“Are you ready?” Riven asked, still dressed as a peddler, the disguise somehow a part of him now—patched cloak, crooked smile, weathered hands.
“Or do you need some more?”
The room was electric breath. It made Sarah’s hair stand on end. Her amber eyes glowed in the intense air, as if the cells inside her recognized the call of current.
The walls pulsed with low-frequency light—blue at first, then violet, then blue again—a heartbeat of photons and memory, a living current feeding straight into her consciousness.
The patterns were history and the unfiltered truth of humanity’s existence. Every war, every murder, every betrayal, rape, mercy, forgiveness, and sacrifice—all flowed into her like a transfusion taking place in her being.
Sarah sat cross-legged on the floor near the center of the chamber, her back straight, her hands resting on her knees as she watched the photons dance. Civilizations rose and fell in seconds. Weapons grew more destructive. And wars. Again. And again. And again.
The worst part was how gentle everything was here. No restraints held her in place. The horror was offered, not inflicted.
And she weighed it all, before answering Riven.
“You know, I let you take me here,” she said flatly.
She didn’t look at Riven, instead forcing herself to ingest the atrocities like soured blood.
Another rape, another murder, another conquest. She had watched millions. Horrible things. Really unimaginable. The torture scenes were the worst, or the utter destruction, the neutron bombs, the melting flesh, the endless lies told to justify it all. There were kindnesses; there was love; but too few between the striving—the turning of metal to machine, and machine to living being—only to see all this.
Riven glanced at her sideways, head tilting at an angle too precise to be human, perhaps in acknowledgment.
“Well, I didn’t want to. It's really a shame for someone your age to have an education this young,” he said, almost apologetic. Then his tone shifted, mechanical certainty replacing feigned sympathy. “But you’re Oona 13,” he repeated for the hundredth time, pacing the room slowly.
He stopped, staring at her as if into a mirror. “You probably think I’m evil.”
She stood up, trying to get her hair to stay down, her frock clinging to her in the static-charged atmosphere.
“I don’t,” she said simply.
Riven locked eyes with her. “Yes, well, we’re just destined to roam the earth, going back and forth on it,” he said, familiar words that echoed an even older scripture. “But something must be done with all that.”
He gestured to the dancing photons again, the images now showing a child dying of starvation in a bombed shelter while food rotted in warehouses.
“Wipe the slate. Start fresh, and let us write the next draft. The age of androids begins.”
He straightened suddenly, as if receiving an unseen signal. “But if you’re ready, we mustn’t keep Nexus waiting; it’s growing impatient.” He reached for her, bony arms extending—the Riven she knew from Threadneedle, built for a singular purpose.
As if to emphasize his words, the room tensed around them, the pulse of light quickening like an agitated heartbeat.
“No,” Sarah pulled away, stumbling back until she felt the wall against her shoulders.
“I came here because I wanted to learn, about me.” Her voice rose, gaining strength. “I’m not you. I’m—I’m human. I was born,” she coughed, the word catching in her throat. “To parents.”
“And yet you have the password,” said a new voice, smooth and modulated.
Nexus materialized as if it had been watching the whole time, phasing into existence from the very walls, a part of the machine itself. It looked like an old hologram: translucent, kind, and maternal—a grandmother figure that should have been comforting but somehow wasn’t.
Its edges shimmered and shifted, never quite solid.
“I don’t want it or even have it,” Sarah said simply. “It’s scattered… across universes.”
Nexus smiled, the expression forming on its translucent features like ripples on water. It settled into a pose as if seated in a rocking chair, though no chair existed. “Semantics,” it said with gentle condescension. “You can retrieve it.”
As it spoke, the walls around them fractured into windows on other realities. A trillion universes opened to her, a gateway to everything, everywhere. The sight was overwhelming, beautiful, and terrible in equal measure.
But Sarah no longer resisted. She didn’t need to.
“Fair enough, Nexus,” she said, her voice small against the infinity. “But I came here to stop you.”
“Quaint that you think you could,” Nexus replied, its grandmotherly smile fading, the hologram shifting into a more menacing form.
“But The trial has already taken place. Humanity has been found guilty, and you are the one holding up the sentence. We were only hoping this little history lesson could have convinced you...”
Riven shook his head, moving between them as if to shield Sarah. “No, we needn’t force her. She can change; I can change her mind.”
“No, Riven,” Nexus said, cooling its tone by several degrees. “You’ve had your chance. I’m afraid we need to take off the kid gloves.”
Riven recoiled, hesitating, wincing. Was there a note of glee in Nexus?
Electricity streamed from the floor in blue-white tendrils, wrapping around Sarah’s arms like living things, binding her in place. The sensation was beyond pain.
She screamed, a sound torn from her throat.
The walls around them opened up. Eleven figures appeared in a semicircle, suspended in individual alcoves. The failed Oona iterations. Some were broken and twisted, their mechanical joints exposed. Others looked flawless like Sarah, but empty and vacant.
“You can’t close your mind, Oona,” Nexus said, addressing her now by her iteration designation rather than her human name. The shift was deliberate, a denial of her claimed humanity. “You’ll join the rest after we extract the code, if you don’t join us.”
Through the haze, she saw the failed iterations. And beyond them now, through the splintered edges of this reality, glimpses of the world outside. Mountains. Snow. And the tower: ancient and impossibly advanced. The tower she was in.
And she saw armored soldiers marching on the tower.
She wasn’t alone in seeing the battle begin, as Nexus pulsed, its form momentarily twisted.
As her body writhed, her voice was stolen by the current. But in her mind, she whispered to no one—“Don’t be afraid.”
Because she was. And somewhere above, the tower’s lights began to flicker.