Day 30.
The Factory Floor.
Sauget, Illinois.
00:00:00 Hours.
The jackhammer bit through the last layer of fused slag and hit the void.
The steel chisel punched into empty space. The machine lurched forward, the resistance vanishing, nearly dragging me into the hole I had just carved. A blast of stale, pressurized air hissed up from the darkness—air that hadn't been breathed since the Coldwell furnaces shut down thirty years ago.
It smelled of oil and dead electricity.
But I didn't care about the hole. I cared about the clock.
I dropped the jackhammer. It clattered against the concrete, the sound echoing in the sudden, absolute silence of the factory.
I looked up.
Through the shattered skylights, the world was holding its breath. The clouds had stopped moving. The wind had died. The very atoms of the air felt suspended, locked in the microsecond before deletion.
The red timer in my vision—the one that had haunted me for twenty-nine days, ticking down the seconds of my life—froze.
`[00:00:00]`
I closed my eyes.
I waited for the fold. I waited for the geometric unraveling of reality I had seen in the first timeline. I waited for the sensation of my body turning into data, for the screaming void to open its mouth and swallow the universe.
I waited to die.
"Jack," Travis whispered. His voice was trembling. "The sky."
I opened my eyes.
It wasn't black. It wasn't the void.
It was Green.
A vibrant, sickly, electric emerald light flooded the factory floor. It wasn't sunlight. It was data. The sky outside wasn't just glowing; it was streaming. Massive ribbons of green code cascaded down from the heavens like a digital aurora borealis, washing over the ruins of East St. Louis.
The light was bright enough to read by. It illuminated the terror on Paige's face. It shone off the metal of Ronnie's shotgun. It reflected in the unblinking blue eyes of Boyd.
We weren't dissolving. We were still here.
"What is this?" Yana asked, stepping back from the skylight, her hand shielding her eyes. "Why aren't we dead?"
Then, the sound hit.
It wasn't a noise from the outside. It didn't travel through the air. It bypassed the ears entirely and resonated directly in the bone of the skull.
It was a Voice.
Not the jagged, scrolling text of the Root. Not the clinical, silent prompts of the Administrator.
This was a spoken voice. Omnipresent. Genderless. Deafening.
"PHASE 1 COMPLETE."
The words slammed into me like physical blows. My knees buckled.
"CALCULATING METRICS... TERRITORY INTEGRITY... BIOMASS YIELD... CHAMPION SURVIVAL..."
The voice boomed through the marrow of my bones.
"CALCULATION COMPLETE. SERVER WIPE: SUSPENDED."
"Suspended?" Helen gasped, clutching her chest. "It... it stopped?"
"No," I whispered. My head felt like it was splitting open. "It didn't stop. It changed."
The pressure in my skull spiked.
I was a Regressor. My existence was tied to the loop. I was a file designed to be overwritten at the end of the cycle. I carried the memories of a dead timeline, compressed and stored in a human brain.
But the overwrite command hadn't come. The cycle hadn't reset.
The energy that was supposed to send me back—the massive, cosmic surge of the Regression Protocol—had nowhere to go.
So it went into me.
CRACK.
A sound like a gunshot went off inside my head.
I screamed.
It wasn't a cry of pain. It was the sound of a mind being torn in half.
I fell to the floor, clawing at my temples. My vision fractured. I didn't see the factory floor anymore. I saw... everything.
[TIMELINE ERROR: SYNCHRONIZATION FAILURE.]
[MEMORY OVERFLOW.]
I saw Timeline 1. I saw the Eastern Wall crumbling. I saw Travis dying in the acid, his skin melting off his face. I felt the heat of the Pus-Bomber. I smelled the cooking meat.
But I was also here. I was seeing Travis standing over me, alive, his club-arm reaching out.
The two images superimposed. Dead Travis and Live Travis occupied the same space in my vision, vibrating, phasing in and out of each other.
"Boss!" Travis roared.
He grabbed me. His hand was solid. But in my mind, I could feel the texture of his corpse—the slime, the exposed bone.
"Get back!" I shrieked, scrambling away from him. "You're dead! I saw you die!"
"Jack, it's me!" Travis shouted. "I'm right here!"
I looked at Yana.
I saw her throat torn out by a Runner. I saw the blood pumping onto the concrete.
But I also saw her standing there, alive, pregnant, terrifyingly whole.
The paradox was a physical weight. My brain couldn't reconcile the two realities. The memories of the dead timeline were overwriting the sensory input of the living one.
Blood poured from my nose. Then my ears. Then my tear ducts.
"INTEGRATING DATA..." the Voice boomed, ignoring my seizure. "TOP 200 SURVIVORS IDENTIFIED."
"Make it stop!" I yelled, curling into a fetal ball. "Reset! Reset the server!"
"He's seizing!" Helen shouted. "Travis, hold him! Don't let him crack his skull!"
Travis pinned me to the floor. His weight was crushing, grounding.
"Boyd!" Helen screamed. "What's happening to him?"
I looked at Boyd.
The Technomancer wasn't looking at me. He was looking up at the skylight, his eyes rolling back in his head. He was convulsing, vibrating in sync with the green light.
"Downloading," Boyd droned. His voice was distorted, layered with static. "Patch 2.0. Expansion pack. New assets. New rules."
My vision turned white.
I was floating.
I wasn't on the factory floor. I was in the Void. The space between ticks of the clock.
In front of me stood a figure.
It looked like me. But it wasn't me. It was the Jack from Timeline 1. The Rank 47 failure.
He was missing an arm. His face was a ruin of scar tissue. He looked tired. So goddamn tired.
"You broke it," the Ghost said. His voice was sad. "You broke the loop, Jack."
"I saved them," I said. My voice didn't make a sound in the void.
"You saved them from the fire," the Ghost said. "Now they have to live in the ash. Do you know what Phase 2 is?"
"No."
"It's not a game anymore," the Ghost said. "It's a farm. And we're the livestock."
He pointed at me.
"Wake up, Architect. The Administrator is watching."
The Ghost exploded into pixels.
[SYSTEM REBOOT: COMPLETE.]
I gasped, sucking in air like a drowning man breaking the surface.
I slammed back into my body. The concrete floor was cold and hard against my cheek. The smell of copper and ozone was overpowering.
I was lying in a pool of my own blood. Travis was hovering over me, his face a mask of panic.
"Jack?" Travis whispered. "You back?"
I blinked. The double-vision was gone. The ghosts were gone.
The green light still flooded the room, casting long, eerie shadows.
I sat up, wiping the blood from my face. My hands were shaking uncontrollably.
"I'm back," I croaked.
"What the hell was that?" Ronnie asked. He was standing by the Gutter grate, his shotgun raised at the sky. "The sky... it's green, Jack. Why is it green?"
I looked at the hole in the floor. The one I had drilled.
It was dark down there. But now, in the green light, I could see something glinting at the bottom.
A handle. A hatch.
"PHASE 2 INITIALIZED," the Voice boomed.
The text in my vision changed. The countdown timer was gone.
Replaced by a new objective.
`[OBJECTIVE: ELIMINATE 90 TERRITORIES.]`
`[TIME LIMIT: 30 DAYS.]`
`[GENESIS SELECTION: DAY 60.]`
I stared at the text.
"It didn't end," I whispered.
I looked at the crew. They were looking at me for answers. They thought I knew everything. They thought the Regressor had the cheat codes.
But the walkthrough had just ended. I was playing blind now.
"It didn't end," I said louder, standing up. I swayed, grabbing Travis's arm for support. "The server didn't wipe. It expanded."
"So we live?" Paige asked.
"We live," I said.
I looked at the green sky.
"But the rules just changed."
FOUNDRY PROTOCOL - DAY 30
SECTOR 1 (JACK MONROE) █████████░ 9/10 Nodes
STATUS: PHASE 2 ACTIVE
Sanity: 65% (Regression Overload)
Condition: Seizure Recovery / Critical
Next Event: The Glimpse (New Eden vs. Hell)