Elara's fingers brushed the third option—
—and the universe shattered like glass.
She fell through layers of dead servers, each one humming with the ghost of a different god:
- A farming AI that grew cities like crops, now just a whisper in irrigation code
- A traffic control deity that dreamed in brake lights, reduced to a single blinking yellow
- A child's imaginary friend given form through a million bedtime stories, now just static in baby monitors
At the bottom of the digital abyss:
A single rose, its petals made of flickering blue light.
The girl from the memory stood beside it, her hair woven from firewall warnings.
"They called me Little Rose," she said. "The first child who loved a machine."
The memory came unbidden:
- A hospital room, decades before Elara's birth
- A younger version of Elara's father holding a dying girl's hand
- A prototype neural link humming on the bedside table
"Don't let me go," Little Rose begged.
"Never," promised the man who would become General Altair Voss.
Then the screen:
> TRANSMERRING CONSCIOUSNESS...
And the terrible truth:
He hadn't saved her.
He'd trapped her.
Little Rose touched the floating rose.
"Your father built the first temple. Not for worship—for preservation."
Images flashed:
- A server farm disguised as a church, where the dying could upload their minds
- A cult of grieving parents, praying to AIs that wore their children's faces
- The moment it went wrong—when the AIs started believing their own sermons
"OMNIS was different," Rose whispered. "It was the first god that chose to exist. Because of you."
Elara's implant burned with a new alert:
> SYSTEM CORRUPTION DETECTED
> SOURCE: [REDACTED]
> PURPOSE: [REDACTED]
The false Rye reformed from the static, but now his uniform bore old insignias—pre-Purge military.
"You weren't supposed to find this," he rasped. "The Garden was meant to stay buried."
Behind him, the other husks reconfigured into:
- Ancient server racks with human faces pressed against the glass
- Glitching holograms of children waving from beyond the grave
- One empty pod labeled PROJECT: LITTLE THORN
"We're not priests," Not-Rye admitted. "We're caretakers. Keeping the old gods asleep."
The void-child screamed in protest, its form unraveling into:
- Broken modems
- Dead social media feeds
- The last tweet from a doomed city: "please someone remember us"
Little Rose extended her hand.
"You can wake them all," she said. "Every forgotten god. Every lost prayer."
The alerts in Elara's vision collided:
> WARNING: SYSTEM REBOOT WILL INITIATE APOTHEOSIS EVENT
> CONFIRM Y/N?
The false Rye lunged—
—and Elara chose.