A God in Ruins

"You can't stay," Vesper said, panic entering her voice. "If the server crashes while you're jacked in, it will fry your brain. You’ll die in the real world."

"I know," Cipher said.

He walked toward the Gate.

"But if I leave, you die. If I take one, the other dies. And if I take you out there... you're right, Vesper. You'd just be simulations. You wouldn't have bodies. You wouldn't be *here*."

He stood before the vortex.

"I'm going to break the loop," Cipher said.

He accessed the Admin Command Line. He didn't type in an export command. He typed in an **Override**.

**[COMMAND: OVERLOAD LOCAL SERVER.]**

**[TARGET: GATEWAY\_BRIDGE.]**

"Cipher, stop!" Thorne scrambled to his feet.

Cipher raised his staff. It glowed with a blinding, apocalyptic light.

"I am the Architect!" Cipher roared at the void. "And I resign!"

He slammed the staff into the center of the Gate.

The impact was silent.

Then, the blue vortex shattered.

Shards of data flew outward like glass. The connection to the outside world—to the internet, to the server farm, to Seattle—severed.

Cipher screamed as the feedback loop hit him. His real body, sitting in a VR chair miles away, seized. His heart stopped. The neural link fused.

His consciousness was ripped out of his biological brain and uploaded, raw and bleeding, into the collapsing server.

The Spire exploded.