The server room in the deepest layer of the Core Building whispered in a language only machines could understand. The rhythmic hum of cooling fans, the metallic vibration caused by thousands of hard drives spinning simultaneously, and the dense smell of ozone in the air... It was no different from a graveyard; the only difference was that those resting here were decaying not beneath the soil, but in silicon valleys.
Kaelen Vance rasped out the dusty, electrically charged air that filled his lungs. The broken rib in his chest stabbed him like a sharp knife with every breath, but pain, right now, was a luxury. Pain was proof that he was still alive.
He fixed his gaze on the center of the room. Jester hung suspended amidst hundreds of black cables dangling from the ceiling, like a colossal data monument. His arms were spread wide, his head bowed forward, his body completely surrendered to gravity. The colorful, chaotic, constantly moving man was gone, replaced by a puppet whose soul had been drained. Cables were clamped to the nerve endings beneath his skin, severing him from the physical world and pulling him into a digital purgatory.
Suddenly, that voice echoed from the speakers in the four corners of the room. The Architect's voice. Not mechanical, but eerily human, calm and clear.
"Protect the system. Erase unauthorized intruders."
It wasn't a command; it was a line of code. And the universe obeyed.
Hidden panels in the room's walls hissed open. From the darkness, the cold gleam of red optical lenses appeared. These were not works of art with samurai aesthetics like the Ronin they had just destroyed. These were "Security Droids"; multi-legged, spider-like death machines, crafted from raw metal with no aesthetic concern. Hundreds of them began to pour in, dragging their metallic claws across the floor. The sound they made was like thousands of cockroaches scuttling over dry leaves.
Kaelen looked at the "Judge" in his hand. He tilted the revolver's cylinder open. It was empty. The *clink-clink-clink* of brass casings hitting the floor was lost amidst the din of the approaching metallic army.
"Great," Kaelen murmured. His voice was tired but resolute. "The party's just getting started."
He holstered the weapon and turned his gaze to the wreckage of the Ronin lying shattered on the floor. In the robot's hand, still clutched tightly, was the black katana, sharpened by high-frequency vibrations. Kaelen dragged his heavy boots to the wreckage. He pried the sword from between the metal fingers. The hilt fit strangely in his hand; it was cold but balanced.
He leaned his back against the tangle of cables from which Jester hung. Before him was a metallic sea, coming in waves.
"Hey, freak," he said without lifting his head, to the unconscious body behind him. "You'd better wake up from those colorful dreams of yours. Because playing samurai to protect you wasn't in my retirement plans."
He gripped the sword with both hands and took his stance. His steel-gray eyes narrowed.
"Until he wakes up... no one passes."
***
At the same time, in a place far beyond reality.
When Jester opened his eyes, what he expected were the flames of hell or the gray, static-filled void of the Static. But what he saw was a perfect white, enough to burn the cells of his retina.
There were no shadows here. No horizon line. The perception of depth was gone. It was as if someone had erased the fabric of the universe, leaving behind only a blank Word document. Jester looked at his hands. His gloves were gone. His patched, purple-and-blue circus attire was gone. Instead, he wore a pristine white suit that fit him like a glove. Even the metal prosthetic on his left leg was gone; his flesh and bone were there, as if it had never been severed.
"You've turned down the graphics," Jester said into the void. His voice didn't echo. "Texture maps not loaded?"
"Simplicity allows the mind to focus."
The voice had come from behind him. Jester spun on his heels.
In the middle of the white, infinite void, stood a white table and two white chairs. In one of the chairs sat a middle-aged man in a gray suit. His face was so ordinary that if you passed him on a crowded street, you'd forget him a second later. In his hand was a Rubik's Cube made entirely of white squares, which he slowly turned.
"Welcome," the man said, without looking up. "File transfer complete."
Jester walked with exaggerated ease and sat in the other chair. He crossed his legs. "So you're the Architect. You're more... analog than I expected. I was anticipating more of a giant neon head or a flying block of code."
The Architect placed the cube on the table. In his eyes, there was neither anger nor curiosity; only the observation of a scientist studying a lab rat.
"This is where you were born, Jester," he said softly. "Or by your name then: **File 001**."
Jester grinned, but it was his familiar, dangerous grin. "Your storytelling is weak, old man. I was born in a laboratory. I remember the cold metal, the needles, the taste of that green liquid. All of it."
"That was a false memory we uploaded to you," the Architect said. His voice carried the undeniable weight of truth. "A background story written to make you believe you were human. A character biography. You were never born of flesh and blood. You are code."
The Architect waved his hand lightly. The white room rippled. Reality tore like a curtain, and the scene changed.
They were now in a sterile hospital room. It must have been 1989; the equipment was old. On the bed lay a pale-skinned woman, beautiful but on the verge of death. Cables were attached to her head. Beside the bed stood a much younger version of the Architect; a man with tearful eyes and trembling hands.
"My wife," the Architect said, watching the scene. "She had a tumor in her brain that medicine was helpless against. To avoid losing her... I tried to digitize her mind. This was the beginning of the 'Great Reset', the Static Age. I wanted to transfer her to a perfect world, a simulation without pain."
The younger Architect in the image frantically entered commands into a computer terminal. On the screen, the text **"TRANSFER INITIATING: SUBJECT - SON"** flashed.
"We had lost our son in that accident," the Architect continued. His voice trembled for the first time. "I couldn't bring him back, but I could upload his data... his memories to the system. I would meet my wife there, with our son."
Watching the scene, Jester felt that emptiness within him, that undefined sense of "error," gain meaning.
"But the transfer failed," Jester said. It was as if he was completing his own sentence.
"The data corrupted," the Architect confirmed. He fixed his gaze on Jester. "The Static intervened. Instead of my son's pure, innocent consciousness... you were formed. A corrupted, chaotic, unstable data mass. A Glitch. You are not my son. You are my greatest failure."
The Architect stood up. The white room returned.
"But now," the Architect said, extending his hand to Jester. "I will correct my mistake using you. Your source code is the key needed to transfer my wife and all of humanity to a 'perfect' world, a pain-free eternity. Sacrifice yourself, Prototype 0. And serve your purpose."
***
In the physical world, the situation had turned less into a massacre and more into a junkyard war.
Kaelen swung the Ronin's sword in a wide arc. The legs of three droids before him were severed with a metallic shriek. The robots collapsed, but ten more were coming from behind them. Kaelen's breath came in ragged gasps. Blood trickling from his forehead stung his eye.
His sword technique was elegant, but his strength was waning. With every strike, old wounds in his shoulder ached, his muscles rebelled. A droid caught a millisecond gap in Kaelen's defense. Its red laser flared.
Kaelen felt the smell of seared flesh and the sharp pain in his left leg. He fell to his knees. "Ah... damn it!"
He tried to brace himself by stabbing the sword into the ground, but he was surrounded. Ignoring the detective on the ground, the droids turned their muzzles towards Jester, who hung from the ceiling. The target was clear: to take control of the data carrier, even at the risk of destroying it.
"Don't touch him!" Kaelen yelled, trying to stand. But his leg wouldn't support him.
Just then, the cargo elevator doors of the server room burst open with a roar, as if forced by an explosion.
The sound that rose from within drowned out the symphony of mechanical whirs and laser blasts. It was a pure, primal war cry.
"SCRAP CITY GREETS YOU!"
From the elevator poured a flood of people, armored with rusty metal plates, cogs, and pipes. The "Rusty Leeches" gang. In their hands were maces made from wrenches, modified nail guns, and shields crafted from scrap metal.
At the forefront was that mad doctor, **Dr. Scraps**, who had modified his wheelchair like a tank and wore welding goggles. In his lap, he held an experimental plasma rifle, larger than himself, with exposed coils.
Dr. Scraps saw Jester hanging from the ceiling, and especially the prosthetic on his left leg, bearing his own signature. His eyes blazed with fury.
"Hey!" Dr. Scraps shrieked, aiming his rifle at the droid horde. "Nobody touches my artwork! That leg's warranty is still valid, you punks!"
He pulled the rifle's trigger. A blue plasma orb turned the droids' front lines into a puddle of molten metal. The gang spread through the room like a wave. As Kaelen watched in astonishment from the ground, a rusty-armored gang member came up and offered him a hand.
"The boss says hello," the man said with a grin. The money Jester had distributed in the arena hadn't just fed them; it had bought them a purpose.
***
In the digital void, Jester bowed his head, digesting the Architect's words. His shoulders began to shake.
The Architect thought he was crying. "Don't be sad. Your existence was a mistake; your deletion will be a blessing."
But when Jester lifted his head, there were no tears on his face. There was that wide, unsettling grin. And then he laughed. His laughter was like the sound of glass cracking the perfection of the white room.
"Ha! Hahahaha!" Jester slapped his knee. "So I'm not your dead son... I'm a side effect of your god complex! This... This is the best joke I've ever heard!"
He sprang to his feet, walking towards the Architect. "You were supposed to make me sad, right? I was supposed to say, 'Oh daddy, why didn't you love me?' But you don't understand, Architect. If I'm a mistake, it means I don't have to follow the rules. I'm free."
For the first time, the calm mask on the Architect's face fell. His brows furrowed. "Enough. Deletion process initiating."
The white walls suddenly darkened. The room's boundaries began to physically contract. Blocks of code converged on Jester, to compress him, to fragment his data and turn it into raw material. Jester felt his digital skin tingle. His existence was being erased.
"End of the game, Prototype 0," the Architect said, rising.
Jester looked at the contracting walls. He didn't panic. His mind was a structure that found peace in chaos. The Architect had built everything on perfect order. And every perfect system had a vulnerability.
The Architect's vulnerability wasn't in the code. It was in his heart.
Jester extended his fading hand. But not to the Architect. To the simulation window behind them. To the "wife" figure still looping there, lying in bed.
"Your heaven is too boring," Jester whispered. "Let's add some color."
And he pressed his finger onto that sacred, untouchable memory, the image of the Architect's wife.
The Glitch ability was far more savage in the digital world than in the physical. A purple spark from Jester's finger spread through the simulation like a virus. The woman's face distorted. Her pixels shifted. Her eyes moved, her mouth stretched vertically. That sad, romantic farewell scene transformed into a horror movie frame in seconds. The woman's voice hitched like a broken record: *"Sa-sa-sa-ve me not... shut... shut..."*
"NO!" the Architect screamed in horror. He lost control. The walls stopped. "What are you doing to her?!"
"I'm giving her the truth," Jester said, reassembling his form that was melting amidst the pixels. "Perfection is a lie. Pain is real. And I am the messenger of truth."
The Architect, in a panic, lowered his defenses as he tried to save the simulation. This was the moment Jester had been waiting for.
***
In the server room, time had almost come to a standstill. Dr. Scraps and his gang were turning droids into scrap, but their numbers were still too great. Kaelen, his back against a server cabinet, had formed a last line of defense with the sword in his hand.
Suddenly, all the lights in the room exploded.
The darkness lasted only a second. Then, a blinding, blue electrical surge emanated from Jester's body, which hung from the ceiling. The cables began to spark and explode under the energy load they couldn't bear.
Jester's body convulsed like a puppet. He threw his head back. On all the screens in the room, in the eyes of all the droids, an instantaneous static, a "glitch," appeared.
In the digital world, Jester looked into the Architect's face, into the eyes of that collapsing god.
"I will hack your heaven, father," Jester said. His voice was no longer just his own; it was a combination of thousands of different frequencies. "And I will turn it into hell."
In the physical world, the last cable holding Jester snapped. His body made a soft landing on the ground, in front of Kaelen.
There was silence. The droids were frozen. The gang members held their breath.
Jester, kneeling on the ground, slowly lifted his head. The sad clown makeup on his face was still there, but his expression had changed. He was no longer joyful or sad. There was absolute authority.
He opened his eyes.
The familiar hazel irises were gone. There was no red combat mode. No purple glitch light.
His eyes, like the infinite digital void behind him, were **pure, unblemished white**.
Jester had become the system's administrator. And the system feared its new master.