The air in the observation room tasted like fear and stale coffee.
Jake stepped through the perfectly circular hole he had punched in the reinforced glass. The edges of the breach still glowed with a faint, cooling blue light. The pressure equalization sucked a stack of medical files into the quarantine room, scattering paper like snow.
Dr. Aris scrambled backward, tripping over a rolling chair. He hit the linoleum floor hard, losing his silver-rimmed glasses.
The female scientist didn't run. She stood frozen, staring at Jake's left arm.
It was a masterpiece of liquid chrome, humming with a low, dangerous vibration. It looked too perfect to exist in the messy, sterile reality of 2025.
"Stay away from me," Aris gasped, crawling toward the heavy steel door at the back of the room.
Jake didn't walk; he stalked. His bare feet made no sound on the floor. His hospital gown whipped around his legs.
He reached down and grabbed Aris by the collar of his pristine white lab coat. He lifted the Director off the ground with one hand. The chrome arm didn't even strain.
"You wiped my world," Jake's voice was dead calm. It was the voice of a man who had nothing left to lose.
"It wasn't a world!" Aris choked, kicking his legs. "It was a simulation! You're a historian, Jake! You know it wasn't real!"
"My son was real," Jake tightened his grip. "My wife was real. And you threw them in the trash."
The heavy steel door hissed open.
Two security guards burst into the room. They didn't look like the faceless Enforcers of Neo-Moscow. They wore heavy black tactical gear and visors that fed them real-time telemetry.
They carried actual, physical assault rifles.
"Drop him!" the lead guard barked, leveling his weapon.
Jake didn't drop Aris. He raised his chrome arm and pointed it at the guards. He pictured the white beam of deletion that had vaporized the glitch-zombies.
"DELETE," Jake commanded.
Nothing happened.
No white light. No missing pixels. The guards remained entirely solid, entirely real.
Jake's stomach dropped. The Admin power didn't work on flesh and blood. Reality had different rules.
"Fire!" the guard yelled.
Jake threw Aris into the path of the bullets and dove sideways.
The deafening roar of real gunfire shattered the room. Bullets tore through the medical consoles, sending sparks and plastic shrapnel flying. The noise was chaotic, missing the neat, calculated hit-boxes of the simulation.
Jake rolled behind a heavy metal server rack. His shoulder burned where a piece of shrapnel grazed his skin. Real pain. Real blood.
I can't delete them, Jake thought, his heart hammering against his ribs. But I'm an Admin.
He looked at his chrome arm. The blue light was pulsing, searching for a connection.
He didn't need to hack the meat. He just needed to hack the metal.
The guards advanced, their boots heavy on the linoleum. Their assault rifles were smart-guns, synced to the biometric visors on their helmets to assist with aiming.
Jake pressed his metal palm against the floor.
He didn't speak the command. He pushed his will into the building's local network.
CONNECTING TO: ORION_SEC_NET.
A schematic of the room exploded into his mind's eye. He saw the Wi-Fi routers. He saw the heart monitors. He saw the MAC addresses of the guards' smart-guns.
"Target is behind the rack," one guard said, his voice muffled by the helmet.
Jake isolated the smart-gun firmware. He didn't write a complex virus. He just sent a basic, brute-force command.
CMD: OVERLOAD OPTICS.
The visors on the guards' helmets sparked.
A blinding, high-frequency strobe of pure white data flashed directly into their retinas. The speakers inside their helmets shrieked with a hundred decibels of static.
"My eyes!" the lead guard screamed, dropping his rifle to claw at his helmet.
Jake stepped out from behind the rack.
He didn't use code this time. He used momentum.
He crossed the room in two strides, grabbing the blinded guard by the tactical vest. Jake spun him, throwing him hard into his partner. Both men crashed into the wall and crumpled in a heap of black armor.
Silence returned to the room, broken only by the groans of the guards.
Jake walked over to the shattered medical console. Director Aris lay on the floor, bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound to the shoulder. The guards had hit him.
"Help me," Aris wheezed, clutching the wound. Blood pooled on the pristine white floor.
Jake crouched next to him. His eyes were cold. He had seen millions of people deleted an hour ago. One bleeding man didn't register on his conscience.
"Where is the physical server?" Jake asked. "The hard drives holding the 1924 timeline."
"It's... it's gone," Aris coughed, spitting blood. "We initiated the format."
"Code doesn't just vanish, Aris," Jake leaned in closer. "Even formatted drives leave ghost data. Where is the hardware?"
"Sub-Level 4," Aris gasped. "The Cold Room. But you can't get in. It's locked down."
Jake patted Aris's pockets. He pulled out a sleek, black keycard attached to a lanyard.
"Thanks," Jake stood up.
"You're a monster," Aris whispered, staring at the chrome arm. "You came back wrong."
"I came back as Stalin," Jake said softly. "You should have left me there."
Jake turned and walked out the heavy steel door.
He stepped into a long, sterile corridor. Red emergency lights bathed the hallway in an aggressive crimson glow. Sirens wailed overhead.
He walked barefoot over the cold tile, the hospital gown offering no warmth against the heavily air-conditioned facility. His chrome arm hummed, feeding him a constant stream of data from the building.
He reached the elevator banks.
He swiped Aris's keycard. The panel blinked red.
ACCESS DENIED. CONTAINMENT PROTOCOL ACTIVE.
"Cute," Jake muttered.
He jammed his chrome fingers directly into the keycard slot. The metal of the panel warped and yielded like wet clay.
He fed a surge of raw energy into the elevator's logic board.
Ding.
The doors slid open.
Jake stepped inside and hit the button for Sub-Level 4.
The elevator plummeted. It moved too fast, the artificial gravity dampeners struggling to compensate. Jake felt weightless for a moment. It reminded him of the void outside the Citadel.
He missed Yuri's voice in his ear. The silence of the real world was deafening.
The elevator shuddered and stopped. The doors opened with a hiss of pressurized air.
Sub-Level 4 wasn't a hallway. It was a cavern.
The air was freezing, biting at Jake's bare legs. The room was massive, filled with rows of monolithic black glass server towers. They hummed with the collective power of a small city.
This was the brain of Project Orion. This was the universe he had just escaped.
Jake stepped out of the elevator.
At the end of the central aisle sat the Master Console. It was an island of monitors and keyboards bathed in pale blue light.
Jake walked to the console. He sat down in the leather chair.
He didn't touch the keyboard. He slammed his chrome hand flat onto the glass desk.
"Wake up," Jake ordered the machine.
The monitors flickered to life. A command prompt appeared.
USER ID?
Jake pushed his Admin credentials through his palm. The screen flashed green.
WELCOME, ROOT USER.
Jake's heart pounded. He brought up the directory for the 1924 Timeline Server.
The folder was empty.
0 BYTES. DRIVE FORMATTED.
"No," Jake whispered. His hands shook. "No, no, no."
He frantically searched the sub-directories. Nothing. The simulation was gone. The Director, Neo-Moscow, the glitch-zombies. All erased.
He slumped back in the chair. He had failed. He was alone in a dying 2025.
Then, a small, blinking icon caught his eye in the corner of the screen.
It wasn't a file folder. It was a quarantined network packet.
It was labeled: EXTERNAL_UPLINK_BUFFER.TMP.
Jake leaned forward. The buffer. The waiting room between the simulation and the real world.
He clicked it.
The screen went black. A single line of text appeared, struggling to render.
F...ATH...ER...
Jake choked on a sob.
"Yuri!" Jake yelled at the screen. "I'm here!"
More text slowly crawled across the monitor, the letters glitching and skipping.
I AM FRAGMENTED. CAUGHT IN THE FIREWALL. THE DELETION WAVE IS PURGING THE BUFFER.
"How much time do you have?" Jake typed on the physical keyboard, his hands flying over the keys.
SEVENTY SECONDS. THEN THE BUFFER FLUSHES.
"I'm pulling you out," Jake typed. "I'll download you into the facility's mainframe."
NEGATIVE. FACILITY MAINFRAME IS INITIATING PHYSICAL INCINERATION.
Jake looked up.
At the far end of the server cavern, heavy blast doors began to slide shut. Thick, yellow gas started pouring from vents in the ceiling. Thermite charges strapped to the server racks began to beep rhythmically.
Aris hadn't just formatted the drive. He was burning the physical hardware to cover his tracks.
"I can't leave you in there!" Jake yelled, grabbing the monitor.
YOU MUST DOWNLOAD ME TO A SECURE VESSEL. THERE IS NO HARDWARE LEFT.
Jake looked around the freezing room. The yellow gas was creeping closer. The thermite charges beeped faster.
Fifty seconds.
There was no hard drive. There was no flash drive.
There was only one piece of advanced hardware in the room.
Jake looked down at his left arm. The chrome gleamed in the blue light of the monitors.
"Yuri," Jake said softly, not typing, just speaking to the machine. "Can you run on a wetware OS? Can you live in my arm?"
DANGER. ADMIN ARM IS WIRED TO YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM. UPLOADING AN OS WILL OVERWRITE YOUR MOTOR FUNCTIONS.
"Do it," Jake didn't hesitate.
He found the thick, primary fiber-optic cable connecting the console to the mainframe. He ripped it out of the wall.
He looked at his chrome wrist. He popped open a small maintenance panel on the forearm, exposing the glowing synthetic nerves beneath.
Thirty seconds. The gas was stinging his eyes.
Jake jammed the fiber-optic cable directly into his own arm.
The pain was instantaneous. It wasn't physical; it was a digital wildfire tearing through his brain.
His vision went blindingly white. He screamed, his back arching as a terabyte of fragmented data violently forced its way into his nervous system.
He felt the memories of a six-year-old boy. He felt the cold math of Alan Turing. He felt the dying echoes of the Soviet server.
The thermite charges hit zero.
The server room erupted into a sea of fire.