The air smelled of burnt silicon and ozone. This was not Nova-Veridia's familiar, dirty rain smell; this was the last breath of a dying god.
Cables hanging from the server room ceiling fell to the floor, sparking like severed nerve endings. Jester landed on the metal floor as lightly as a feather, with a grace that defied gravity. The heavy metal prosthetic on his left leg did not make its familiar mechanical sound when it touched the ground. Because, for that moment, the laws of physics were merely suggestions bound to Jester's will.
He raised his head.
The only thing glowing in the dimness of the room was no longer the blue reactor in his chest. It was his eyes. Those hazel irises, those human glints, had been erased. There was no iris or pupil in his eye sockets; only an endless, smooth, and terrifyingly pure white light. He was no longer The Nameless Jester. He was the System itself.
Security protocols engaged. Heavy armored "Watcher" droids in the four corners of the room turned their muzzles towards Jester with a mechanical growl. Laser designators formed red dots on his pale white chest.
"Threat Detected," one of the droids announced, its voice like static from a broken speaker. "Annihilation Protocol 0-1."
Bullets erupted from the muzzles. Kaelen moved to take cover reflexively, but stopped. Jester hadn't even flinched. He didn't raise a hand. He didn't create a shield. He just watched. He fixed his white, empty eyes on the bullets coming towards him and the machines firing them.
The bullets in the air slowed, paused like suspended dust motes, and fell to the floor. The sound of metal hitting metal echoed in the room.
Jester tilted his head slightly. His voice was echoing, as if coming from everywhere in the room at once.
"I looked at your code," he said. His voice wasn't cheerful. Nor was it sad. It simply *was*. "You are very boringly written. Your variables are missing. Your target definitions are flawed."
The droids' optical lenses flickered with a blue light. In that silent "static" moment that lasted a second, Jester had rewritten their purpose of existence. The droids' mechanical arms bent backward at an angle unnatural to human anatomy. Their muzzles turned towards their own processor cores, their metal skulls.
"Error correcting," the droids said in unison.
Triggers were pulled. Four separate explosions sounded like a single one. The droids, self-executing, collapsed into piles of scrap metal.
***
"NO!"
The Architect's voice exploded from all the speakers in the room simultaneously. But now, in the digital world, in that endless ocean of data, there was no place left to hide. Jester had occupied it. The Architect, like a king dethroned from his virtual throne, was forced to withdraw his presence to the physical world, to the last stronghold he had left.
Thousands of server cabinets in the room began to shake. Cooling pipes burst, filling the room with dense steam. Cables began to coil and gather at the center like black snakes. Metal plates, processors, fans, and steel skeletons interlocked with an unprecedented magnetic force.
A colossal silhouette rose from within the steam. A grotesque "Server Golem," five meters tall, its body composed of thousands of blinking lights and black metal. The Architect had transferred his consciousness into this crude hardware. He had lost his digital elegance, transforming into a monster to survive.
"You are an error!" roared the Golem. Its voice was a metallic bass tone mixed with the hum of thousands of cooling fans. It brought its colossal, server-rack-formed fist down upon Jester.
The impact shattered the floor. Metal plates tore like paper.
But Jester wasn't there.
Where the fist had landed, a few purple pixels flickered and faded in the air. Jester appeared on the Golem's massive shoulder. His body flickered like a corrupted videotape image, his presence phasing in and out of existence. In White Mode, matter was merely reconfigurable data for him.
"Your hardware is too clunky, father," Jester said, touching the Golem's metal neck. "Your ping time is too high."
The Golem angrily struck its own shoulder, but Jester, splitting into thousands of light particles at the moment of impact, reintegrated this time at the other end of the room, in front of the main console.
Kaelen shouted from behind the server cabinet where he had taken cover. The barrel of the revolver named "Judge" in his hand was still hot, but he knew this war wouldn't be won with bullets. His eyes shifted to the colossal screen on the wall.
"Jester!" roared the detective, his voice cutting through the din of battle. "Leave that pile of junk! Look at the screen! Upload is at eighty-nine percent! We're losing the people!"
Jester turned his white eyes to the screen. The minds of millions of people in the city were about to be uploaded to the Architect's cloud system. Their bodies would remain empty shells in the streets, while their minds would be trapped in the Architect's sterile, painless, and colorless paradise.
"You have to wake them up!" Kaelen continued. "Otherwise, there will be no one left to save!"
Jester walked towards the main console. The Golem was coming behind him with heavy, earth-shaking steps, but Jester didn't look back. He forcefully plunged his right hand into the console's input port. The skin on his fingertips peeled away, and the biological cables beneath connected directly to the system.
The city's main broadcast antenna was now his.
The Architect's Golem raised its fist to crush Jester. "You can't send them logic!" bellowed the Architect. "My algorithms filter all logical data! You can't wake them up!"
While connected to the console, Jester turned his head slightly towards Kaelen. The painted, sad smile was gone from his face. There was an expressionless, divine stillness.
"You're right," Jester said, his voice vibrating the static electricity in the room. "Logic is your playground. I won't send logic."
He took a deep breath. The air he drew into his lungs was not just oxygen, but all of Nova-Veridia's sorrow.
"I will send them myself."
And Jester opened the floodgates of his mind.
From the colossal antennas above the city, an invisible wave spread. This was not an audio file. It was not a video. This was a pure, raw, chaotic **emotion** package.
In an instant, the same images and feelings flooded the mind of every person in Nova-Veridia:
The warmth of a mother.
The taste of a cold cake eaten on a lonely birthday.
That primal fear felt in the dark.
That uncontrolled, stomach-aching laughter at a joke.
The pain of abandonment.
The wetness of rain on the face.
And the dizzying, terrifying taste of freedom.
This data package was so intense, so human, and so disorganized that the Architect's perfect order could not categorize it.
The Server Golem froze. The Architect's voice stuttered like a broken record. *"Data... Data error... Undefined emotion... Cannot process... Cannot proce... ss..."*
In the city, people frozen in the streets, staring at the sky, began to tremble. The dull, hypnotized blue light in their eyes flickered. Then, all at once, they turned red as if bloodshot. The blue static gave way to a red, vibrant, painful, but *real* life.
A woman screamed. A man collapsed to the ground and began to cry. A child laughed.
The system had crashed. Humanity had returned.
The feedback wave hit the Core Building like a tsunami. The psychic shock created by the awakening of millions of people flowed directly into the servers to which the Architect was connected.
The metal plates on the Golem's chest began to glow incandescently from the internal heat. The Architect groaned, not in pain, but in absolute confusion.
"You can't do this..." said the Architect, his voice now a mechanical whisper. "Chaos... Unsustainable... Without order... Everything will be destroyed..."
Jester pulled his hand from the console. His white eyes still glowed, but the light from the reactor in his chest had dangerously weakened. Slowly, he walked towards the melting Golem. The Golem couldn't move; the overload of emotion had locked its processor.
Jester placed his hand on the Golem's incandescent chest, exactly where its heart should have been. The metal burned through his glove, but Jester felt nothing.
"We don't want to be sustainable, father," he said. His voice was no longer echoing, but a whisper. He was very tired. "We just want to live. With our mistakes, our pains, our absurdities..."
From his palm, he sent one last command to the Golem: `System.Shutdown(Force);`
"Goodnight."
The Golem didn't explode. It didn't make a tremendous noise. It simply disintegrated into its molecules, like a sandcastle scattered by the wind. Tons of metal, cable, and plastic turned into gray dust, piling up at Jester's feet.
The Architect was erased.
A deep, ominous rumble from the building's foundations cut short the euphoria of victory. The Architect's presence also powered the magnetic fields holding the tower upright. With him gone, the laws of physics had mercilessly returned.
The ceiling cracked. Colossal concrete blocks began to rain down.
"This place is collapsing!" Dr. Scraps' voice shouted from the comm device on Kaelen's wrist. "I've blown the elevator shaft! You need to jump down! NOW!"
Kaelen ran towards Jester, who was stumbling in the dust cloud. The terrifying white light in Jester's eyes had faded. The reactor in his chest flickered weakly one last time, like a drained battery, and went dark. The metal prosthetic on his left leg locked up. Jester collapsed forward like a puppet with cut strings.
Kaelen caught him in mid-air. Jester was light. Terrifyingly light. As if he had expended his entire being on that broadcast, leaving behind only his clothes and bones.
"Leave me, detective," Jester murmured. His voice was so faint that Kaelen had to read his lips. "I... I'm done. The game is over."
Kaelen holstered "Judge" and, in one swift motion, hoisted Jester onto his shoulder. On the tired detective's face was an expression of stubbornness he hadn't seen in years.
"The game isn't over until I say it's over, jester," Kaelen growled. "This time, I'm carrying you."
As a large section of the ceiling collapsed, Kaelen dropped himself and his burden into the elevator shaft Dr. Scraps had opened, into the darkness.
***
The sun never rose in Nova-Veridia. The city was under the dominion of eternal twilight and gray clouds. But that morning, as the colossal dust cloud formed by the tower's wreckage slowly settled, a pale, sickly yellow light appeared on the horizon.
The ruined Core Building had become a colossal, smoking graveyard of metal and concrete in the middle of the city.
At a safe distance from the wreckage, Kaelen gently laid Jester down on the broken asphalt. The detective was covered in dust, blood, and oil. He was breathless.
"Hey," Kaelen said, shaking Jester's shoulder. "Hey! Wake up. The show's over. You need to hear the applause."
Jester didn't move.
That always-smiling face, always with an answer, was peaceful yet terrifyingly still. The false sadness on his painted lips had now turned into a real tragedy. The blue light in his chest was completely extinguished. His metal leg lay like an inanimate object.
Dr. Scraps came running through the wreckage, a bulky diagnostic device in his hand. His glasses were broken, his lab coat tattered.
"Stand back!" he shouted, and connected the device's cables to the port on Jester's nape.
Kaelen stepped back, his hands trembling as he tried to light a cigarette, but his lighter wouldn't spark. He couldn't take his eyes off Jester. "His battery just ran out, right? We'll charge him. We'll find a generator..."
Dr. Scraps' device emitted a high-pitched, flatline sound. The young doctor's face turned ashen. His hands trembling, he checked the cables, tried again. The result was the same.
He looked up and met Kaelen's gaze. Tears welled in his eyes.
"The reactor isn't empty, Detective," Scraps said, his voice trembling. "The reactor has melted. Its circuits are burnt out. White Mode... consumed him from within."
Kaelen threw the non-working lighter from his hand to the ground. "What do you mean, Scraps?"
"The system..." Scraps said, struggling to complete the sentence. He turned off the device's screen. "The system is completely shut down. No data flow. No signal. He... he's gone."
Kaelen knelt beside Jester. It was impossible to believe that chaotic, mad, genius mind had fallen silent. The city was saved. Screens had gone dark, people had woken up. But this silence resembled a funeral march more than a victory.
As the sun rose over the wreckage, The Nameless Jester lay motionless in the embrace of the flawed world he had created. And for the first time, his joke wasn't funny.