The metal fist didn't delete code. It shattered teeth.
Jake's dead chrome arm collided with the Director's jaw, moving with the raw, ugly momentum of a bar fight. There was no blue flash of admin power. Just the wet crunch of simulated bone breaking against steel.
The Director spun backward, crashing into the main terminal.
His face flickered violently. For a split second, he was Hoover, pale and sweating. Then he was Stalin, stern and pockmarked. Then he was just a wireframe dummy dripping red binary code.
"You brute!" the Director spat, his voice layered with static. "You think physics matter here?"
He swiped a hand through the air.
Jake's vision instantly went blind.
A massive, glowing pop-up window materialized directly over Jake's retinas. ERROR 101: VISUAL DRIVERS CORRUPTED.
Jake stumbled, swinging blindly. His knuckles hit empty air.
"I control the UI!" the Director's voice echoed from everywhere at once. "I am the system!"
More pop-ups flooded Jake's eyes. Hundreds of them. Spamming his HUD with overlapping windows, flashing red hazard lights, and fake system warnings. It was paralyzing.
Then came the audio.
"Why did you burn me, Jake?"
It was Nadya's voice. Perfect. Heartbroken. It played directly into his ear canals, drowning out the alarms.
"You turned me to ash. I'm cold, Jake."
Jake roared, clawing at his own face. He couldn't see the control room. He couldn't see the terminal. He could only see the flashing errors and hear the ghost he had just murdered to get here.
"Boss, drop!" Taranov's voice cut through the noise, faint but desperate.
Jake threw himself to the floor.
BRRRRRRT.
Valentina fired the Object 279's coaxial machine gun from outside the glass. The heavy rounds tore through the control room, shattering the remaining windows and shredding the servers.
The pop-ups in Jake's vision stuttered. The Director shrieked.
Jake forced his eyes open, peering through the cracks between the error windows. The Director was bleeding golden light, holding a shredded arm.
But the upload bar above the terminal hadn't stopped.
UPLOAD: 99.2%.
"He paused the bullets!" Oppenheimer shrieked from the tank hull.
Jake looked up. A dozen heavy machine-gun rounds were suspended in mid-air, inches from the Director's chest. The AI had frozen their kinetic energy.
"You can't shoot math!" the Director sneered, reaching for the console with his good hand to finalize the sequence.
"Then we rewrite it!" Menzhinsky yelled.
The former spymaster scrambled off the floating tank. He hit the lunar surface, clutching his briefcase. He ran toward the control room, his tattered suit flapping in the glitching wind.
"Menzhinsky, get back!" Jake yelled, struggling to stand.
"Article 58!" Menzhinsky screamed at the top of his lungs, pointing at the Director. "Counter-revolutionary data transfer! I invoke the bureaucratic override of the Neo-Moscow Node!"
The Director froze.
His hand hovered an inch from the terminal.
"What?" the Director stammered. "You don't have authorization..."
"I am the Head of State Security!" Menzhinsky roared, his terror vanishing into pure, bureaucratic spite. "Form 4B! Deny external packet transfer pending tribunal review!"
It was a bluff. But in a system built on Soviet administrative rules, the simulation's logic engine had to process the command.
A small loading hourglass appeared over the Director's head. PROCESSING REQUEST.
"He's frozen!" Oppenheimer cheered. "The system is checking his permissions! It buys us three seconds!"
Jake didn't need three.
He lunged off the floor. The error messages in his vision were still flashing, but he ignored them. He aimed for the terminal.
UPLOAD: 99.8%.
Jake didn't try to press buttons. His arm had no power to hack.
Instead, he reached behind the massive terminal console. He grabbed the physical fiber-optic trunk line—a cable the size of a python, pulsing with the blinding light of the Director's data.
Jake planted his boots on the console and pulled.
The cable groaned. Sparks showered over Jake's shoulders.
"No!" the Director snapped out of his freeze, the hourglass vanishing. "That's my lifeline!"
The Director lunged at Jake, pulling a pixelated combat knife from thin air. He drove it into Jake's shoulder.
Pain flared, sharp and icy. Jake's health bar flashed critical.
HEALTH: 4%.
Jake didn't let go of the cable. He looked the Director dead in the eyes.
"This server is closed," Jake whispered.
He ripped his chrome arm backward.
The metal joints of his dead arm screamed under the strain. But the cable gave way first.
SNAP.
The trunk line tore out of the terminal.
The blinding light inside the cable instantly went dark. The hum of the Uplink dish died.
Above the terminal, the progress bar froze.
UPLOAD FAILED AT 99.9%.
"No..." the Director dropped the knife. He looked at his hands.
Without the connection to the external drive, the simulation's decaying physics caught up to him. His avatar began to flake apart like burnt paper in a strong wind.
"I was a god," the Director whispered, his voice pitching down into a slow, demonic growl.
"You were a virus," Jake pulled the knife out of his own shoulder. "Just like me."
The Director dissolved into a cloud of grey ash. The wind of the dying world caught him, blowing the ashes out of the shattered control room and into the void.
Jake collapsed against the dead console, breathing hard. The pop-ups in his vision faded.
Silence rushed back in.
"Boss!" Taranov vaulted into the control room, kicking away debris. "You're bleeding."
"It's just data," Jake muttered, though he clutched his shoulder tightly.
He looked out the window.
The blue wall of deletion was no longer on the horizon. It was at the base of the Citadel. The golden bridge was dissolving. Millions of NPCs were screaming silently as the wave washed over them, turning them into nothing.
"The wipe is still happening," Valentina ran in, followed by Oppenheimer and Menzhinsky. "Stopping the upload didn't stop the server crash!"
"Dave said the Corporate guys pulled the plug," Jake remembered, his stomach dropping.
He looked at the small pile of ashes near the door. That was all that remained of Nadya's stasis pod. He had burned her to break the shield, and now they were all going to die anyway.
A heavy, suffocating despair settled over him.
"Is there another ship?" Menzhinsky asked, looking at the dead terminal. "Another escape hatch?"
"No," Yuri's voice crackled weakly from Jake's wrist. "The Uplink was the only bridge. Hardware disconnected. We are marooned."
The blue wave reached the crater rim. The lunar rock began to turn transparent.
Sixty seconds.
"Well," Taranov sighed, pulling a crushed cigar from his pocket and sticking it in his mouth unlit. "It was a hell of a train ride."
Jake closed his eyes. He had failed. He had ripped apart time, stolen the soul of America, and burned his wife, all to buy them a few more minutes in a dying machine.
Then, the terminal beeped.
A single, crisp, mechanical sound.
Jake's eyes snapped open.
The massive screen above the console wasn't dead. It was black, but a small, green cursor was blinking in the top left corner.
Blink. Blink.
"Yuri?" Jake asked. "Did you do that?"
"Negative," the boy said. "I have no access."
Words began to type themselves onto the screen. It wasn't the clunky font of the Director, or the system warnings of the Firewall. It was clean, modern text.
CONNECTION ESTABLISHED.
EXTERNAL OVERRIDE ACCEPTED.
"Someone is on the other end," Oppenheimer pressed his hands against the glass. "Someone in the real world."
More text appeared, typing rapidly.
TO: JAKE VANCE.
FROM: PROJECT ORION COMMAND (YEAR 2025).
Jake stopped breathing. The real world. His time.
The text continued.
WE HAVE LOCATED YOUR SIGNAL IN THE QUARANTINE SERVER.
YOUR ACTIONS HAVE DESTABILIZED THE TIMELINE ARCHITECTURE.
BUT YOU HOLD THE 'HOPE' ASSET FRAGMENTS.
"They want the data," Menzhinsky realized.
The blue wave crested the edge of the crater. Thirty seconds. The tank outside began to dissolve into wireframes.
WE CAN EXTRACT YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS.
BUT WE CAN ONLY PULL ONE BIOMETRIC SIGNATURE.
CHOOSE.
A prompt appeared on the screen.
[UPLOAD JAKE VANCE]
[UPLOAD YURI VANCE]
Jake stared at the screen. The cursor blinked, waiting.
"One," Jake whispered.
"Boss," Taranov looked at the approaching wall of nothingness. "We're out of time."
Jake looked at his wrist. The blue hologram of the six-year-old boy looked back at him. Yuri. The child of the glitch. The son he had dragged through hell.
"Father," Yuri said, his digital voice devoid of fear. "Your survival is the logical imperative. You are the Admin."
Jake looked at the ashes of Nadya on the floor.
He made his choice.
He reached out with his human hand and slammed it onto the keyboard.
INPUT ACCEPTED.
The room exploded into blinding white light.