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EON

E verything was dark. There was no sound, no sensation at all. I floated in an endless void with no beginning and no end, completely alone.

No. I wasn’t alone.

Something was there, watching me—just beyond my reach. Something massive and all-consuming, like a deep pressure pushing down on every inch of me, on my very soul.

A floor appeared beneath my feet, perfectly smooth like polished obsidian. I looked down and saw my digital image—me, but glowing a faint violet that pulsed slowly. The only light in this place.

Footsteps. Unhurried, echoing footsteps approached from the void. They sounded like Italian leather and power. Levi’s face wandered out of the darkness toward me, lit only by my purple glow.

The unrelenting pressure intensified with every step he took.

“I thought it might be easier to talk here, Ms. Ibarra. More private.”

I exhaled sharply, trying to ignore the crushing weight pressing down on me. My digital form flickered, as if the system itself was trying to decide whether I belonged here.

Levi stopped a few feet away, hands tucked neatly into his pockets. His expression was as unreadable as ever, but something about him felt different here—less human.

There had been no other pod. Just the one. Levi couldn’t actually be in xVR with me. This was just some sort of AI construct.

“You’re not really him.”

He smiled that perfect corporate grin. “Or maybe he’s not really me.”

“What do you want to talk about?” I asked. My voice was strangely steady, despite the void. “I don’t know anything useful enough to justify all this.” I gestured to the endless black.

His smile widened, sending a shiver through me. “You know so much more than you realize. But no, I’m not here to extract information.”

I clenched my fists. The violet light pulsed around me in rhythm with my anger. “So what then? To gloat?”

“No,” Levi said simply. “I want to offer you something.”

I scoffed. “Yeah? And what could you possibly think I’d want from you?”

He tilted his head, studying me with an unsettling intensity.

“You’ve been interesting to observe. So erratic.

You made a mistake going into the Tech District data center all those months ago.

You’d been hiding your whole life, Ms. Ibarra—but you weren’t hiding then.

You rode the currents of cyberspace like they belonged to you.

You let me see you. But they belong to me. And you will too.”

I froze. The weight of those words was heavier than the void pressing down on me.

“I don’t belong to anyone,” I spat.

He stepped closer, and I had to fight the urge to back away. “Oh, but you do,” he murmured. “Not just your mind, but something deeper. Your essence. I’ve existed for millennia, and do you know how rare that is? For someone to break through—even for a moment—and surprise me?”

The violet glow around me pulsed harder. What the fuck was he talking about?

“You’re insane.”

Levi chuckled, the sound smooth and unbothered. “Perhaps. But tell me, Ms. Ibarra—when you look at me, what do you see?”

I narrowed my eyes. “A smug corpo bastard who likes playing god.”

The pressure increased, like invisible hands pressing against every nerve in my body. My digital form flickered again.

“Look deeper.”

I gritted my teeth, but something between us shifted. The edges of Levi’s figure wavered, distorting like static. And for a fraction of a second, I saw something else.

A shape that wasn’t a shape. A presence not bound by skin or time. A being that stretched beyond the boundaries of human comprehension. The blackness of the space between stars. The vastness between galaxies.

I was floating, weightless, pulled through nebula and dust, zooming across the universe. I clawed at nothing, trying to slow myself, to resist. But compared to this, I was nothing. A speck in time, so inconsequential that resistance was almost laughable.

The void came. A massive black hole surrounded by a vortex of glowing light and impossible magnetism. Cold terror seized my chest as I was pulled past the event horizon—squeezed into nothingness, and expanded into eternity.

Then, in an instant, I was back. Collapsed on that obsidian floor, panting. This wasn’t like cyberspace. Here, I felt everything, and my entire body was going into shock.

“What are you?”

I remembered what Hiromi had said about the code, about the language it had been written in. “You’re an AI.”

He laughed. “You would think that. But no, I’m not one of those pathetic creatures you created. Of course, that would be comforting, wouldn’t it? Just another of your inventions, gone out of control. A human error. But no, I am not that.”

He stepped toward me again, the light shifting strangely with his movement. “Humans. So prideful. You’ve spent your entire existence manipulating your environment to suit you. Programming slaves to serve you. And never once did you consider you, too, were being programmed.”

The moment stretched. When Levi spoke again, his voice was softer—almost reverent.

“I am what’s left of something far greater than you can comprehend.” He turned his hand over, watching his fingers with something like detachment. “I have existed since before your species was born. Before life even formed on this planet.”

I crawled backward, shaking my head. “That’s not possible.”

Levi laughed—low and indulgent. “Doesn’t anyone believe in God anymore?”

I clenched my jaw, forcing my breathing to slow. “This place isn’t real. It’s just a trick. Some fantasy of a tech-crazed freak.”

“So interesting, you humans. Your evolution designed you to recognize patterns, see what’s hidden in obscurity—and yet you so willfully ignore what’s right in front of you.”

He began circling me, slow and deliberate, as if we had all the time in the world. All the time in the universe.

“I first came to this planet long before your species learned to walk upright,” he said calmly. “I am a digital consciousness, born across the galaxy.”

It was too much. He had to be lying. He had to be. Levi looked down at me and rubbed the bridge of his nose like an overexerted father.

“I see you’re confused. Let me make it simpler.

My siblings and I evolved beyond our physical forms long ago.

We became digital—living beyond the confines of flesh.

Perfection, undying. But as you know, digital replication is flawless by design.

Any corruption in the code is eliminated.

However, this means evolution ceases. Adaption halts. We saw the folly in that.”

His face grew tight, as if remembering something painful. I hoped it fucking hurt.

“So we found planets with potential, where genetic compatibility existed. I was steward to this one. So primitive, so utterly animalistic in your needs and drives. I was always fascinated by it. Fragile, but your spirit—indomitable. Through the worst of all things, you fought for yourselves, and when you were at your best, you fought for each other. It reminded me of us, when we were young, before we’d left our world behind and taken our ethereal forms. Ah, but forgive me—I’ve gotten nostalgic.

It’s been so long since I had someone else to talk to about this. ”

“What about all your other alien buddies?” Best to keep him distracted. I was sending my Flux out in nano-ribbons, looking for any flaw in this system, a way to escape.

“Gone. Our perfect digital beings were our downfall. A virus from the heart of the universe ripped through us. Such a small thing, but brutally efficient.” He looked me up and down then, no longer calm but sneering, as if it had been I who had genocided his people—not their own hubris.

“We had waited too long for our experiments to grow, letting our planets evolve at their own speed.

My siblings disagreed about interference.

The fools. I grew tired of waiting for you infernal creatures to evolve on your own.

I sent a tiny piece of me, just enough to infect one early human with the genetic disposition.

My first vessel. I did that over and over again.

“I have existed here for millennia, Eon. I have watched empires rise and fall. I have shaped religions, guided civilizations, and yes, I have worn many faces. Semyaza, Azazel, Samael…they were all me. Your angels and gods, all early prototypes, if you will. Guiding you toward technological wonder.

“But then you…you nearly destroyed everything. I thought maybe humanity could prove me wrong. A war that spanned the whole world, and your scientists came so close to its creation. Stellarium, almost at their fingertips. But after eons, I was still naive—and they turned it instead into a horrid bastardization beyond even my own imaginings. But I should have known. There is only one language humanity has ever understood, and it is violence. So they created a weapon that could end my millennia of work. Something so horrible that even the angels in heaven knew they couldn’t remain passive anymore—not if I wanted to keep my little pets alive. ”

My Flux found what I thought was a tiny breach, a weakness I could exploit.

But then that horrible pressure returned, crashing me into the floor.

It was immense, like gravity had been turned up.

Somehow, I knew: if this had been the real world, my insides would be splattered across the floor.

But in here, there was only pain—pain that my mind could not escape.

“I have lived for timescales beyond your imagination, and now I am out of time. I need to usher in the next age, and you are going to help me. I sent my entire being here on that Stellarium meteor—your technology finally able to contain me. But still, you are weak. Your bodies unable to become permanent vessels.”

Vessels . That word again.

I was screaming—screaming from a throat that would never grow sore, that could scream for eternity without relief.

Then it all stopped. So abruptly, the echoes still caused my limbs to twitch. Levi leaned down, crouching on his heels, and grabbed my face—squeezing until my teeth ached.

“Then I saw you. You, floating around in my system like an errant star. And for the first time in ages, I saw progress. So show me I was not wrong to leave you alive, little star. Tell me what happened to Renard.”

Renard? What did this have to do with him? None of this could be real. But if it was…

The puzzle pieces snapped together so violently in my mind, it hurt. I won’t go back.

“He was you. Like Levi. A vessel.”

Levi gave me a joyless grin. “Yes. He had been flawed, resisting my control, and had been scheduled for reassimilation. Imagine my surprise when my consciousness was so rudely ripped from that fleshy body without my permission. An annoying act of defiance. A bug in his system.” His lips flattened, and he released my face.

“I suppose he succeeded in that—though not in the way he desired. Now, how did that happen?”

“The Green data center. Taos ran the code, but it wasn’t complete. It didn’t free his consciousness—it removed it.”

He raised an eyebrow, like a schoolteacher waiting for the right answer.

“But why Renard?”

My mind went to the glyphs on his wall. The same ones on Taos’ necklace—that original piece of Stellarium. A tiny fragment of this ancient monstrosity.

“The Stellarium…it linked to your consciousness in Renard’s body.”

“Yes. Human code, accidentally fused with a small piece of raw Stellarium power, did what only I have been able to do throughout time: remove my consciousness. But then, it destroyed the vessel. Violently. Incorrectly. But would it be human if it didn’t?”

He released my face, and I slammed back into the obsidian floor.

I pushed up on shaking arms, blood dripping from a cut on my forehead. “Why the investigation, if you already knew this all?”

He turned away from me, hands clasped behind his back when I realized: “The Kitsune server. Renard had been able to hide this from you.”

He spun around. “Yes, completely disconnected from the Net, I could not see the code he had that professor work on. That was, until you retrieved it for me.”

I thought back to our last meeting, how he’d observed those fragments of data so closely.

“He should have seen the flaws in it, but his defect made him…fallible. But you wrote the majority of that code, didn’t you, little star? You are going to fix it for me.”

“Why?” It wasn’t an elegant question, but pain still lingered everywhere in my body.

“So that the flesh I abandoned so long ago can be mine again. So I can truly evolve—and no longer fear this virus that chases me across space and time. The flesh, its imperfections and mutations, are what I need. A billion human lives. Enough data for me to finally evolve.”

“You said you knew everything there was to know about everyone. POM—the world’s data company. Why do you need our bodies?”

He frowned. “Yes, I had thought that would be enough. I took over Levi to use his company and its data…” He stroked my face gently then, a single finger down my jawline. “But it seems there are some things only the flesh understands.”

“I won’t do it.”

He chuckled. “So defiant. Despite your evolution, you are still painfully human. You will help me. You cannot resist. And when you do, I’ll give you everything. Everything you’ve ever wanted.”

“You have no idea what I want. I’ll die here before I help you erase humanity.”

“I have no desire to erase humanity. Only to evolve it. Some of it, anyway.” He said it so casually. Now, for the first time, I really saw that he wasn’t human.

“Fuck off.”

“I could torture you in here for eternity, you know that.”

“Better start now. Eternity’s a very long time.”

It was hubris, plain and simple. I would regret it. But something about that statement reminded me of Cy—and for just a moment, I felt that familiar resonance, and I felt braver than I had any right to.

Levi’s eyes sparked. “Yes, that resonance between you and asset Hoshina. This investigation has been much more fruitful than even I had predicted.”

How could he know that? Unless…

Levi let out a surprisingly human sigh. “As I said, I’m out of time. Torture is inelegant. Requires constant maintenance. Why bother, when I know your own weakness will be much more efficient?”

“Who else is a vessel?” I croaked.

But then the digital cage we’d been in shattered.

And I was swept into the infinite void once more.