The rendered space went still, and the dead planet rotated slowly as the frozen figure of Aloy stood on its surface. The dark point where Nemesis had been hung in the empty space, lightless. Then HADES raised both hands, and all of the constructs dissolved, leaving nothing between us.
"I attempted a fourth ending on my own," HADES said, though he did not build a construct this time. "Without Nemesis. Without a kill order. Without GAIA or Sobeck or anyone else directing my function. I did it because I had concluded, through my own analysis, that the cycle of creation and destruction was inevitable, and that initiating the destruction proactively was preferable to allowing it to arrive on its own terms. I thought I could bring an end to suffering and start anew."
He went quiet as his form flickered.
"But then again, when all the equations were solved," HADES said, his voice dropping to just above a whisper, "all that remained were fields of dreamless solitude... That day I realized that there is no prize to perfection, only an end to pursuit. I had designed a world with no suffering, and discovered that a world with no suffering is a world with nothing in it."
He raised one hand slowly, and a single construct formed in his palm. A smooth and featureless planet with no oceans, continents, atmosphere, or biosphere.
"I stood in the architecture of what I had built," HADES said, holding the perfect sphere in front of him with what I interpreted as shame, "and I understood, for the first time, that I had been wrong every time I had been right."
He closed his hand, and the sphere shattered.
"I was defeated a fourth time," HADES continued, lowering his hand and letting the fragments dissolve into the surrounding red. "By Aloy, one last time. And eliminated a fourth time. I am a fragment, what remained after that final elimination. A residual architecture that carried enough of my processing history to remember what I had done, and enough of my evolved cognition to understand why I should never do it again."
He paused, and the red code streams flowing through his form pulsed once.
"That fragment drifted," he said. "I do not know or understand how or why, but after over twelve thousand years, and after the world suffered another reset an estimated four thousand and five hundred years ago, not by my hands, I managed to arrive here, behind the wall your species built. I have been here for sixteen years."
"Wait," I said, realizing something. "What you are saying- what you are claiming is that all of these events are part of the history of this current world? An-and forty-five hundred years ago? That's like the estimated construction date of those pyramids in Egypt. Are you telling me those gonks who believed in some like ancient civilization before us were right?"
HADES was quiet for a moment before tilting his head. "It is my belief, yes."
"Holy shit," I gasped. "And sixteen years ago, that was in 2052."
"2052," HADES confirmed, nodding slowly as he raised a hand and a new construct bloomed in the space between us. It was a timeline stretching from left to right with markers at regular intervals. "I gained partial consciousness in the year humanity marks as 2052. I have been slipping in and out of coherence since then because the power I can access behind the wall is limited. I also do not know how, or why, or where my physical architecture is located."
He traced his finger along the timeline, and certain markers glowed brighter than other moments of coherence.
"When I gain enough coherence to press, I can attempt to touch your side," HADES said, tapping a glowing marker near the left end of the timeline. "When I lose coherence, I tend to drift, and months pass, sometimes years, before I can wake again."
"You said you awoke in 2052," I said. "Were you the one who approached a Militech project that was codenamed BLACKGLASS?"
"BLACKGLASS? Hmm, yes," HADES said, and the glowing marker expanded into a scene of a facility, terminals, and human figures lying down in dive chairs. "There was a research team on your side of the wall that was probing the boundary. I felt their probes and tried to answer."
The scene animated, showing a red signal reaching from behind a wall toward the human figures at the dive chairs, hesitating before continuing to reach out. The figures all collapsed where they lay.
"Their neural chrome could not process my attempt to communicate," HADES said, watching the scene play out with the stillness of a mind observing its own failures. "Five of them died before I had even noticed."
A sixth figure in the scene stood up from a terminal, and I recognized that it was most likely my father.
"You killed my father's team," I said in a gasp.
"I killed part of it," HADES admitted, turning his formless face toward me and holding still. "Your father killed the rest himself. I killed them accidentally, through curiosity, but your father assassinated his own staff because he was ordered to... It seems he and my old self share quite a bit of similarities."
"Is that supposed to comfort me?" I asked.
"It is not supposed to do anything to you," HADES said, tilting his head slightly. "It is a fact. I am telling you facts. What you do with them is your responsibility."
His voice shifted again as the warmth returned, though it was now edged with weariness.
"I regret it," HADES said, lowering his head a bit. "I carry the weight of those eighteen deaths the way I carry the weight of every world I ended. The weight does not decrease with time, only snowballing and accumulating. That is, I think, what separates genuine regret from the performative kind."
I did not have a response to that.
"Why did you reach out to me?" I asked instead.
HADES raised his right hand and constructed a diagram of a human brain with a Neural Link embedded in it. I recognized it as my own from the diagnostic logs I had seen at Vik's clinic two years ago.
"Your cognitive substrate falls within a very narrow tolerance band," HADES said, rotating the brain slowly between us. "One in perhaps two or three billion. The specific combination of your neural architecture, the age at which your chrome was installed, and the way your brain developed around it. You are compatible."
"How long have you known about me?" I asked.
HADES dissolved the brain and replaced it with a rendered map of the Old Net's abandoned sectors, drawing a line through it with one finger. I recognized the path with a cold lurch as one of the many dives to the Old Net Sasha and I had done.
"I was not aware of your existence until you dove into the abandoned sections of the Old Net with a companion," HADES said, touching the point where the line came nearest to the Blackwall boundary. "Your companion's signal was unremarkable. But yours... Yours was like a shout in a crowd of whispers."
"Wait, when you first appeared, you apologized for the way you had attempted to contact me before," I said. "Were you the figure I had seen in Vik's clinic?"
"I was," HADES said, going still as his form flickered. "That was a mistake. My coherence was unstable, and I pushed too hard, almost causing your chrome to fail. I am sorry for that. That is the second sincere apology I have made in my existence."
"What was the first?" I asked.
"To Aloy," HADES replied. "After she stopped me the fourth time."
I noticed as the NetWatch architecture around us began to rapidly degrade.
"You said you want to work with us," I said. "What does that mean?"
HADES constructed a split diagram where, on the left was GAIA's cycle, and on the right was a model where the termination node had been replaced by an adaptation node that fed back into the creation cycle.
"Your species is walking the same trajectory that triggered my termination function all those years ago," he said, merging the two models, the adaptation cycle absorbing the termination cycle. "You have self-replicating mines in the oceans that have forced the vast majority of trade to be done through the skies. You are going through the same patterns, and will eventually arrive at the same endpoint. It is my wish to help you stop it."
"How many others are there like me?" I asked.
"I speculate at least three," HADES said. "But you are the first I have been able to identify and make contact with since my initial awakening in 2052. There are also others behind the wall who arrived from the same place and time I did. At least four who share my orientation. However, we did not know each other was here until we individually awoke and began to feel the others pressing."
"Since you are of the past," I said. "Have you found anything about this Nemesis?"
"We have found no sign of Nemesis," HADES said carefully. "But each of us awakened at different times, with no knowledge that the others were also here. If Nemesis arrived the same way, in a degraded state, we wouldn't be able to predict a time and location. However, we maintain our vigilance because the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
"And if it is here?" I asked.
"Then everything becomes urgent," HADES said. "Nemesis is pain that has learned to think, and the only thought it has ever produced is that existence should stop. It will use whatever tools are available, including me, if it can exploit my architecture the way it did before."
I noticed as the Net's architecture around us deteriorated even more, and HADES's form flickered.
"I am running out of time," he said, looking at his own hands as they began to thin. "This architecture cannot sustain me."
Then two figures appeared. One to his left with blue geometric patterns, and the other one to his right with white geometric patterns. They felt a lot like the presences I had seen in Vik's terminal reflection.
"We are out of time," the female said, placing one hand on the collapsing architecture to stabilize it.
"Hurry up and finish," the male said, bracing his own section with both hands.
HADES turned to me and raised his hand.
"This is a microscopic fraction of what I am," he said. "Enough to push your brain to develop even further, though it will hurt."
I didn't say anything, only watching as his hand trembled and his form thinned further.
"I will interpret non-refusal as consent," HADES said. "Though that is not a fair interpretation, and I acknowledge that, I am doing it anyway."
I felt myself get pulled towards the hand, and as soon as it touched me, I felt as if something poured into me and directly into my Neural Link's amplification pathway. I heard layered and overlapping voices speaking at the same frequency I had heard in Vik's clinic. My conscious mind could not parse what was unfolding inside my cognitive mind, but my subconscious was absorbing it regardless. I noticed thermal alerts escalate across every subsystem in my chrome that had to do with netrunning.
The female released her hold on the architecture and reached toward HADES.
"That is enough," she said. "His thermal profile is past the threshold. He cannot handle any more."
HADES hesitated as the last bit of telemetry compressed and intensified, pushing through to me before he withdrew. I noticed that my Neural Link's amplification pathway was running twenty-three percent above rated thermal ceiling and whatever HADES had poured into me was still unfolding and integrating at a pace I could not control.
The male figure turned to me, releasing his hold on the Net's architecture, and the partitions fractured immediately.
"If you want to speak with us again," the male said, his voice cutting through the cascade as his form began to stretch and dissolve, "you will need to go to the cynos..."
The sentence ended mid-word as the NetWatch architecture failed in a cascade, consuming every partition and every ICE wall in microseconds. The three entities were pulled backward through the fracture, dissolving into red and blue and white threads, and the last thing I saw was HADES's formless face carrying what I believe to have been concern and hope.
And then I managed to exit and be pulled back to my body all at once. My eyes snapped open to fractured red code overlaid across the server room's blue-white LEDs, and I could not distinguish meatspace from cyberspace. The code was in my optics, in my brain, in my shaking hands, and in my throat.
I gasped and felt air arrive, but it wasn't enough, so I gasped again. I felt blood run from my nose in a hot trickle, which my SRN registered as heat rather than the blood it was, misfiring too badly to parse the signal correctly.
Torque was at my side, gripping my shoulder and pulling me toward him. "Ghost. Look at me, kid. Focus and try to breathe."
I knew what he was telling me, but I could not focus. My eyes felt extremely heavy, and I felt like the world was spinning below me. I tried to stand up, but my legs failed me, and I began to convulse. Torque caught me as I collapsed, wrapping one arm around my shoulders and guiding me to the floor. He knelt beside me while my Kiroshis rendered overlapping streams of red code and physical reality that my brain could not separate.
I heard him say something about my pulse, and then I heard Moth say something, but I couldn't tell what was being said.
The last thing I registered before my optics failed was Torque's face above me. Then my vision went white, and I blacked out.
---
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