The heavy steel of the clinic door groaned under the terrifying heat of Jake's fingers.
Drops of glowing, liquid metal hit the concrete floor, sizzling instantly in the damp air of the underground market. The smell of vaporized iron was choking. Inside the clinic, Silas didn't wait for the door to melt completely off its hinges.
He threw the heavy deadbolts back in pure, panicked terror.
The door swung open with a harsh screech. Silas stood there, wearing thick, blackened welder's goggles and a stained rubber apron. Behind him, the clinic was a horrific, flickering butcher shop of hanging cybernetics, bloody operating chairs, and harsh halogen surgical lights.
Jake stepped over the threshold.
The moment his heavy boots hit the white, blood-stained tile, the sheer willpower keeping him upright vanished. His legs gave out completely. He hit the floor hard, a choked gasp escaping his lips.
The wet tile immediately began to dry and crack around his glowing, smoking left arm.
[Core temp: 108 degrees. Neural proteins denaturing. Complete system failure in 90 seconds.]
Yuri's text was a frantic, blinking red across Jake's vision. The words pulsed with the erratic, terrifying rhythm of a failing heart.
"Help him!" Nyx shouted, shoving past Silas and grabbing Jake's uninjured shoulder.
Silas swore violently. He didn't hesitate. He grabbed Jake's legs and helped Nyx haul him onto a rusted, hydraulic operating table in the center of the room.
The leather of Jake's melted trench coat stuck to the metal table with a sickening hiss.
Silas grabbed a crude, handheld medical scanner from a tray of bloody tools. He ripped Jake's charred shirt open and ran the scanner over his violently heaving chest.
The scanner immediately shrieked a high-pitched, continuous alarm.
Silas recoiled like he had been physically shocked. He dropped the scanner onto Jake's chest and backed away, his mechanical eyes whirring in disbelief behind the goggles.
"What did you bring into my shop, Nyx?" Silas rasped, his synthesized voice trembling.
"He's overheating from a combat stim!" Nyx yelled, pinning Jake's thrashing human arm to the table. "Just vent his core!"
"That is not a combat stim!" Silas pointed a shaking finger at the scanner. "Look at the data output! His neural implant is holding a mass the size of a corporate planetary archive. His brain is a localized sun!"
Jake threw his head back against the metal table. He couldn't see Silas or Nyx anymore. His vision was a chaotic storm of digital static and blinding red warnings.
The 'Hope' archive was expanding. Taranov, Valentina, Menzhinsky, Nadya. The compressed digital souls of billions of people were literally burning the biology out of his skull.
"Fix him, Silas," Nyx drew her kinetic pistol and slammed it onto the metal tray next to the bone-saws. "Or I start breaking your merchandise."
Silas stared at the gun, then back at Jake's glowing chrome arm.
"Standard medical coolant won't touch this," Silas said, moving to a heavy steel refrigeration unit in the corner. "If I pump him with liquid nitrogen, his heart will shatter like glass."
He pulled a massive, heavy piece of hardware from the freezer.
It was an industrial 'Frost-Bite' thermal spine. It looked like the skeletal tail of a metallic scorpion, covered in thick, frosted cooling tubes and jagged spinal clamps.
"This is for deep-core mining borgs working near magma vents," Silas slammed the heavy rig onto the table next to Jake. "It has to be grafted directly onto his human vertebrae to siphon the heat from his nervous system."
Nyx went pale. "He's awake, Silas. That will kill him."
"He's dead in sixty seconds anyway," Silas snapped, grabbing a heavy, blood-stained surgical drill. "But I don't touch corporate targets on credit. It's ten thousand. Up front."
Jake heard the price through the roar of static in his ears.
He didn't speak. He couldn't. He forced his burning chrome hand up from the table. The liquid metal flowed, shifting its shape to expose a glowing blue interface port in his palm.
He pointed a single, trembling finger at the digital payment terminal bolted to the wall.
The terminal instantly flared green.
A robotic voice echoed from the wall. "Transfer Complete: Fifteen Thousand Omni-Corp Credits."
Silas stared at the terminal in pure shock. Jake had just cracked his encrypted, off-the-grid banking firewall in less than a second, while actively dying.
Jake didn't drop his hand. He reached over and grabbed a handful of Silas's stained rubber apron with his human fingers.
He pulled the terrified mechanic down until their faces were inches apart.
"If I wake up without my arm," Jake whispered, his voice a wet, ragged growl, his teeth stained pink with blood. "I will burn this entire market to the bedrock."
Nyx took a step closer to the table. She rested her hand on the grip of her pistol, her eyes locked on Silas. She was silently backing Jake's threat.
Silas swallowed hard. His mechanical eyes clicked rapidly.
"You keep the arm," Silas promised, his voice tight. "But I can't give you anesthesia. Your heart rate is over two hundred. Painkillers will stop your pulse entirely."
"Do it," Jake gritted his teeth.
Silas shoved a thick, leather bite-block into Jake's mouth.
"Hold him down, Nyx," Silas ordered, grabbing a heavy bone-saw. "If he thrashes when I hit the spinal cord, he's paralyzed from the neck down forever."
Nyx threw her entire body weight over Jake's legs, pinning him to the steel table. Silas hit a pedal on the floor, and heavy leather straps shot up from the table, locking Jake's chest and arms down.
Silas didn't hesitate. He brought the whining surgical drill down to the base of Jake's neck.
The high-pitched scream of the drill biting through skin and bone was deafening.
Jake bit down on the leather block so hard he tasted his own blood instantly. The agony was absolute. It was a blinding, white-hot spike driving straight down his spine.
The smell of vaporized blood and burning bone filled the small, sterile room.
He threw his head back, pulling violently against the heavy leather straps. His muscles tore. His human arm strained until the veins bulged black against his skin.
He heard Nyx swearing loudly over the sound of the drill, begging him to stay still.
The pain wasn't just physical. As Silas cut deeper into his nervous system, the raw data of the 'Hope' archive violently surged. Jake's mind was flooded with overlapping, chaotic memories that didn't belong to him.
He saw snow falling on the Kremlin. He heard the roar of Object 279's engine. He smelled Nadya's perfume in the static air of a server room.
[Pain receptors at 100%. Neural damage imminent. Initiating forced unconsciousness.]
Yuri's voice was the last thing Jake heard in the physical world.
The clinical text flared bright red, and then Yuri severed Jake's sensory input entirely. The agony vanished. The harsh lights of the clinic went instantly black.
But Jake didn't find silence.
He fell entirely into the 'Hope' archive. He was floating in a vast, endless void of golden, swirling data. It was beautiful and terrifying, a digital ocean of compressed human souls.
Suddenly, the golden data rippled violently.
The silence of the void was shattered. Jake heard voices. Dozens of them. Then hundreds.
They were overlapping, echoing, and terrified. They were screaming in Russian. They were crying out from the darkness of the deleted simulation, trapped in the crushing gravity of the local hard drive.
And rising above the chaotic noise, clear as a bell, were the voices of his team.
"Admin!" Taranov roared from the golden static. "Where are we?!"
"Comrade Vance!" Menzhinsky's voice trembled with absolute panic. "The sky is falling!"
Jake tried to speak to them, tried to reach out into the golden void, but he had no mouth, no hands. He was just an observer in the storm of his own mind.
The voices grew louder, a deafening chorus of digital ghosts screaming his name, begging him to let them out.