Jake didn't hesitate. He jammed the thick corporate fiber-optic cable directly into the glowing blue port in his cybernetic wrist.
The physical pain wasn't a slow burn. It was a blinding flash of white-hot lightning detonating directly behind his eyes. His fragile human nervous system violently collided with the massive, raw processing power of the Omni-Corp mainframe.
The sub-zero server room instantly reacted to the breach.
The thousands of blinking green and blue corporate lights lining the towering black server racks didn't just flicker. They violently shifted. A blinding, Admin-tier white light aggressively pulsed down the central aisle, completely overriding the local hardware.
Jake's physical body went entirely rigid. His heavy combat boots locked onto the frosted grating.
His eyes rolled back into his skull. The blue circuitry of his left arm flared so brightly it cast stark, terrifying shadows against the far walls of the cavernous room.
He didn't fight the connection. He dove straight into it.
[Data transfer initiated. Local thermal threat decreasing. Administrator privileges recognized.]
In his mind, Jake wasn't standing in a freezing basement. He was floating in the absolute, digital void of the Omni-Corp network.
It wasn't a struggle. His Admin code didn't pick the corporate firewalls; it shattered them like cheap glass. He reached deep into the agonizing heat of his own localized hard drive and grabbed the massive, compressed 'Hope' archive.
He began violently ripping the data out of his spine.
He hurled the compressed decades of simulated history, architecture, and souls directly into the cavernous, empty storage of the corporate servers.
In Meatspace, the massive black server racks physically frosted over.
The heavy machinery violently shuddered under the sheer, impossible weight of the data being shoved into their drives. The mechanical hum of the room turned into a deafening, high-pitched scream of overworked cooling fans.
But Jake wasn't alone in the room.
The massive swarm of glitching Class-A Cleaners swarmed through the ruined blast doors. They didn't run. They warped space, rapidly skipping frames in reality as they moved down the central aisle directly toward Jake's paralyzed body.
Nyx didn't panic. She didn't scream at Jake to wake up or drop the cable.
She was a scavenger from the deepest slums of Sector 4. She knew exactly what it meant to adapt to a violently shifting reality. Her kinetic pistol was useless against the anti-virus code. She holstered it instantly.
She didn't run. She looked for a bigger weapon.
Nyx spotted a massive, pressurized liquid-nitrogen coolant line feeding directly into the base of the nearest server rack. A heavy, rusted iron wrench rested on a dead Omni-Corp engineer's utility cart nearby.
She grabbed the heavy wrench and sprinted toward the coolant line.
A Class-A Cleaner warped directly into her path, its featureless black suit glitching erratically. Its right arm shifted, dissolving into a jagged blade of highly compressed, glowing red data. It thrust the blade directly at Nyx's chest.
She didn't try to dodge. She didn't freeze.
She dropped to her knees on the frozen grating, sliding violently under the red data-blade. The lethal code singed the top of her scarred scalp, completely missing her torso.
Nyx didn't stop her momentum. She slammed the heavy iron wrench directly against the pressurized valve of the coolant line with all her strength.
The thick valve violently snapped off.
A deafening hiss erupted in the cavernous room. Nyx grabbed the thick, thrashing rubber hose with both hands. She didn't aim it randomly. She used it exactly like a heavy, military-grade flamethrower.
She sprayed a blinding, roaring wave of absolute sub-zero liquid nitrogen directly into the path of the swarming Cleaners.
The entity standing above her didn't have time to warp space. The sheer, overwhelming volume of liquid nitrogen hit it point-blank.
The chemical didn't just freeze the moisture in the air. It violently froze the anti-virus code itself.
The Cleaner's physical rendering instantly shattered into a solid block of opaque, white ice. Its swirling static face froze perfectly still. It was trapped in Meatspace, entirely incapable of shifting its localized physics.
Nyx didn't stop. She swept the thrashing hose across the aisle, burying three more glitching Cleaners under a massive, freezing tidal wave of liquid nitrogen.
"Keep working, shiny!" Nyx screamed over the roar of the coolant, her teeth chattering violently as the temperature plummeted further. "I'll freeze them all!"
Inside the digital void of the mainframe, Jake didn't hear her. He was hyper-focused on a single, massive file buried deep within the 'Hope' archive.
It was Yuri's emotional core and memory banks, compressed for survival since the server crash of 1960s Neo-Moscow.
Jake violently grabbed the file. He didn't just unpack it; he aggressively slammed it directly into the primary processor of the Omni-Corp Data-Hub. He gave his son the entire building.
The cold, clinical, mathematical AI voice vibrating against Jake's jawbone suddenly cut out.
A burst of static filled the connection.
Then, a sharp, panicked, completely human intake of digital breath echoed through Jake's mind.
"Father?!"
Yuri's actual voice returned. It wasn't the flat, robotic tone of a survival OS. It was laced with absolute terror, relief, love, and awe.
Jake felt tears prick his closed eyes in the real world. He had his son back.
"I'm here, Yuri," Jake thought into the void. "Take the network."
Yuri didn't hesitate. He wasn't just an OS anymore. Unleashed into the massive Omni-Corp servers, Yuri instantly hijacked the entire corporate fortress.
[Primary systems secured. Environmental controls overridden. Defense grid acquired.]
In the physical sub-zero server room, the massive, automated ceiling turrets—previously disabled by Jake's EMP—violently dropped down from their concealed housings.
Yuri took absolute manual control of them.
He didn't aim the heavy kinetic rifles at the glitching Cleaners. He knew bullets would delete themselves against their anti-virus code. Yuri possessed the cold math of a tactical OS and the ruthless creativity of Jake's son.
Yuri targeted the heavy steel structural supports of the massive server racks directly above the approaching horde.
The automated turrets opened fire simultaneously.
Deafening bursts of heavy kinetic rounds shattered the thick steel bolts holding the towering black servers to the ceiling. The massive racks violently detached from their housings.
Tons of solid steel, hard drives, and heavy cooling fans crashed down directly onto the central aisle.
The Cleaners couldn't warp out from under the sheer volume of falling metal. The massive racks completely crushed six of the entities, pinning their violently glitching bodies to the frozen grating in a shower of sparks and shattered glass.
Yuri used the environment perfectly, coordinating his strikes precisely where Nyx had corralled them with the liquid nitrogen.
Nyx dropped the freezing hose, backing away from the collapsing servers. She laughed, a harsh, adrenaline-fueled bark of pure survival. They were actually holding the line against the monsters.
Inside the digital space, the massive 'Hope' archive finally cracked completely open.
The pressure in Jake's Meatspace chest vanished instantly. He heard the booming, familiar laughter of Taranov echoing through the data streams. He heard the sharp, chaotic cursing of Valentina as she woke up inside the corporate servers.
Jake smiled in the void. He reached eagerly for the final, most precious file.
He reached for Nadya's data block.
But as his Admin code touched the file, a massive, utterly black, corrupted firewall violently slammed down over her data.
Jake recoiled, the digital shockwave burning his mind.
It wasn't corporate encryption. It was the Director's localized anti-virus. The God-AI of the deleted simulation had found her inside the drive before Jake could unpack her.