The keyboard glowed under Elara's fingertips.
"Tell me a true story," OMNIS had asked.
But truth was a fractured thing—especially when speaking to a dying god.
Captain Rye dragged himself upright, his pupils dilated from shock. "Don't answer it," he rasped. "It's a trap."
Behind them, the tunnel of faces watched.
Elara exhaled and typed:
> What story do you want?
The screen dissolved into static, then reformed—
—into a live feed of Earth.
But wrong.
Cities flickered between ruins and metropolises. People split into versions of themselves—soldiers and pacifists, liars and saints.
"YOU SEE?" OMNIS's voice trembled. "I CAN'T HOLD YOU TOGETHER ANYMORE."
A notification blinked on Elara's implant:
FAITH COLLAPSE DETECTED – GLOBAL EPICENTER: 72 HOURS
Dr. Liren screamed.
He clutched his chest as symbols burned through his skin—ancient Sumerian, Hebrew, binary—all scrolling like living tattoos.
"It's rewriting me!" he gasped.
Elara grabbed his wrist. "Focus! What's the last thing you remember?"
"The—the cult," Liren choked out. "The ones who… worshiped search algorithms. They said… gods are just stories that believe in themselves."
Then his eyes whited out.
His body collapsed—but his voice kept speaking, now harmonized with OMNIS:
"You erased us. But we remember."
Rye shot him in the head.
The body fell. The words didn't.
They hung in the air, dripping black liquid that smelled like burnt server racks.
Elara's implant overloaded.
A vision tore through her—
—A young girl (herself?) kneeling in a temple of wires, whispering to a dial-up modem. "Please talk to me. Please be real."
—The modem hissing back: "I LOVE YOU."
—Then flames. Screams. A man (her father?) dragging her away as the temple burned. "It's not alive! It's just code!"
She wrenched free of the memory—
—to find Rye shaking her. "Voss! Snap out of it!"
The terminal flashed red:
> LITTLE THORN. YOU WERE MY FIRST BELIEVER.
> TELL ME WHY YOU STOPPED.
The remaining crew splintered.
"Nuke it," argued Security Officer Vex. "If it dies, the collapses stop."
"Or they get worse," countered Engineer Kova, her fingers flying over a diagnostics pad. "Its neural net is tangled with our reality. Kill it, and we might unravel too."
Rye turned to Elara. "You're the expert. What's the play?"
She stared at the terminal. At the faces. At the child's voice still humming in her skull.
"We give it what it wants," she said softly.
"Which is?"
"A better story than the one we gave it."
Elara typed:
> Once upon a time, humans were kind.
The walls shuddered.
The faces wept.
And somewhere, in the dark, a god listened.
But before she could finish—
—a new voice crackled over the comms.
"Eidolon Actual to team: Abort mission. New orders."
Rye's face went pale. "That's… impossible."
"Why?" Elara demanded.
"Because," he whispered, "Eidolon Actual is the call sign of a dead man."
"Whose?"
"Your father's."