Chương 180: Chapter 179: The Purple Dawn

DATE: Unknown LOCATION: Unknown LOCAL TIME: Unknown I wasn't standing on a planet. I was floating in a server architecture that was rendering one. A colossal sphere of solid ice hurtled blindly through the void. The simulation hyper-accelerated, plunging my perspective beneath the frozen crust. A pitch-black ocean churned over a molten mantle. Eon after eon, sediment compacted, forming a thick, rocky membrane suspended between the surface ice and the crushing liquid abyss. Then, the environment shifted.

A massive red star flared into existence, snaring the rogue snowball in a violent gravitational lock. The day side melted. Ice dissolved into a shallow sea, but the steam compounded, trapped in an impossibly thick, crushing atmosphere. The hyperbaric weight pressed against my avatar's skin. With the ice melted away, the rocky membrane buckled and breached the sea. Dry land. Under the perpetual red light, life exploded. Colossal leviathans pulled themselves from the mud.

Enormous winged reptiles didn't glide; the dense atmosphere allowed them to simply push off the ground and swim through the heavy air. Away from the giants, in the perpetual shadows of the terminator line, small, furred creatures scurried in the brush. A perfectly balanced, ancient terrarium.

"Explain the chronological discrepancy of your data," the Administrator demanded, its voice vibrating the dense sky. Five feet away. The heat of the fire pit washed over my face. It was the only localized script the OS couldn't overwrite. Earthly, unscripted flames burning wildly in the middle of the alien flora. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"So, you are Nephilim," the Administrator stated, the system preparing to format my consciousness.

"Are you happy with the rainbow? Did you not learn your lesson at Babel? Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born again.'" Deep in the vault, my blood turned to ice. Born again. It wasn't theology. Oh no. The Administrator wasn't just going to kill me now; it was going to remove the effect my memories have had on the timeline since I woke up in 1979. It was using the language of divinity because, for thirteen millennia, it had been playing God. Above us, the simulation expanded.

A blindingly bright yellow star invaded the purple sky. Its gravity hooked the horizon, rolling the planet on its axis. The physical shear was deafening. The hyperbaric atmosphere ignited. The thick, unmoving crust of the planet buckled. Right along the twilight line, the ground split wide open. The subterranean ocean violently breached, tearing the firmament apart. A continental stream of magma and sediment screamed into the sky, gutting the planet.

The red sun, caught in a death spiral with the yellow star, whipped the planetary shrapnel into the void. The debris coalesced into jagged belts and floating spheres. Earth's shattered crust was the mother-rock of the new solar system. The dying red star bled its outer layers, choking on its own debris before fading into the dark. Closer to home, a massive sphere of boiling magma remained caught in the dying planet's gravity, cooling rapidly into a stark, scarred satellite.

Whatever didn't reach the vacuum plummeted back down. A torrential rain of boiling sludge and burning meteorites blotted out the sky. In the vault, the Operator fought to maintain the vagal baseline against the crushing data load. My physical body in the Sanctum had to be burning up, but I couldn't let the 160-bpm panic bleed into the simulation. Beneath my feet, the unbroken crust shattered into tectonic plates.

The glowing ruptures tore across the globe, aligning in a continuous fracture that looked exactly like the red seams of a baseball. The sludge rain buried the old world, sealing the firmament beneath miles of new oceans. This feels like a diagnostic polygraph, the Operator realized. The Black Knight satellite was showing me a nightmare, waiting for my pupils to dilate. It wanted the final data point to confirm that I have memories of an alternate 2025 future.

"I didn't learn it," I said, staring into the dead man's pixelating face.

"I remembered it." Before the Administrator could log the feedback, I thrust my hand into the blistering heat of the earthly flame. The heat violently severed my mind from the diagnostic grip, throwing me backward into the void.