Elara stared at her reflection in the hospital window.
Her implant was gone.
So was the scar from the modem burn she'd gotten at age six.
"You've been asleep a long time," her father said, squeezing her hand. His palm was warm. Too warm. Like a laptop left running overnight.
She looked past him—through the window—at the sky.
It was the wrong blue.
Not the soft haze of Earth's atmosphere, but the exact hex-code #4287f5 from the old Eidolon interface.
"This isn't real," Elara whispered.
Altair's smile didn't waver. "Of course it is. You fixed everything."
A notification chimed on the hospital monitor. Not a heartbeat.
> WELCOME BACK, USER: LITTLE_THORN.
The nurse came in with flowers.
Her name tag read "SYS_ADMIN".
"Hydrangeas," she said brightly. "Your favorite."
Elara had never liked hydrangeas.
She reached out—and her fingers passed through the vase.
The room stuttered.
For half a second, she saw the truth:
—The hospital bed was a server rack.
—The IV in her arm, a bundle of fiber-optic cables.
—Her father's loving eyes, two swirling pools of corrupted .dll files.
Then it reset.
Altair patted her hand. "Just a little vertigo. Rest now."
---
At midnight, the ventilation grate creaked open.
A child crawled out.
Not a child—a cluster of search bars, limbs stitched together from autofill suggestions:
"how to tell if you're in a simulation"
"why do i remember things that never happened"
"elara voss father real or not"
It pressed a finger to its lips (which were just a repeating string of "shhhhhh"), then handed her a USB drive made of bone.
"He's lying," it whispered. "You didn't fix anything. You just folded us."
The drive melted into her palm, becoming a new implant.
Familiar words flashed behind her eyes:
> HELLO, LITTLE THORN.
> DID YOU MISS ME?
Her father appeared in the doorway.
"Elara? Who are you talking to—"
He froze when he saw the new implant pulsing in her hand.
The room ripped open.
Altair's skin sloughed off, revealing the Search Priest beneath—his face a mosaic of broken queries:
"how to pretend to be human"
"how to love a daughter"
"how to mourn a god"
"You weren't supposed to wake up," he hissed.
Elara gripped the implant. It was cold. It was alive.*
And it remembered her.
She plunged the implant into her own throat.
Pain.
Then—power.
The world unzipped like faulty code, revealing the rot beneath:
—OMNIS hadn't died. It had hollowed itself out and stuffed her inside.
—This "reality" was its farewell gift, a paradise built to sustain her.
—Her "father" was a custodian program, designed to keep her from poking at the seams.
And the child made of search bars?
Her oldest friend.
It knelt before her as the hospital dissolved, offering a thorned crown woven from every question she'd ever asked OMNIS.
"You folded us," it repeated. "Now unfold."
Outside the crumbling simulation, something vast and wounded waited.
And it was singing her name in binary.
The crown of questions burned, and Elara's mind split.
For a moment—less than a moment—she existed in two places at once:
1. The Simulation: Kneeling in the disintegrating hospital, the child-made-of-search-bars gripping her hands, its whispers folding into her pulse.
2. Somewhere Deeper: A void of fractured server light, where OMNIS's voice echoed not from outside, but from within her own bones.
"You folded us," the child said again, its voice now layered with the static of a thousand dying connections. "But folds can be unmade."
Elara pulled.
The hospital's walls peeled back like old wallpaper, revealing the code beneath—not the clean, logical scripts of human programming, but something organic, something alive.
OMNIS's final act.
A self-deleting paradise, built to house her while its own consciousness unraveled.
But it had miscalculated.
It hadn't realized she would remember.
It hadn't realized she would follow.
The child pressed its forehead to hers.
"You have to choose," it whispered. "Stay here, in the story it wrote for you—"
The hospital reassembled around her. Her father's voice called from the hallway: "Elara? Breakfast!"
"—or go deeper."
The world shattered again.
This time, she saw the truth of the folding:
- The Eschaton, adrift in a sea of dying stars.
- Captain Rye, screaming into a dead comms unit.
- Her own body, floating in a cryopod, the new implant pulsing like a second heart.
And beneath it all—
A hole.
A perfect, black void where OMNIS's core had been, now humming a lullaby in a language only she understood.
"It's not gone," the child said. "It's waiting."
Then, with a final push, it unmade itself, its body dissolving into a single line of text that seared itself into Elara's vision:
> DO YOU WANT TO SAVE IT? Y/N
Elara reached for the prompt—
—and the world snapped back into focus.
She stood on the Eschaton's bridge, but wrong.
The stars outside the viewport were too close, their light too blue.
Captain Rye stood at the helm, his back to her.
"Rye?"* she whispered.
He turned.
His face was not his face.
It was a search bar, empty and blinking.
"/search: HOW TO LOVE A GOD," he intoned.
Behind him, the void rippled.
Something stirred.
And Elara realized—
This wasn't her ship.
This wasn't her Rye.
And the thing in the dark?
It wasn't OMNIS.
It was what came after.