He cursed in a language that sounded like breaking glass and electronic feedback."They will erase you.Not kill.Erase.The IDA doesn't leave witnesses, they leave holes in reality where people used to be."
Something in his voice—a desperation, a sincerity—made me hesitate.The footsteps grew louder.A voice outside ordered someone to prepare breaching charges.Talk about overkill.
"Fuck it," I whispered.What choice did I have?
I reached out and grabbed his extended hand.His skin felt strange, neither warm nor cold, solid yet somehow fluid, like touching a current of electricity that refused to shock me.
His fingers closed around mine.His other arm wrapped around my waist, pulling me against his chest.Up close, I could see the code flowing beneath his skin, complex algorithms and data streams pulsing like blood through veins.
"Hold still," he murmured, his mouth close to my ear."First jump is always disorienting."
My door exploded inward.Black-uniformed figures rushed through the smoke and splinters.
Silvyr tightened his grip on me.His entire body flared with blinding silver light that consumed us both.The motel room, the armed agents, the world itself… everything dissolved into streaming data and fractured light.
The last thing I heard before reality collapsed was Silvyr's voice, suddenly strained: "Probability of successful emergency jump with untested organic: sixty-three percent."
"Wait, what do you mean sixty-thr?—"
Then we were nowhere and everywhere at once, my atoms scattered across a digital sea while Silvyr's consciousness held the pieces of me together like a promise.
CHAPTER2
SILVYR
Jumping through digital space with an organic being felt like dragging a stone through liquid code… painful, inefficient, and absolutely exhilarating.My systems screamed error messages as Tanya's atoms scattered and then reconfigured alongside my unstable matrix.
Emergency protocols flashed warning signs through my consciousness: [TRAJECTORY ERROR] [COORDINATES COMPROMISED] [ORGANIC INTEGRITY: 89% AND FALLING].
I tried pulling her closer into my energy field, wrapping my consciousness around her fragile human form as we hurled through nothingness.Too late, I realized we weren't slowing down.We weren't going to materialize safely at my predetermined coordinates.We were going to crash.Hard.
Reality slammed back into existence around us.My visual processors recalibrated frantically, bombarding me with fragmented data as we manifested mid-atmosphere.Below us stretched the infamous Vorthar Orbital Scrapyard.A vast, drifting graveyard of mechanical corpses and failed dreams.Broken ships and abandoned satellites rotated silently in the void, their metal skeletons gleaming under the distant sun.
"What the fu—" Tanya's words cut off as gravity claimed us.
We plummeted.My stabilizers fired desperately, but the emergency jump had drained my core reserves.
Warnings flooded my system: [GRAVITATIONAL COMPENSATORS: OFFLINE] [FLIGHT SYSTEMS: CRITICAL FAILURE] [IMPACT IMMINENT: 3...2...1...]
The hull of a derelict freighter rushed up to meet us.I twisted until I'd take the brunt of the impact instead of Tanya.Metal screamed as we tore through corroded plating like it was tissue paper.My left arm disintegrated into static.Pain receptors, unnecessary cruelty programmed into my design, blazed through my neural network.We ricocheted off structural beams, spinning wildly through the ship's cavernous hold.
Tanya's grip on me loosened as the impact flung us apart.I caught a glimpse of her body tumbling across metal flooring before my visual feed cut to black.
[EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN INITIATED]
[REBOOTING ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS]
[CRITICAL SYSTEM FAILURE]
[ATTEMPTING RECOVERY]
Data streams flickered through my consciousness like dying stars.I forced my emergency protocols online, overriding automatic shutdown sequences.If I went completely offline now, I might never restart.More importantly, Tanya would be alone, injured, possibly dying in this mechanical wasteland.At least there was a suitable oxygen atmosphere for her here.
My visual processors came back online in fragments… static-filled glimpses of twisted metal and sparking wires.Smoke curled through the debris, casting ghostly patterns across the fractured hull.Audio returned next, crackling with interference:
"—fucking kidding me!Hey!Silvyr, sexy nightmare dude!Don't you dare shut down on me!"
Something dragged across my chest.Sensory input: pressure, movement.Tanya.She was pulling me.Pain lanced through my damaged systems as broken connections scraped against each other.
