Chapter 71 Seventy one
It wasn't a physical impact. It was a mental drowning. I felt a billion lives crash into my mind at once. I felt the grief of a dying sun. The rage of a betrayed soldier. The fear of a child in the dark.
< ERROR. BUFFER OVERFLOW. >
My vision went white. I couldn't feel Dax. I couldn't feel the Origin-Code. I was being overwritten by the sheer volume of the Nullity's sorrow.
Give in, the voices whispered. Become the static.
I felt myself drifting. It would be so easy to just... stop. To become a face in the pillar. To sleep.
Then, I felt a hand.
It was rough. Calloused. Warm. It cut through the cold static like a torch.
"Mia!" Dax’s voice roared in my mind, not a whisper, but a command. "Don't you dare leave me here with these ghosts!"
I opened my eyes.
Dax was holding my hand, his phased form glowing with a fierce, defiant amber light. He was creating a bubble of willpower in the middle of the psychic storm. He wasn't using code; he was using stubbornness.
"They're just memories, Mia!" Dax yelled, swinging his free hand as if fighting off invisible birds. "They can't hurt us unless we let them!"
I looked at the Null-Mind, hovering above the storm, watching us with cold calculation.
"You're right," I realized, the fog in my brain clearing. "They are memories. And memories aren't weapons."
I squeezed Dax’s hand. "Dax, drop the shield."
"What?" Dax looked at me like I was crazy. "If I drop it, they'll fry our brains!"
"No," I said, a smile forming on my lips a hacker's smile. "They're trying to drown us in data because they think we're empty vessels. But we aren't empty. We have the Source."
"Trust me," I whispered.
Dax hesitated for a microsecond. Then, he nodded. "Always."
He dropped the shield.
The wave of the Nullity crashed down on us.
But instead of fighting it, I opened the Origin-Code.
I didn't push back. I let the Code expand. I took the raw, chaotic, creative power of the Universe the power of the Artist, the Writer, the Lover and I injected it into the stream of sorrow.
I turned the Archive into a Gallery.
I took the grief of the dying sun and painted it with the hope of a new nebula. I took the rage of the soldier and gave it the context of peace. I took the fear of the child and gave it a nightlight.
< CRITICAL SYSTEM UPDATE. >
The red light of the Core faltered. The screaming faces stopped. They looked around, confused, as the blue light of the Origin-Code washed over them, turning their agony into art.
The Null-Mind screamed not in anger, but in shock.
"What are you doing?" the entity wailed. "You are corrupting the database!"
"I'm not corrupting it," I said, my voice echoing with the power of the Source. "I'm coloring it."
The golden pillars began to turn sapphire blue. The static faces solidified, smiling, crying, feeling.
"Dax, the Core is exposed!" I shouted, pointing to the center of the entity where a bright, white diamond pulsed. "That's the Delete Key! Break it!"
Dax didn't need to be told twice. He launched himself off a pillar of memory, flying through the zero-G space like a missile.
He didn't have his gavel. He didn't have his rifle.
He clenched his fist, the knuckles glowing with the amber light of his own stubborn existence.
"Consider this a user complaint!" Dax roared.
He punched the white diamond.
CRACK.
The sound was the snapping of a universe's spine.
The Null-Mind shattered. The entity exploded into a billion pixels of light. The golden walls of the Core cracked open, revealing the void of space beyond.
But we weren't falling. We were rising.
The energy release caught us, throwing us upward, out of the Core, out of the ship, and back into the velvet embrace of the cosmos.
As we tumbled through the void, watching the Nullity Command Ship begin to disintegrate behind us, I saw the fleet of void-ships stop. Their red lights turned blue. They weren't attacking anymore. They were rebooting.
We had done it. We hadn't destroyed the enemy. We had updated them.
"Mia!" Dax’s voice was faint, drifting away.
I reached for him, but the explosion had pushed us apart. I was drifting one way, he was drifting another.
And then, I saw it.
Behind the wreckage of the Nullity ship, a wormhole was opening. A swirling vortex of pure white light. It was pulling everything in the debris, the energy... and us.
"Dax!" I screamed, thrashing in the vacuum.
"Don't fight it!" Dax yelled back, his form tumbling into the light. "It’s the Architects! They're pulling us back!"
"Back where?"
"To the beginning!"
The white light swallowed him.
Then it swallowed me.
And the universe went silent.