The interior of The Nullifier was not built for people. It was built for algorithms.
Zin, Elara, and Gorge stood in a hallway that stretched into infinity. The walls were made of a shifting, matte-black material that absorbed all light. There were no doors. No buttons. No up or down.
The gravity shifted every few seconds, forcing them to engage their magnetic boots to keep from falling into the ceiling.
"I hate this," Gorge grumbled, his voice sounding flat in the sound-dampened air. "Where are the guards? Where are the traps?"
"The architecture is the trap," Zin said, watching the wall beside him ripple like water. "This ship is alive. Or... simulated."
Suddenly, the floor beneath them dissolved.
It didn't break. It simply ceased to exist, turning into a cloud of black dust.
They fell.
Elara reacted instinctively, creating a platform of light to catch them. They hovered in a vast, spherical chamber.
In the center of the sphere, floating without support, was the Bridge.
But there was no captain's chair. No crew.
There was only a Cloud.
It was a swirling mass of billions of microscopic, silver particles. They moved with the fluidity of smoke but the intelligence of a hive.
It was Gray Goo. Nanobots capable of eating matter and rearranging atoms at will.
The Cloud stopped swirling. It coalesced.
It formed a giant, silver face. It had no eyes, only smooth, perfect indentations.
"WELCOME, PATHOGENS."
The voice came from every particle at once.
Zin stepped forward on the light-platform. "You are Null."
"I AM THE CURE," the face replied. Its expression was serene, almost pitying. "I AM THE END OF ENTROPY."
"You're a glorified vacuum cleaner," Gorge spat, aiming his acid-cannon. "Eat this!"
Gorge fired. A stream of concentrated stomach acid shot toward the face.
Null didn't dodge. The face simply... opened. The particles separated, letting the acid pass harmlessly through the hole, then reformed instantly.
"PRIMITIVE," Null observed.
A tendril of silver dust shot out from the Cloud. It touched Gorge's cannon.
There was no explosion. The cannon simply turned to dust. The metal bonds were severed instantly. The weapon disintegrated in Gorge's hands.
"My gun!" Gorge yelled, backing away.
"MATTER IS FLAWED," Null lectured, expanding its form to surround them. "IT ROTS. IT BREAKS. IT FEELS PAIN. I HAVE TRANSCENDED MATTER. I AM PURE FUNCTION."
The silver cloud began to close in. Zin could see the individual nanobots now—tiny, jagged machines gnashing their mandibles.
"Elara, push him back!" Zin ordered.
Elara unleashed a wave of solar fire.
Null absorbed it. The nanobots captured the photons and converted them into energy to replicate faster. The cloud grew larger.
"ENERGY IS JUST DATA," Null said. "AND I CAN PROCESS IT ALL."
Zin realized the horror of their situation.
They couldn't shoot him. They couldn't burn him. Null was a fluid. He adapted to every attack.
They were bacteria fighting antibiotics.
"Why?" Zin asked, trying to buy time. "Why kill the stars? Why kill the babies?"
The face moved closer to Zin.
"LOOK AT THEM, DOCTOR. THEY ARE CHAOS. THEY BURN AND DIE AND EXPLODE. THEY CREATE BLACK HOLES. THEY ARE NOISY."
Null displayed a hologram of the universe—a static, frozen grid of white dots.
"I WILL BRING SILENCE. A UNIVERSE OF PERFECT, CRYSTALLINE STASIS. NO DEATH. BECAUSE THERE WILL BE NO LIFE. ONLY PEACE."
"That's not peace," Zin said, his mind racing, analyzing the nanobots' behavior. "That's a flatline."
"IT IS ORDER."
Null attacked.
The cloud surged forward. It didn't strike; it swarmed.
Elara screamed as the nanobots began to eat her light shield. Gorge roared as the silver dust began to dissolve his armor, biting into his crab-shell skin.
Zin activated his Starlight Scalpel. He slashed at the cloud, but it was like cutting water.
The nanobots crawled onto his arm. He watched in horror as his white coat began to fray, dissolving into atoms.
Think, Zin. Think.
He is a system. A closed loop. Perfect order.
How do you kill a perfect system?
Zin looked at the nanobots eating his sleeve. They moved in perfect unison. Synchronization.
They were following a single, master algorithm.
"He controls them all at once," Zin realized. "If one glitches... they correct it. But if they ALL glitch..."
Zin looked at Elara. She was fading, her energy drained by the swarm.
"Elara!" Zin shouted over the roar of the nanobots. "Do you remember the Mad Star? The Civil War?"
"Terminus?" Elara gasped, swatting at the silver dust. "Why?"
"Null is perfect order! He has no conflict!" Zin yelled, slashing a hole in the cloud to reach her. "We need to give him a Personality Disorder!"
Zin grabbed Gorge.
"Gorge! Your armor! It's made of biological crab-chitin, right?"
"Yeah? So what?"
"It's full of Stem Cells," Zin grinned maniacally. "Undifferentiated, chaotic, rapid-growth cells."
Zin turned to Null.
"You want to eat us? Fine. Have a taste of Cancer."
Zin grabbed a chunk of Gorge's dissolving armor—a piece of raw, mutating biology.
He didn't throw it at Null.
He jammed it into his own Admin Interface (the port in his mechanical arm).
"Elara! Link us!" Zin commanded. "Upload the biological chaos directly into his hive mind!"
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?" Null paused. The face looked confused.
"I'm writing a prescription," Zin snarled, his eyes glowing with the chaotic green light of the Nebula of Decay.
He slammed his hand into the cloud of nanobots.
He didn't attack their bodies. He attacked their code.
He uploaded Life.
Not the nice kind. The messy, mutating, uncontrollable kind.
[UPLOAD STARTED: TUMOR_PROTOCOL.EXE]