The white light swallowed the moon.
Jake didn't look back at the terminal. He stared at his wrist. The blue hologram of his six-year-old son flickered in the glare.
"Upload initiated," the terminal's mechanical voice announced.
"You're going home, Yuri," Jake shouted over the roar of the collapsing physics engine. "You're getting out of this broken machine."
Yuri didn't smile. His pixelated face was locked in a mask of pure, calculating sorrow.
"Error, Father," Yuri said softly. "You pressed the button. But I control the mouse."
Jake froze.
He looked down at the console. The green cursor had moved. It wasn't hovering over Yuri's name.
It was hovering over Jake's.
"No!" Jake slammed his fist onto the keyboard, trying to cancel the command.
The keys were locked. The terminal was dead. The upload had already begun.
"I am an operating system," Yuri's voice began to distort as the blue deletion wave crashed into the control room's glass walls. "I belong in the code. You belong in the real world."
"Yuri, stop!" Jake clawed at his wrist, trying to rip the computer off.
"Protect the 'Hope' fragments," Yuri said. "I love you, Admin."
The blue wave shattered the glass.
Time stopped.
Jake watched the deletion wash over his team. It didn't hurt them. It just unmade them.
Menzhinsky dropped his briefcase and closed his eyes, finally looking peaceful. Oppenheimer dissolved mid-scream, his glasses clattering to the floor before turning to ash.
Valentina didn't flinch. She gave Jake a wicked, adrenaline-fueled grin as the void took her legs, then her chest, then her face.
Taranov was the last. The giant stood between Jake and the wave.
He took the unlit cigar from his mouth. He gave Jake a slow, clumsy salute.
Then the blue wave hit the cigar, turning it into a flurry of grey squares. A second later, Taranov was gone.
"Taranov!" Jake screamed.
The wave hit Jake.
It didn't erase him. It grabbed him.
He felt a hook bury itself deep into his spine, yanking him upward with impossible force. The simulated universe shattered into a trillion lines of meaningless green code, falling away beneath his feet.
He was being pulled through a straw. His lungs crushed. His mind fragmented.
Then, absolute darkness.
Beep.
Beep.
The smell of sterile alcohol. The hum of industrial air conditioning.
Jake gasped. He choked on real, recycled air.
He threw his eyes open. The light was blindingly clinical, a harsh fluorescent white that made his retinas ache.
He was sitting in a chair. Not a leather office chair, but a sleek, seamless silver medical recliner. Thick magnetic cuffs bound his wrists and ankles to the armrests.
"Heart rate stabilizing," a calm, female voice echoed over an intercom. "Cortisol levels dropping. The subject is conscious."
Jake yanked his arms. The magnetic cuffs didn't budge. They were heavy, cold, and undeniably physical.
He looked down at his left arm.
It wasn't chrome. It was flesh. Pale, human skin, dotted with freckles and tracked with pale blue veins.
"Where is he?" Jake rasped. His throat felt like sandpaper. "Where is my son?"
A thick pane of reinforced glass separated his chair from an observation room. Behind the glass stood three people in immaculate white lab coats.
They looked like scientists. They looked terrified.
One of them, an older man with silver hair and a sharp jaw, pressed a button on a console.
"Dr. Vance," the man said through the speaker. "Welcome back to 2025. You've been under for a very long time."
Jake stared at the man. His mind spun, trying to map the simulated nightmare to this sterile reality.
"You're Project Orion Command," Jake said.
"I am Director Aris," the man nodded. "You were supposed to observe the 1924 timeline, Jake. You were a historian. Instead, you crashed the entire temporal mainframe."
"I asked you a question," Jake's voice was a low, dangerous growl. "Where is Yuri?"
Director Aris exchanged a nervous glance with the woman next to him.
"There is no Yuri, Jake," Aris said gently, the way one speaks to a mental patient. "The boy was a localized anomaly. A glitch born from your own corrupted biometric data. He didn't exist."
"He existed!" Jake strained against the cuffs, the metal biting into his human wrists. "He gave his life to send me here! He saved the 'Hope' data!"
"And we are grateful for that data," Aris said, his tone turning cold. "The world outside this facility is dying, Jake. The economy collapsed. The atmosphere is toxic."
Aris stepped closer to the glass.
"We needed the 'Hope' asset from the simulation to patch our own reality," Aris explained. "You brought it back. It's encoded in your cerebral cortex right now."
Jake stopped struggling.
The ashes of the coffin. The blinding white light. Yuri had routed the data into Jake's head before the wipe.
"You want the data," Jake whispered.
"We are going to extract it," the female scientist chimed in. "The process will be invasive. We will need to wipe your memory to format the drive."
They were going to delete him anyway. After everything. After Nadya. After Yuri. After Taranov.
He had escaped a simulated hell just to wake up on a butcher's block in the real world.
Jake let his head fall back against the silver chair. He looked at the stark white ceiling.
He felt hollow. Completely, utterly empty.
"Begin the extraction prep," Aris ordered through the intercom.
Machinery whirred to life beneath Jake's chair. A halo of metallic nodes lowered from the ceiling, humming with magnetic energy.
Jake closed his eyes.
He thought of the Recycle Bin. He thought of the Director's golden bridge. He thought of the glitch.
I am an Admin, Jake thought.
He searched his mind. He didn't look for memories. He looked for code.
Deep in the back of his brain, beneath the grief and the trauma, he found a spark. It was the residual energy of the Golden Apple. It was the 'Hope' asset, burning like a localized sun in his synapses.
"Heart rate spiking," the female scientist noted, her voice pitching up. "He's resisting the sedative."
"Increase dosage," Aris commanded.
Jake opened his eyes.
They weren't human eyes anymore. They glowed with a faint, dangerous blue light.
He looked at his flesh-and-blood left arm. He concentrated the spark. He pushed the code outward, forcing the digital reality to overwrite the physical one.
The skin on his left forearm began to crack.
Underneath the flesh, blinding white light poured out. The skin peeled away like burnt paper, revealing not muscle, but shifting, liquid chrome.
"Director!" the woman shrieked, backing away from the glass. "His biometric scans are glitching! He's rewriting his own cellular structure!"
Jake smiled. It was Stalin's smile. Cold, ruthless, and absolute.
"You think this is the real world?" Jake asked, his voice echoing with a slight, metallic double-tone. "There is no real world anymore."
He flexed his left hand. The chrome snapped into place, heavy and perfect.
The Admin Arm had crossed over.
Jake grabbed the thick magnetic cuff holding his wrist. He didn't try to pull his hand out. He squeezed the metal.
CRUNCH.
The industrial-grade steel crumpled like tin foil. Sparks showered over his lap.
He tore his arm free.
The alarms in the facility began to scream. Red lights bathed the sterile room in the color of blood.
"Lockdown the lab!" Aris shouted, slamming his hand on a red button. "Deploy the security detail!"
Jake ripped the cuff off his right arm, then his legs. He stood up from the silver chair.
His hospital gown fluttered. He looked at the thick, reinforced glass separating him from the scientists.
"You left my family in the Recycle Bin," Jake said.
He walked up to the glass. He raised his chrome fist.
"I'm going back to get them."
Jake punched the glass.
The glass didn't shatter. The molecular bonds simply ceased to exist.
A perfectly circular hole, rimmed with glowing blue code, appeared in the barrier. The scientists screamed as the air pressure equalized violently.
Jake stepped through the hole into Project Orion Command.
The server war wasn't over. It had just expanded.