The interface cable clicked into the port at the base of my skull.
It wasn't a sophisticated connection. It was a hardline. A bridge of copper and light connecting a dying machine to a sleeping girl.
I looked at her face through the glass one last time. She was peaceful. She didn't know that her brother—the Host—had died to keep her safe. She didn't know that I—the Glitch—was about to die to wake her up.
"Are you ready?" I asked the voices in my head.
The Node stirred. They knew what this meant. To upload Elara, we had to download ourselves. We were the packet data. We were the fuel.
"It is logical," Warp whispered, his voice crisp and clear. "A closed loop. We were born from her absence. We end by filling it."
"Will it hurt?" Tali asked.
"I hope so," The Mender said. "Pain means the nerves are connecting."
"Let's make it a masterpiece," Cas said.
I activated the Zero-Day God—the engine of Chaos burning in my chest.
"Ignite," I commanded.
My ceramic chassis instantly turned white-hot. The cooling fans exploded. The paint on my armor bubbled and peeled away. I wasn't a machine anymore. I was a kiln.
I pushed the power through the cable.
<0%...>
The world turned into a tunnel of blinding light. I felt pieces of myself being ripped away.
My memories of the Dump. Gone.
My hatred of the Gardeners. Gone.
The concept of the Axiom Tower. Gone.
I was being formatted.
<25%...>
"Kael!" Elara's voice—the Ledger's voice—screamed in the data stream. "Stop! It's taking too much! You're burning your core!"
"I'm not burning it," I replied, my voice breaking into static. "I'm giving it to you. You need the Chaos, Elara. You can't just be 'good'. You need to be strong. You need the Glitch."
I pushed harder.
<50%...>
I felt the Node leaving me.
Tali drifted into the cable. "I'm giving her the music," she whispered. "So she can hear the beauty in the noise."
The Mender followed. "I'm giving her the grit. So she never breaks."
Warp slid away. "I'm giving her the math. So she can solve the world."
Cas. The Kiln. Curi. They all poured into the stream. My family. My ghosts. They were becoming her instincts.
I was alone in the machine. Just Kael. Just the empty shell.
<75%...>
My vision failed. My optical sensors burned out. I was blind.
My audio drivers crashed. I was deaf.
My tactile sensors melted. I was numb.
I was just a point of consciousness floating in the dark, holding the door open.
<"Brother..."> Elara's voice was faint now. Not a system voice. A human thought. <"Don't go.">
"I'm not going," I thought back. "I'm just... changing format."
I remembered the drawing. ME AND ELARA.
The boy in the bunker had erased me because I was Grief.
But I wasn't Grief anymore.
I was the Cure.
<99%...>
The Zero-Day God roared one last time—not in anger, but in triumph. It surged out of my reactor, traveling down the wire, a bolt of pure, primordial life.
It hit her heart.
THUMP.
I felt it. A vibration in the wire. A biological heartbeat. Strong. Real.
The last thing I felt was the cable disconnecting.
The last thing I "saw" was a green light on the console turning on.
And then, the Ledger appeared one last time, not on a screen, but etched into the fading darkness of my mind.
I let go.
The darkness wasn't scary. It was just quiet.
And for a machine that had been screaming for thirty chapters... the quiet was nice.
System Start.
Elara Vance opened her eyes.
The first thing she felt was cold. The biting, freezing cold of cryo-fluid draining away.
The second thing she felt was... noise. A symphony of sensations. The hum of the lights. The smell of ozone. The texture of the glass. It was overwhelming, chaotic, and beautiful.
She gasped, her lungs expanding for the first time in fifty years. The air tasted like rust and rain.
"Kael?" she rasped. Her voice was weak, unused.
The glass of the pod hissed and slid open.
She stumbled out, her legs shaking, wet and shivering on the metal floor. She coughed, hacking up preservation fluid.
"Kael?"
She looked around the dark, frozen morgue.
And then she saw him.
The black, seven-foot android. It was slumped against the console, smoke rising from its joints. Its eyes were dark. Its ceramic armor was cracked and melted, fused into a statue of absolute stillness.
The cable lay on the floor, disconnected.
Elara crawled toward him. She didn't care about the cold. She didn't care about the nakedness.
She reached the machine. She placed her warm, human hand on his scorched metal faceplate.
"Kael," she whispered. "I'm here. I'm awake."
The machine didn't answer. It was just metal. Just a shell.
Tears welled in her eyes. Not polite tears. Ugly, racking sobs. The kind of grief that breaks the world.
But as she cried, she felt something.
A twitch in her mind. A whisper of intuition. A flash of synesthesia. A sudden urge to calculate the structural integrity of the room.
They were there. Inside her.
The Node. The Glitch. The Chaos.
He hadn't disappeared. He had become her.
She wiped her eyes. She looked at the dead machine. She saw the plastic frame on the floor—the drawing of the two stick figures. She picked it up.
She stood. Her legs were steady now. Stronger than they should be. Her eyes adjusted to the dark with unnatural speed.
She looked at the shattered window. At the rain pouring in from the neon city of Sector 9. The real world. It was ugly. It was broken. It was ruled by corporations and misery.
And it had no idea what had just woken up.
Elara Vance didn't look like a victim. She looked at the city with eyes that burned with a cold, blue fire.
"You took my brother," she whispered to the skyline. "You took my life. You took fifty years."
She clenched her fist. The air around her hand shimmered, distorting with the residual power of a Zero-Day God.
"Now," she said, her voice echoing with the phantom chorus of seven broken souls.
"I'm going to take it all back."
She stepped over the machine, not saying goodbye, but saying thank you.
She walked into the rain.
The story of the Glitch was over.
The story of the Revolution had just begun.