When the roar of the engine ceased, the only sound left was nothingness. There was no wind. No sound of waves. Even that familiar white noise, that static hum always present in the background of the world, was silent here. Jester loosened his grip on the handlebars and took a deep breath. The air filling his lungs didn't smell of oxygen, but like time turned to dust.
What stood before them resembled less a door and more a black curtain drawn across the sky. The entrance gate to the Necropolis. Its surface was woven from an obsidian-like stone, so matte it seemed to swallow light. It was so tall that when Jester raised his head, he felt the servos in his neck strain. Beside this colossal block, he and his modified motorcycle beneath him seemed as tiny as punctuation marks dropped into a line of the universe's code.
Echo, in spherical form, floated up from his shoulder. Its lens swept a blue laser scanner across the door's surface, but the light extinguished the moment it touched the stone.
"My sensors are reading nothing," Echo said. Its voice lacked its usual mechanical coolness; the whirring of its processor's fans could be heard speeding up. "No radiation. No heat signature. Data flow zero. This is... a dead spot, Jester. A blank on the map."
Jester kicked down the kickstand and dismounted. The metal prosthesis on his left leg made a dull, industrial sound with each step on the barren ground. *Klang. Klang.* The paint on his face was slightly cracked from the desert's dryness, but his famous, melancholic smile remained. He felt for the reactor on his chest. The blue light pulsed like an uneasy heart in this dead atmosphere.
"You're wrong, tin can," he whispered, pressing his gloved fingers against the cold surface of the black stone. The stone was colder than ice; it seemed to absorb life. "This place isn't dead. It's just holding its breath. Like a spider waiting for its prey."
There was no handle, no lock, nor any digital panel of Nova-Veridia's crude technology on the door. In the very center of the smooth surface, a colossal, human-sized symbol was carved: **Ω**. Omega. The End.
Jester scanned the probability networks in his mind. *Brute force?* Pointless. *Explosives?* The stone absorbs energy. *Glitch?*
He narrowed his eyes. A purple spark flickered in his hazel irises. "Let's break this code," he murmured, placing his palm over the symbol. He focused his mind to bend reality, to manipulate the spaces between atoms. Purple lightning emanated from his fingertips.
But the stone did not react. Instead, it absorbed Jester's chaotic energy like a sponge. Jester stumbled, feeling a void in his stomach. As if someone had torn a piece from his soul.
"Access denied," Echo said, descending anxiously. "This technology is far beyond our protocols. We should retreat."
Jester shook his head. His eyes fixed on the faint, almost eroded carvings just below the Omega symbol. It was a language. A much more primitive, much wilder form of binary code. As if it were written not with numbers, but with wounds.
*"Only the broken can see the whole."*
As Jester read the text, the grin on his lips widened, but the melancholy in his eyes deepened. "Ah, how melodramatic," he said to himself. "This isn't a door that wants perfection, Echo. This door wants damage."
He brought his hand to his chest. There was a piece left from his battle with the Architect, from the collapse of that tower, which he still hadn't repaired. The plate protecting his chest reactor was cracked. It bore the mark of a deep fissure, an error, a *glitch*.
Jester gritted his teeth as he tore the chest plate from its place. A sickening sound, like metal separating from flesh, emerged. He placed the cracked, burn-scarred plate into the carving in the very center of the Omega symbol.
No *click* was heard. No mechanical gear turned.
Instead, a groan came from the depths of the earth. The black stone door lost its solid form. It began to melt, transforming into a black, mercury-like liquid. The stone's molecules had yielded to the "flaw" Jester presented, renouncing their wholeness. The door silently dissolved into nothingness, as if it had never existed.
Inside, it was dark. Not merely the absence of light, but a darkness where the possibility of light's existence was absent. Jester jumped onto his motorcycle and turned on his headlights. The powerful halogen lamps could only illuminate half a meter ahead in the darkness. The beams of light were swallowed by infinity.
"Image processing modules offline," Echo reported. Its voice trembled. "Jester... the atmospheric pressure here... it's like..."
Then, the sound came.
It wasn't mechanical. It wasn't wind. A wet, organic chorus of whispers, emanating from thousands of different throats, echoed from within the darkness. As if the walls were made of flesh and were speaking.
*"Zero... Zero... Zero..."*
The words echoed in Jester's mind. This was his codename. His label in the labs. *Prototype 0.*
Jester gripped the handlebars. Fear tried to climb his spine, but he took that feeling and used it as fuel. He laughed. His voice echoed distortedly in this organic cathedral.
"Did you hear that, Echo?" he said, revving the engine at idle. "My fans are waiting for me. It would be rude to keep them waiting."
***
The camera pulled away from that pitch-black darkness and the smell of decayed time, gliding hundreds of kilometers back to the gray city where the rain never ceased.
Nova-Veridia was changing.
In the top-floor office of the Police Department, Kaelen Vance stood by the window. His old, worn trench coat had been replaced by a Chief's uniform, but the weight on his shoulders remained unchanged. The city below was aglow. Neon signs now reflected not just advertisements, but slogans of "RECONSTRUCTION." The static had diminished. People's dreams were no longer fragmented by gray static.
Kaelen set the whiskey glass in his hand down on the table and brought his fingers to the object resting there.
Jester's old mask.
A cracked, paint-peeling porcelain face. As Kaelen touched the mask, he seemed to hear the laugh of that mad jester with metal fingers. "You're still giving me a headache," Kaelen murmured, looking into the mask's empty eye sockets. "Wherever you are... I hope you're annoying someone there too, kid."
In another corner of the city, in a makeshift building rising amidst the junkyards, Dr. Scraps was repairing a child's cybernetic arm with a laser soldering iron. Sign: *ERROR CHECK & REPAIR - FREE.* The queue stretched outside. Humans and robots now stood side by side, not with fear, but with purpose.
The Architect's statue in the square had been torn down. In its place, an abstract monument, shapeless yet reaching for the sky, built by the people's own hands from scrap metal, was erected. No one had named it, but everyone knew to whom it was dedicated.
Jester might have been gone. But the "Error" he left behind, that crack in the system, had become Nova-Veridia's new operating system. Freedom was the right to be flawed, and the city now loved its flaws.
***
When Jester floored the throttle, the motorcycle shot into the darkness like a bullet. The ground beneath the wheels was no longer sand or stone; it felt as if he were riding on a soft, biological tissue.
And then, the darkness looked at him.
First, a green glow appeared. Then this glow widened, elongated, and transformed not into a vertical, but a horizontal slit. In the void before Jester, a colossal **EYE**, the size of an apartment block, opened.
The sclera of the eye was metallic gray, its iris a sickly green. The pupil constantly shifted shape like a burning flame, bending the reality around it. This was not merely a monster. This was a being that could rewrite the universe's source code with its gaze. The Consortium's god.
Echo's alarm sounds drowned out the roar of the engine. "Jester! Energy levels are off the charts! This isn't an anomaly... This is a God-Class entity! Its very presence is burning out my processor!"
The colossal eye focused on Jester. Jester felt his bones ache under the weight of that gaze. The "Red Mode" in his mind screamed to activate, but Jester suppressed it. This fight wouldn't be won with fists.
Echo trembled with panic on Jester's shoulder. "We have to go back! We're not ready! No data, no plan, no weapons!"
Jester saw the motorcycle's speedometer pinned to the end. The wind (or whatever that thing was) peeled the paint back from his face. He adjusted his goggles on his nose. The melancholic expression on his lips vanished, replaced by pure, unadulterated madness.
"No one is ready for the apocalypse, Echo," he shouted, his voice mingling with the engine's roar. "We just... improvise."
He lifted the front wheel. On one wheel, he rode directly into that colossal, green-flame-burning pupil. Not like a mosquito flying into a fire, but like a virus entering a host computer.
Green light swallowed the world.
The sound cut out.
The image suddenly went black, like an old television unplugged.
Silence.
Infinite, absolute silence.
Then, in the middle of the darkness, a green, blinking cursor appeared, and a single line of code was written:
**`SYSTEM REBOOT COMPLETE. WELCOME TO LEVEL 3.`**