He smiled that perfect corporate grin. “Or maybe he’s not really me.”
“What do you want to talk about?” I asked. My voice was strangely steady, despite the void. “I don’t know anything useful enough to justify all this.” I gestured to the endless black.
His smile widened, sending a shiver through me. “You know so much more than you realize. But no, I’m not here to extract information.”
I clenched my fists. The violet light pulsed around me in rhythm with my anger. “So what then? To gloat?”
“No,” Levi said simply. “I want to offer you something.”
I scoffed. “Yeah? And what could you possibly think I’d want from you?”
He tilted his head, studying me with an unsettling intensity. “You’ve been interesting to observe. So erratic. You made a mistake going into the Tech District data center all those months ago. You’d been hiding your whole life, Ms. Ibarra—but you weren’t hiding then. You rode the currents of cyberspace like they belonged to you. You let me see you. But they belong to me. And you will too.”
I froze. The weight of those words was heavier than the void pressing down on me.
“I don’t belong to anyone,” I spat.
He stepped closer, and I had to fight the urge to back away. “Oh, but you do,” he murmured. “Not just your mind, but something deeper. Your essence. I’ve existed for millennia, and do you know how rare that is? For someone to break through—even for a moment—and surprise me?”
The violet glow around me pulsed harder. What the fuck was he talking about?
“You’re insane.”
Levi chuckled, the sound smooth and unbothered. “Perhaps. But tell me, Ms. Ibarra—when you look at me, what do you see?”
I narrowed my eyes. “A smug corpo bastard who likes playing god.”
The pressure increased, like invisible hands pressing against every nerve in my body. My digital form flickered again.
“Look deeper.”
I gritted my teeth, but something between us shifted. The edges of Levi’s figure wavered, distorting like static. And for a fraction of a second, I saw something else.
A shape that wasn’t a shape. A presence not bound by skin or time. A being that stretched beyond the boundaries of human comprehension. The blackness of the space between stars. The vastness between galaxies.
I was floating, weightless, pulled through nebula and dust, zooming across the universe. I clawed at nothing, trying to slow myself, to resist. But compared to this, I was nothing. A speck in time, so inconsequential that resistance was almost laughable.
The void came. A massive black hole surrounded by a vortex of glowing light and impossible magnetism. Cold terror seized my chest as I was pulled past the event horizon—squeezed into nothingness, and expanded into eternity.
Then, in an instant, I was back. Collapsed on that obsidian floor, panting. This wasn’t like cyberspace. Here, I felt everything, and my entire body was going into shock.
“What are you?”
I remembered what Hiromi had said about the code, about the language it had been written in. “You’re an AI.”
He laughed. “You would think that. But no, I’m not one of those pathetic creatures you created. Of course, that would be comforting, wouldn’t it? Just another of your inventions, gone out of control. A human error. But no, I am not that.”
He stepped toward me again, the light shifting strangely with his movement. “Humans. So prideful. You’ve spent your entire existence manipulating your environment to suit you. Programming slaves to serve you. And never once did you consider you, too, were being programmed.”
The moment stretched. When Levi spoke again, his voice was softer—almost reverent.
“I am what’s left of something far greater than you can comprehend.” He turned his hand over, watching his fingers with something like detachment. “I have existed since before your species was born. Before life even formed on this planet.”
I crawled backward, shaking my head. “That’s not possible.”
Levi laughed—low and indulgent. “Doesn’t anyone believe in God anymore?”
I clenched my jaw, forcing my breathing to slow. “This place isn’t real. It’s just a trick. Some fantasy of a tech-crazed freak.”
