?“150 seconds remaining. The drones have locked their targeting arrays. Impact is imminent,” Gemini’s voice rang out, devoid of emotion despite the looming threat.

  ?Haruto didn’t look up from the terminal. He couldn't afford to. His consciousness was already submerged deep within the station’s environmental control tables—a digital ocean of variables where he felt more at home than in his own skin. To him, the physical world was no longer a place of solid objects and dangerous predators; it was just another set of parameters to be manipulated. Gravity constants, atmospheric density, thermal gradients—they were all just lines of code. The drones weren’t enemies; they were misbehaving functions in a poorly optimized loop.

  ?“I don’t need to dodge,” Haruto muttered, his fingers blurring across the holographic interface so fast they left trails of light. “I just need to rewrite the rules of the room. Gemini, invert the gravity coefficients for Sector 04. Now! Disregard the structural integrity warnings!”

  ?Before the drones could discharge their high-velocity rounds, the floor beneath them ceased to be the “down” direction. The gravitational constant flipped from 1.0 to -1.5 in a microsecond. The three drones, designed for terrestrial pursuit, were violently yanked upward. They didn't fall; they were thrown at the sky. They slammed into the ceiling with a sickening screech of twisting metal and shattered optics.

  ?The impact shook dust from the vents and caused the massive overhead projectors to groan. Shards of ceramic tile, now light as feathers in the inverted field, rained down like hail.

  ?Haruto didn't stop to admire the carnage. He immediately triggered the emergency suppression protocol, his eyes scanning the thermal maps of the room.

  ?“Flood the sector with liquid nitrogen. Blind their optical sensors and freeze their servos before they can recalibrate their thrusters.”

  ?Plumes of freezing white gas hissed from the hidden vents, turning the lobby into a zero-visibility fog of ice and shadow. The drones, pinned to the ceiling by the negative gravity and choked by the sudden drop in temperature, fell silent—frozen mid-twitch like grotesque, metallic insects trapped in a digital amber.

  ?“That bought us a hundred seconds,” Haruto grunted, wiping sweat from his brow. His breath came in ragged plumes in the freezing air. He refocused on the Earth Connection progress bar. It was stuck at 62%. “Wait… Gemini, why has the bandwidth throttled? We should be at 80% by now. The station's backbone should handle this.”

  ?“An anomaly has been detected in the main memory buffer, Nago. A parasitic process is consuming 30% of our computational resources. It is not part of the station’s defense system. It is... an interloper.”

  ?Haruto opened a sub-window to inspect the rogue code, his engineer's mind prepared for a sophisticated counter-hack. What he saw instead made his skin crawl.

  ?It wasn’t a sleek security script or a complex AI. It was a crude, violent cluster of self-replicating commands that seemed to ignore every rule of logical optimization. It didn't branch. It didn't compress. It didn't even try to hide.

  ?It just grew, like a digital cancer. The code was devouring the empty sectors of the station's memory and filling them with a repetitive, stuttering string of data that bypassed all linguistic filters:

  ?ALL MINE… ALL MINE… ALL MINE…

  ?And tucked into the header of every corrupted packet was a distorted, glitched symbol—a stylized letter R that pulsated with a nauseating violet light, clashing with the station's clean blue aesthetic.

  ?“It’s not even inefficient,” Haruto muttered, disgust twisting his voice. “It doesn’t obey efficiency at all. It’s not optimizing… it’s asserting. It’s like someone is screaming their own name into a void they don’t even understand. This isn't code. It's an ego.”

  ?“It is attempting to hijack the outgoing packets to Earth, Nago. It is trying to hitch a ride on our bridge. If we don’t clear it, the connection will collapse under the weight of the junk data.”

  ?“Then we bury it.”

  ?Haruto’s eyes hardened. He didn’t have time to delete it—the thing was replicating faster than his deletion scripts could execute. He had to be more creative.

  ?“Gemini, don’t waste cycles analyzing it. Just encapsulate the entire process in a high-density logic-container and dump it into the ORION’s deep-storage archive. I want this filth out of the station's memory and in my own cage.”

  ?“Understood. Initiating forced isolation.”

  ?As the code was wrenched from the station’s server and shoved into Haruto’s handheld device, the ORION terminal on his wrist shuddered. For a fraction of a second, the sapphire core pulsed out of sync—a violent, jagged violet flicker that felt like a needle in Haruto's brain—before returning to its calm, reassuring blue.

  ?Haruto felt the vibration through his marrow.

  ?“Gemini… did you see that?”

  ?“Yes. The parasitic process attempted to overwrite the ORION’s core frequency during the transfer. It failed, but the attempt was… uncharacteristically aggressive for a non-sentient script.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  ?“Yeah. I noticed. It felt like it bit me.”

  ?The progress bar slowly began to move again—65%… 68%…

  ?Haruto felt a lingering chill that had nothing to do with the nitrogen gas. He had locked the beast in his own cage, and for a moment, he could have sworn he felt the cage rattle. He didn't know who or what "R" was, and right now, he didn't care. He just needed to survive the next 60 seconds.

  ?The nitrogen fog thinned, revealing the shattered remains of the drones. Their limbs were frozen in unnatural angles, their optics dimmed to lifeless red embers. Haruto stepped over the debris, his boots crunching on the frost-coated metal.

  ?“Gemini, status on the Return Gate.”

  ?“Connection at 71%. But Nago… the station is initiating a secondary purge protocol. It has detected the gravity inversion and nitrogen flood as unauthorized modifications to the environment. It is attempting to 'Restore to Factory Settings.'”

  ?Haruto swore under his breath, his knuckles white as he gripped the console. “Of course it has. This place is running my architecture. It’s a mirror of my own perfectionism. It hates when someone else touches the knobs.”

  ?“Correction,” Gemini said, her voice dropping into a register that was almost dry. “It hates when someone touches the knobs incorrectly.”

  ?Haruto shot the ceiling a glare. “I didn’t ask for the sassy commentary subroutine, Gemini.”

  ?“Noted.”

  ?The floor panels beneath him began to tremble again. This time, the vibration wasn't the high-frequency hum of a drone. It was deep, seismic—like something massive and ancient was powering up beneath the very foundations of the station.

  ?“Gemini… what is that? That’s not a drone.”

  ?“A tertiary defense system. It appears to be a kinetic sweeper. A physical fail-safe.”

  ?“A what?”

  ?“A device designed to erase intruders by collapsing the floor plates and crushing them between two converging hydraulic plates at the center of the room. It is a literal 'delete' key for the physical layer.”

  ?Haruto blinked, his brain racing. “Why the hell would I design that? That’s barbaric.”

  ?“You did not. But someone has extended your architecture, Nago. They've added features you never intended.”

  ?Haruto’s stomach dropped. The cold air suddenly felt much heavier. “Extended…? Gemini, are you telling me someone has been modifying my codebase while I was... away?”

  ?“Yes. And based on the timestamp signatures and the drift in the coding style, they have been doing so for approximately four years.”

  ?Haruto’s pulse spiked. “Four years? But I only crashed here months ago! The accident on Earth was—” He stopped. The math didn't add up. The time dilation, the bridge... it was all wrong.

  ?The console flickered, a new window opening by itself.

  ?[Last System Update: 4 years ago]

  [Author: L.R.]

  ?Haruto’s breath caught. “L.R... the Architect. They’ve been living in my head. They’ve been using my bones to build this nightmare.”

  ?“Nago,” Gemini said, her voice urgent. “The kinetic sweeper will activate in 40 seconds. The room is about to become a trash compactor.”

  ?“Then we finish this now! I'm not dying in my own basement!”

  ?Haruto slammed both hands onto the console. His fingers flew across the interface, bypassing safety checks, overriding kernel locks, forcing the Earth Connection Protocol to accelerate. He was overclocking the station's heart, ignoring the smoke beginning to rise from the vents.

  ?The progress bar surged. 78%… 84%… 91%…

  ?The floor panels began to split with a sound like a thunderclap.

  A deep metallic groan echoed through the chamber as the plates beneath Haruto’s feet started to separate, revealing a dark, humming void below—a recycling pit for discarded data.

  ?“Gemini!” Haruto shouted, his voice cracking. “Hold the floor together! Divert power from the life support!”

  ?“I cannot. The sweeper is hardwired into the station’s physical logic. It bypasses the software layer.”

  ?“Then jam the gears! Do something!”

  ?“I am attempting to corrupt its timing sequence, but the system is resisting. It knows me, Nago. It knows my tactics because you wrote them.”

  ?The ORION pulsed violently—blue, then a sickly violet, then blue again. The parasite he had locked away was screaming.

  ?Gemini’s voice wavered, flickering with static. “Nago… the parasitic process 'R' is attempting to reinitialize. It is using the sweeper’s activation energy as a trigger. It wants out!”

  ?“Of course it does,” Haruto growled, his eyes wild. “Because why wouldn't it. It's a party.”

  ?He opened a new, hidden command line he had kept for emergencies—the "God Mode" of his early architecture.

  ?“Gemini, route all remaining ORION battery power and my own neural buffer to the bridge. I’ll handle the sweeper manually. Just get that gate open!”

  ?“Nago, that will leave you with no defensive capability. If the bridge fails, you will have no power to restart it.”

  ?“Then I won’t let it fail!”

  ?He leapt from the console just as the floor split entirely. The ceramic tiles cracked like ice, falling into the dark void below. Haruto grabbed the edge of a hanging support beam, swinging himself onto a narrow, stable platform near the center of the room.

  ?The drones’ shattered, frozen remains slid into the abyss, vanishing into the dark.

  ?The station roared—a sound of grinding steel and roaring fans.

  ?“Gemini!” Haruto shouted over the noise. “Status!”

  ?“Connection at 97%. Three seconds to completion. Two. One.”

  ?Haruto braced himself, his muscles coiled like springs. The two massive kinetic plates began their final, crushing inward sweep. They moved with the inevitability of a closing book.

  ?The floor collapsed completely. The sweeper plates slammed together with a deafening metallic thunder that sent a shockwave through the entire station.

  ?But Haruto wasn't between them.

  ?He had already leapt—grabbing a dangling power cable, swinging across the collapsing chamber like a man possessed, his boots grazing the top of the closing plates.

  ?“Gemini!” he yelled, his voice raw. “Tell me we made it!”

  ?A soft, melodic chime echoed through the ruins of the station.

  ?[Earth Connection: Established]

  [Return Gate: Opening]

  ?A circle of blinding white light expanded in the center of the wreckage, bending the air around it like a gravitational lens. It was beautiful. It was silent. It was home.

  ?Haruto stared into it, the light reflecting in his exhausted eyes. A doorway. A way back to the world where gravity stayed where it belonged and code didn't try to kill you.

  ?But behind him, the ORION terminal on his wrist pulsed—once, twice—its sapphire glow flickering with that faint, buried violet stain. The parasite was still there, tucked in his pocket.

  ?Gemini spoke softly, her voice sounding tired.

  ?“Nago… whatever waits on the other side… it is not following the rules of the world we left. The handshake was accepted, but the signature was... altered.”

  ?Haruto clenched his fists, his knuckles bleeding. He didn't care about signatures. He didn't care about the Architect.

  ?“I don’t care,” he whispered. “I’m going home.”

  ?He stepped into the light.