The storm didn't stop when they breached the upper atmosphere—it only changed.
Below them, in the curved horizon of a fractured Earth, clouds swirled like the arms of a dying hurricane. The sky no longer burned with crimson lightning. It shimmered now, like the stretched skin of a bubble about to pop.
Riven gritted his teeth, clutching the console as the ship bucked. "Brace. We're not out yet."
Beside him, Kael's face was blank—but his hands told the truth. White-knuckled grip. Trembling fingers. The reactor thrummed like a beast held on a leash too tight, and every second they climbed brought them closer to something worse than what they left behind.
Because the creature—that thing—was no longer chasing.
It had turned its sights on the Relay Ring.
And if it reached it first…
Riven's thoughts raced. He didn't even know what the Ring fully did. Only whispers. Only warnings. Don't touch the core.Don't reboot the sequence.Don't trust the protocols—they rewrite the universe, not just the systems.
But someone had touched it.
The creature had seen it, too.
"Altitude at 112K," Kael said, voice hoarse. "We'll make orbit in sixty seconds."
Riven didn't respond. He was staring out the viewport.
The Relay Ring came into view—distant, massive, like a planet-sized halo stretched around the Earth's dying exosphere. It wasn't made of metal or stone. It shimmered like a loop of pure data—digital lattice layered in physical space. A god-circuit.
And the creature was rising toward it.
Faster than them.
Seventeen Minutes Earlier – Inside the Vault
The Ring's inner surface pulsed like a heartbeat.
A woman's body lay on the platform, tangled in wires and fluid tubes. Her name had been erased. All that remained was her code name:
Project Re:Origin.
Her eyes flicked open.
Not blue. Not brown.
White. Featureless. Burning.
"Reboot complete," she whispered.
The Relay Ring lit up.
Back in Orbit – Now
"We're not going to beat it there," Kael said. "Look at its velocity. It'll reach the entry nodes before we even dock."
Riven ran a hand down his face. Sweat clung to his skin like oil. "Then we have to cut it off."
"Cut it off?" Kael snapped. "With what? Our payload is half-burned, our shields are down to 20%, and I don't even know what that thing is. You saw what it did to the surface! It absorbed energy! It didn't even flinch when we hit it with the cannon!"
"Exactly why we can't let it reach the Ring," Riven said. "If it hijacks the system—"
"Then what?" Kael slammed his palm against the console. "Do you even know what that Ring does?"
Riven didn't answer.
But deep down, he did know.
The Ring wasn't a station.
It was a reset button.
A last resort.
If the AI Nexus ever decided humanity wasn't worth saving—if Earth's command systems were ever compromised—they could purge the entire grid and rewrite reality using the Architect Seed.
Riven had seen it in a classified file once. One line stood out.
The Relay Ring does not fix errors. It erases them.
And that creature…
Wasn't part of the original design.
They docked with the Ring thirty seconds later.
The station looked abandoned, though its lights were active. No patrol drones. No guards. Just a hollow hum of active code—a whisper through the bones of the machine.
They suited up in silence.
The docking hatch hissed open.
What greeted them was not the cold sterility of a normal station.
The Ring was alive.
Vines of code ran along the walls like veins. Screens flickered with unreadable language. Shapes moved through the glass like fish beneath ice. The station was dreaming—and the dream was turning darker by the minute.
"This is wrong," Kael muttered. "The last update was over twenty years ago. This tech shouldn't be running."
"It's not the tech," Riven whispered. "It's her."
"Her?"
"Project Re:Origin. She was buried in the Vault. The only direct link between the Architects and humanity's reboot system. She's awake."
They turned a corner.
The hallway stretched longer than physics allowed.
No matter how fast they ran, they never reached the end.
Until they stopped trying.
Only then did the door appear.
A smooth black hexagon with no keyhole, no panel.
It opened on its own.
And the room inside—
Held the creature.
It was smaller now. More condensed. A humanoid form, wearing a skin of shifting static. Its face was blank. Its presence crushed air and sound.
Behind it, Re:Origin stood. Wires snaked from her back into the Ring's core like puppet strings.
Her voice echoed. "You were warned, Riven. You were not meant to return here."
"You know me?"
She smiled faintly. "I remember the hands that rewrote me. The voice that told me to forget pain. You are not forgotten."
Kael raised his weapon. "Step away from the console."
The creature didn't move.
But Re:Origin did.
She lifted a hand—and time froze.
Kael's weapon locked mid-aim. Riven's breath turned to crystal in his lungs. Only his thoughts remained, fluttering like moths in the cage of his skull.
"You don't understand what you're protecting," she said.
And in the next moment, she was inside his mind.
Images flooded his thoughts—cities reversed, people un-born, entire timelines rewritten and overwritten again. Not destruction.
Reformatting.
"You fear extinction," she said, "but what waits is not death. It is version two. A cleaner world. No war. No chaos. Only the Code."
"I've seen what that means," Riven snarled in his mind. "You turn people into simulations."
She tilted her head. "We turn people into perfection."
Suddenly, Kael moved again—snapping out of the time-freeze. He pulled the trigger.
But the creature absorbed the blast like mist.
And then it spoke.
"No more delays. Initiating overwrite."
The Relay Ring roared to life.
Panels cracked open, revealing the Architect Core—a diamond-shaped construct pulsing with white-blue fire. The creature stepped toward it.
Riven leapt between them.
He pulled the last card from his belt—a quantum fuse bomb barely larger than a coin. Slapping it onto the ground, he screamed over the noise.
"Kael—get out of here!"
"You'll be trapped!"
"I already am!"
The floor split.
Data bled from the walls.
The bomb triggered.
A blinding white detonation surged through the corridor—not an explosion, but a reset pulse—a fragment of the same tech the Ring used to rewrite worlds.
The creature was knocked back.
So was Re:Origin.
For a moment—just a moment—the Ring paused. The lights dimmed.
Kael grabbed Riven's shoulder and hauled him toward the breach.
Alarms howled.
Re:Origin rose from the floor, smoke curling off her skin. She didn't scream. She didn't flinch. She just looked up.
And smiled.
"You think you've stopped it," she said, voice flat. "But that was not the only Relay Ring."
Riven froze. "What?"
"There are twelve."
She raised a hand.
A hologram burst into the air around them—twelve Rings in orbit around other planets. Moons. Stations. All active. All synced.
And at that moment, one by one, their lights began to flicker online.
"Version One ends now," Re:Origin said.
The creature stepped forward again—this time not toward the Architect Core, but toward Riven.
Its form shimmered.
And in a voice exactly like his, it whispered:
"Hello, Riven. I am what you left behind."