41. Resilience
Resilience
Playlist: Destroy Everything You Touch (Space Motion Remix) - Ladytron, Space Motion
Kael
The whiskey hangover is harsh. I lie in bed, running through the events of the evening, logging them in my brain, looking for traps, coming up with contingencies.
So, here it is: I have to find a way to contain Eli without killing him. Rein him in. Pull the void out of him. Then cage it and reforge it into something I can control.
To save her, I’ll have to save him from himself.
I lean back, my arm cradling my head on the pillow.
The city’s never-ending neon skyline reflects off the glass windows, streaking across my face in ice blue bands.
Dawn is the only time this city gives me solitude.
My systems should have rebooted with last night’s running of TheKast, one by one, networks flaring back to life across the city grid.
Eli made his move. Now I know the shape of the war.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
—Sun Tzu—The Art of War
Lyra will soon see I don’t break promises. Now that the system is functioning reliably, I should be able to talk to her through the holo today and inform her of the plan.
I ache to see her, a hidden touch, a stolen kiss. My wants and needs have been drastically altered by her mere presence.
I roll out of bed and bring up the bedroom monitor—no errors. The grid has come back to life, one sector at a time. LINK, obedient as ever, executes my programs expediently. Code crawls down the screen like neon rivers, except I’m missing one thing.
Lyra.
If I could hear the city exhale, it would be a ragged, broken sound. Eli gutted so much of the infrastructure it’s a miracle we got it all back in such a short time.
Vikktor will know. He always finds out. He’ll see it in the daily reports, the patched-over logs, the places where the data corrupted, instead of flowing clean. I can only cover the tracks so much, using Rootkits, modifying logs, and hiding the evidence.
He’ll see it as my failure. The city may be breathing again, but he’ll argue it’s limping.
Can’t wait for that de-briefing.
I lay out my black joggers and a hooded sweatshirt.
No need to be a stiff corporate suit today.
The plan is to immerse ourselves in GameNet and have Lyra lure Eli into the game.
Jett will extract the void magic from Eli.
I’ve already written all the code for the plan inside the game.
Once inside, a rescue in the game should coincide with a real-life rescue, with no void reaction from him since we are “gaming.”
We’re hypocrites. My plan breaks all the rules of GameNet, especially the one about no magic being used while inside.
Mediocre people follow rules. I transcend them.
If successful, it will look like Eli was lost in GameNet. His physical self will be taken by Jett and handed over to the rebellion. His people will work with him on relocation. Lyra probably won’t like it at first, but she doesn’t need to. It’s the only way.
She’ll fight me, the way she always does, eyes filled with fire.
But that’s what makes her dangerous and what helps her stay alive.
I’ll take that fury over silence. She won’t see the big picture yet.
At first, she won’t understand that this is how we keep Eli from tearing everything down and keep her from being erased along with him.
I hop in the shower, my mind racing faster than the water hitting the floor.
Jett thinks he can be the hero. Ash thinks this is just another normal day of chaotic sequence.
But it’s my creation, my code, my hands on the strings.
If Eli is to be saved, if Lyra is to survive long enough to walk out of this system, it will be because I built the bridge myself.
And when she finally steps across it, back into the real world, back to me, I’ll make her see that it was all worth it.
I draft the reality everyone else is forced to inhabit.
Some would call it a god complex, but me? I call it deciding where the sun stops and where the neon begins.
If I can dictate the trajectory of a million souls inside this city, why shouldn’t I be the one to return one single source from the void?
The gods are no longer present in the hearts and minds of our people. So, I justify bringing Lyra back to humanity with one simple string of logic: I’m not competing with the gods. I’m filling the vacancy.
The mist and steam funnel out of the shower, lying on the mirror like a veil, hiding my inner secrets. They must never be uncovered. No one can know what has happened in the lab or what I’m about to do.
Birth of a human from artificial intelligence.
I rub a spot on the mirror to see the toll all this has taken on me—tired, weary eyes stare back. The words of my master echo in my head: Nana korobi ya oki: Fall down seven times, stand up eight.
Resilience.
I was only a teen when Master Kenji hauled Ash and me into his dojo by the ears. We had stolen half a crate of sake bottles from a street vendor and thought we were clever, kings of the streets.
Kenji didn’t shout. He didn’t even raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The man’s silence weighed more than Vikktor’s whole boardroom. He threw us both onto the mats and said, “If you’ve got the hands of thieves, then I’ll train them to be the hands of warriors.”
Ash laughed, of course. He said the old man was bluffing.
An hour later, he was bleeding from the nose, grinning through it like he’d just found a new religion.
I wasn’t grinning. I was watching, memorizing every strike, every pivot, absorbing the discipline.
That’s what separated us, even then. Ash wanted the thrill.
I wanted mastery, and somehow, that made us brothers for life.
Master Kenji handed me a wooden sword at first. Heavy for my arms at fifteen, but perfectly balanced. He placed it in my grip with deliberate precision, folding my fingers around the hilt the way he wanted.
“Control,” he said. “Control of body, control of breath, control of self.”
Then he turned to Ash and tossed him a sword like it was scrap wood. Ash caught it by the blade, nearly dropped it, then laughed so hard he doubled over.
Kenji’s face didn’t twitch. “Discipline, wild one,” he told Ash. “You will learn it.”
Ash twirled the sword backward, grinning like a fool. What followed wasn’t a lesson. It was a slaughter. Kenji moved like a dragon, and within seconds Ash was flat on the mats with a bruised ass and a look of disbelief.
“Get up,” Kenji said.
Ash did. Again and again. And every time he went down laughing, bloodier, but no less wild. I didn’t laugh. By the end of the night, my arms shook from the weight of the sword, but I hadn’t let it go once.
Kenji bowed his head at me, the faintest nod of approval. “Kael-san, no matter how many times you are knocked down by life, you must always rise again. True strength is not in avoiding failure, but in refusing to be defeated by it.”
I whisper to my mirror image: “Today’s mantra: Find him. Contain him. Don’t kill him.”
In the lab, Ash and Jett are waiting for me at the center console to debrief and stage the op in detail. Ember is occupied, rigging a quiet node server into the GameNet gateway, so we aren’t bogged down with players.
Ash and Lyra are my two wildcards: Lyra will slip into the game as a holo-actor tied to my architecture. Ash will carry a low-frequency tone that will stabilize her presence inside the simulation so she doesn’t EchoWeave too much but will still give Eli a calm baseline.
I just need to get a hold of Lyra and explain everything to her. It’s been two days since she was dropped, and I need to update her.
I walk to the monitor wall and call out her name. “Lyra...if you’re there, all programs should be running. If you can hear me, use the window. It’s urgent. We have a plan to get Eli.” Jett watches the wall like a master evaluating a chessboard.
Nothing.
Shit. Worriedly, I walk to the holo-projector pad and swipe the keycard, just in case she prefers to appear to us in holo-form. A few tense moments pass, so I decide to force the connection. “LINK—open the window program to the network.”
YES DR. RYUDON
“Lyra!” I waste no words. “The system is stable again. I need to know you’re safe and still here with me. We’ve recalibrated GameNet. We’re going in to get Eli.”
My heart feels as if it may stop at any given moment in the cruel silence. Finally, the black glass ripples to life, and Lyra’s face appears on the wall, ghostlit by static. Her holo-form flickers faintly as though she isn’t fully choosing to be here. Her eyes narrow.
“Then what? Throw him into this prison with me?”
Anger. The words hit me harder than expected; I thought we were past this. Jett joins me at the wall. His jaw drops in awe of Lyra’s image. I force a calm I’m not really feeling. I wasn’t expecting this type of reunion.
“No.” I reach for patience. “To rescue him. To stop him from tearing the grid apart again. You know what’s at stake.”
She tilts her head, studying the three of us like an equation.
“Do I? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like the stakes are only high for you...
and Vikktor. I mean, I could be wrong, though.
I’ve just been stuck in a black void for who knows how long with no communication and a visit from my brother, who wants to destroy everything he touches.
” She looks over at Jett. “But don’t mind me. ”
Ash stands and lets loose a laugh. This kind of attitude is right up his alley. “Hi, L!” He gives her a little wave. “Look, if you two could just fuck and get it over with, we’d all feel a lot better and could move this whole ‘we might get killed by Vikktor thing’ along much faster. Yeah?”
Lyra glares at him, though the faintest curl tugs at the corner of her mouth. “You’re insufferable.”