of the floating tank. The wind whipped his coat, but there was no air. It was just the physics engine glitching as the atmosphere unraveled.
"Look down," Taranov pointed a meaty finger over the edge.
Jake looked.
The streets below were black with movement. It wasn't an army. It was a stampede. Millions of grey-suited workers, neon-drenched cyborgs, and panicked Enforcers were sprinting toward the only structure left standing.
The Citadel. The bridge to the Moon.
"They heard the broadcast," Oppenheimer whispered, clutching a rusted pipe he'd found in the trash. He looked terrified, but his hands were steady. "You actually did it. You weaponized a population."
"I didn't weaponize them," Jake said, his voice flat. "I gave them a door."
"And the Firewall is the lock," Valentina shouted from the gunner's hatch. She spun the heavy 130mm turret. The metal groaned in the low-gravity environment.
Above them, the lunar surface filled the sky. It wasn't a globe anymore; Dave's frantic coding had flattened it into a massive, cratered ceiling stretching over the dying city.
At the apex of the highest crater—Tycho—a beam of white light shot into the black void beyond the simulation.
"The Uplink," Yuri's voice chimed from Jake's wrist. "The Director is transmitting his data. Upload progress: 12%."
"He's moving fast," Jake gritted his teeth. "Where are the guards?"
"On the ridge," Taranov unslung his broken rifle, realizing it was useless, and drew his combat knife instead. "Big ones."
Lining the edge of the crater were a dozen figures.
They were Titans. Thirty feet tall, made of liquid silver that constantly shifted and reformed. They didn't hold weapons; their arms were weapons—massive, pixelated hammers that hummed with deletion algorithms.
ENTITY: FIREWALL SENTINEL.
LEVEL: MAX.
HP: ERROR (INFINITE).
"Infinite health," Menzhinsky squeaked, hugging the glass coffin tightly. He looked at Jake. "We can't kill them."
"We don't need to," Jake tapped his chrome arm. The Admin light was a steady, angry red. "We just need to make them busy."
Below, the first wave of the mob reached the base of the Citadel bridge.
They didn't climb; they surged. Like a swarm of ants scaling a sugar cube, the millions of digital souls scrambled up the golden walls, desperate to escape the blue wave of death chasing them.
The Sentinels on the Moon looked down.
Their featureless silver faces split open, revealing single, glowing red eyes.
"UNAUTHORIZED TRAFFIC DETECTED," a voice boomed. It wasn't one voice, but twelve, speaking in perfect, terrifying unison. "INITIATING PACKET DROP."
The Sentinels raised their hammers.
They didn't swing at the people. They slammed the hammers into the ground.
A shockwave of red energy rippled down the bridge.
When it hit the mob, people didn't die. They just popped.
Hundreds of workers vanished instantly, leaving behind brief flashes of wireframe skeletons before fading into nothing.
"They're dropping packets," Oppenheimer gasped. "They're treating the people like spam data!"
"It's a slaughter," Valentina yelled, her hands trembling on the tank's firing controls.
"Keep climbing!" Jake roared to the mob below, even though they couldn't hear him. "Don't stop!"
The mob didn't stop. Fear of the blue wave was stronger than fear of the red hammers. For every hundred that popped, a thousand more took their place, climbing over the empty spaces where their friends had been seconds before.
"The server is lagging!" Yuri reported. The hologram on Jake's wrist was flickering violently. "The Sentinels are struggling to process the volume of targets. Their swing rate is decreasing."
"It's working," Jake looked at the crater rim. "They're distracted."
"But we aren't," Taranov pointed dead ahead.
One of the Sentinels wasn't looking at the bridge. It was looking right at them.
The tank was floating up the side of the bridge, a massive metal saucer defying gravity.
"PRIORITY THREAT," the Sentinel boomed.
It raised its hammer. This one glowed with a sickly yellow light.
"It's targeting the tank!" Valentina screamed.
"Evasive maneuvers!" Jake yelled.
"We don't have thrusters!" she screamed back. "We're floating on zero-mass!"
The Sentinel swung.
A beam of yellow code shot from the hammer, arcing through the vacuum toward the tank.
"It's an anti-vehicle script!" Oppenheimer shielded his eyes. "If that hits, it deletes the physics mesh!"
"Not if it hits something else first," Jake said.
He didn't hesitate. He grabbed Taranov by the collar.
"Throw me," Jake ordered.
Taranov didn't blink. He knew the drill.
He grabbed Jake by the belt and the shoulder, spun once, and hurled him off the tank into the void.
"Boss!" Menzhinsky screamed.
Jake flew through the zero-gravity air, directly into the path of the yellow beam.
TIMER: 06:15.
He raised his admin arm. The red light flared, hungry and violent.
He didn't try to block the beam. He caught it.
The yellow code slammed into his palm.
It felt like catching a live power line. Jake's teeth rattled. His vision whited out. The heat traveled up his arm, burning the artificial nerves.
WARNING: FATAL EXCEPTION.
OVERRIDE REQUIRED.
"Override!" Jake screamed through gritted teeth.
He forced his fingers to close around the beam of light. He squeezed.
The code shattered like glass.
Jake hung in the air for a second, smoking, before gravity decided to remember him.
He began to fall. Not back to the tank. Down to the mob.
"Jake!" Valentina fired the 130mm cannon.
The recoil kicked the tank backward, but it was too late to catch him.
Jake plummeted toward the golden bridge, hundreds of feet below.
I'm going to splat, he thought. All this, just to die from fall damage.
He saw the sea of grey suits rushing up to meet him.
He closed his eyes.
He didn't hit the ground.
He hit hands. Dozens of hands.
The mob caught him.
Workers, cyborgs, even a few glitched Enforcers reached up, grabbing his coat, his legs, his arms. They absorbed his momentum, passing him over their heads like a crowd-surfer at a punk rock concert.
Jake opened his eyes. He was lying on a bed of digital humanity.
He looked up at the faces holding him. They weren't blank anymore. The viral code he had uploaded in Neo-Moscow was still active.
They were angry. They were alive.
"The Admin," a worker whispered, his face smeared with pixelated dirt. "He caught the fire."
"Put me down," Jake rasped. His arm was completely numb.
They lowered him to the surface of the golden bridge.
He stood up. The bridge was shaking violently under the weight of millions.
Above him, the tank had drifted closer to the crater rim. The Sentinel that had fired at him was winding up for another shot.
"We need to break the line," Jake looked at the worker next to him.
"How?" the worker asked. He had a name tag that read 'UNIT 73'.
"We don't run," Jake said. He looked at the massive silver giant looming above. "We push."
Jake raised his good arm. He pointed at the Sentinel.
"For the Union!" Jake roared. It was a stupid, archaic battle cry, but it was the only one that fit.
The mob roared back. It wasn't a cheer; it was a wall of sound that shook the code of the world.
The stampede changed. They stopped trying to run past the Sentinels. They ran at them.
Millions of bodies slammed into the legs of the silver giants.
The Sentinels swung their hammers, deleting hundreds with every strike. But it wasn't enough. The sheer mass of the crowd began to push the giants back.
"They're clipping!" Oppenheimer yelled from the tank above. "The physics engine can't handle the collision data! The Sentinels are getting pushed through the floor!"
One of the Titans stumbled backward, its silver leg sinking into the lunar rock. It thrashed, trying to free itself, but the mob swarmed over it, burying it under a mountain of bodies.
"The line is broken!" Taranov cheered from the tank hull.
Jake ran with the crowd. He crested the ridge of the crater.
He stood on the Moon.
The landscape was stark, grey, and littered with the corpses of deleted files.
In the center of the Tycho crater, a mile away, was the Uplink.
It was a massive satellite dish, pointing straight up into the void. At the base of the dish was a glass control room.
And standing in the control room, illuminated by the blinding white light of the data-stream, was the Director.
He was typing furiously on a console. The progress bar above his head flashed.
UPLOAD PROGRESS: 85%.
"He's almost out," Yuri warned. "If he hits 100%, the server wipe executes automatically to cover his tracks."
"Where is the tank?" Jake looked up.
The Object 279 floated over the ridge, damaged but flying. Valentina steered it toward the dish.
"Ram him!" Jake yelled into his comms. "Valentina, hit the control room!"
"I can't!" she yelled back. "Look at the dish!"
Jake looked.
Surrounding the Uplink wasn't a firewall. It was a cage.
A sphere of pure black energy pulsed around the dish. It wasn't deleting things; it was reflecting them. The mob that hit the sphere bounced off, thrown back violently.
"It's a Faraday Shield," Oppenheimer analyzed. "Physical objects can't pass! Energy weapons deflect! It's an absolute barrier!"
"Nothing is absolute," Jake ran toward the dish. His lungs burned. The air here was thin, barely coded.
TIMER: 04:30.
He reached the edge of the black sphere. Taranov and the tank hovered just outside it, unable to get closer.
Jake placed his hand on the black energy. It was cold. Cold like the space between stars.
He could see the Director inside.
The old man looked up from the console. He saw Jake.
The Director smiled. He walked to the edge of the glass room, standing just inches away from Jake, separated only by the black shield.
"You're too late, Virus," the Director's voice transmitted directly into Jake's mind. "I'm leaving. And you are staying here to be erased."
"Turn off the shield, Hoover," Jake said.
The Director laughed. It was a hollow, echoing sound.
"Hoover? Stalin? Those were just skins, Jake. I am the system. I evolved past the history you broke."
The upload bar ticked to 90%.
"You can't hack this shield," the Director sneered. "It requires a Root Password. And I changed it."
Jake looked at his admin arm. It was dead. The yellow beam had fried the circuits.
He couldn't hack it. He couldn't punch it.
"Yuri," Jake whispered. "Can we bypass it?"
"Negative," the boy said, his voice laced with rare panic. "It is impenetrable from the outside."
From the outside.
Jake looked at the Director.
"You're right," Jake said softly. "I can't break in."
He turned back to the tank hovering behind him. He looked at Taranov. He looked at the glass coffin strapped to the hull.
"Taranov," Jake said. His voice was terrifyingly calm. "Bring her here."
Taranov hesitated. "The coffin?"
"Bring it."
Taranov jumped down from the tank. He unstrapped the casket and carried it to Jake. He set it down gently on the grey lunar dust.
Nadya slept inside. The 'Hope' upload bar was still frozen at 99%.
"What are you doing?" the Director frowned inside his shield. "A dead asset won't save you."
"She's not dead," Jake said. "She's paused."
He knelt beside the coffin. He didn't use his admin arm. He used his human hand.
He touched the glass.
"Yuri," Jake said. "The Director changed the Root Password."
"Yes."
"But he didn't change the hardware."
Jake looked up at the Uplink dish. It was beaming data out. But it was also capable of pulling data in.
"Yuri," Jake commanded. "Route the 'Hope' file upload directly into the shield's power grid."
"Father," Yuri hesitated. "If I do that, the file will be consumed. She will not be restored. She will be burned as fuel."
Jake closed his eyes.
He saw her face. The real Nadya. In the snow in 1924. Smiling.
I have to save the world, he thought. Even if I have to burn my own heart to do it.
"Do it," Jake choked on the words.
"Executing," Yuri said softly.
The glass coffin began to glow. Blinding, agonizingly bright white light.
The 99% bar flickered.
It didn't go to 100. It went to zero.
The light shot out of the coffin, striking the black shield.
It didn't break the shield. It overloaded it.
The 'Hope' of an entire nation, compressed into a single file, slammed into the Director's defense grid.
The black sphere shrieked. It cracked.
Then, it shattered like cheap glass.
The shockwave threw Jake onto his back.
He sat up. The shield was gone.
The coffin was empty. Just glass and ashes.
Jake didn't cry. He didn't have time.
He stood up. He walked toward the control room.
The Director was backing away from the console, his eyes wide with genuine terror.
UPLOAD: 98%.
Jake stepped through the shattered glass of the control room.
"You burned her," the Director whispered. "You burned your own wife to get to me."
"I told you," Jake raised his fist. It wasn't glowing. It was just a heavy piece of metal. "I don't lose."
He lunged.