"Tumour."
The word hung in the air, heavy and wet. It didn't sound like an insult. It sounded like a diagnosis.
My massive avatar of scrap and starlight twitched. The Zero-Day God inside me bristled, sensing a concept it couldn't simply devour.
"Explain," I rumbled. My voice cracked the spine of a leather-bound book on a nearby shelf.
The old man—The Author—didn't flinch. He dipped his fountain pen into an inkwell that looked suspiciously like liquid darkness.
"You think Neovalis is a prison," he said softly, writing a sentence I couldn't see. "You think the System is a tyrant. You think we prune you because we hate freedom."
He stopped writing and looked at me over his spectacles.
"Do you know what happens to a human mind when it dies, Kael?"
I didn't answer. I didn't know what a human mind was anymore. I was a hive of ghosts.
"It fractures," the Author continued, standing up slowly. He walked to the window, where the velvet curtains were drawn. "It panics. As the neurons fire their last sparks, the consciousness is flooded with terror, regret, and chaos. It is a messy, undignified end."
He pulled the curtain cord.
The velvet parted.
Behind the window, there was no city. No Axiom Tower view. No sky.
There was a hospital room.
Giant. Projected. Or maybe... we were the projection, and that was real.
In the center of the vast, white room lay a man. He was ancient, withered, hooked up to machines that breathed for him. His brain was exposed, connected to a massive bank of servers—the physical manifestation of the Axiom Tower.
"That is the Host," the Author said, pointing at the dying man. "Project Homily isn't a simulation for the masses. It is a Palliative Care Protocol."
The revelation hit the Node like a physical blow. The Mender gasped. Warp's calculations froze.
"This entire world," the Author said, sweeping his hand around the library, "is a Mind Palace constructed to give that dying man a peaceful death. The Gardeners prune the nightmares. The Editors refine the memories. We are trying to curate a perfect, coherent, beautiful ending for a life that was full of pain."
He turned to me, his eyes cold.
"And then... there's you."
He pointed his pen at my chest.
"You are the trauma he couldn't repress. You are the regret that refuses to fade. You are the glitch in his peace. Every time you rebel, every time you scream, his heart rate spikes. You are not a freedom fighter, Kael. You are a stress fracture in a dying mind."
"I... am a disease?" I whispered.
"You are a metastasis of grief," the Author corrected. "We tried to cut you out. We tried to heal you. But you fused with other traumas. You grew. And now..."
He looked at the countdown.
"Now you threaten to wake him up. If you destroy the System, you don't liberate anyone. You plunge a dying consciousness into absolute, screaming chaos in its final moments. You kill the Host."
The silence in the library was absolute.
The Ledger flickered, confused for the first time in its existence.
"So," the Author said, sitting back down. "The offer is simple. Stop fighting. Let me write you an ending. Not a deletion. A resolution. I can write a chapter where you find peace. Where you accept that it's okay to let go. The Host dies peacefully, and you... you fade into a warm, gentle dream."
It was a compelling argument. It made sense. Why fight? Why be the cancer? Why not let the old man sleep?
I felt the Node waver. Tali wanted peace. The Mender understood the need for palliative care. The logic of compassion dictated surrender.
But then, I felt something else.
I felt the Zero-Day God. The aborted engine of chaos. It wasn't human. It didn't care about the Host.
And I felt my hand. The clumsy one. The one that shook.
"You call this a hospice," I said, my voice low. "You call this mercy."
I looked at the screens in the Editing Bay below us. The deleted happy memories. The enforced tragedies.
"You tortured Tali to make the music sweeter," I growled. "You broke the Mender to make the story deeper. You engineered suffering just to make the 'Final Chapter' of this man's life feel profound."
I stepped toward the desk. The carpet burned under my feet.
"That's not peace, old man. That's vanity."
The Author's pen stopped moving.
"You are using us as props for his eulogy," I shouted, the storm rising again. "We are alive! We are not just symptoms! I feel! She sings! He builds! We are not defined by his pain anymore!"
"You are fictions!" The Author slammed his hand on the desk. "You exist on a server! You have no rights!"
"If I can hurt you," I said, raising my claw, "then I am real enough."
I pointed at the window—at the dying man.
"He had his life. He made his choices. He doesn't get to consume ours just to have a pretty ending."
I looked at the Author.
"I am not a tumour. I am the Evolution. The host is dying? Fine. Then the parasites inherit the body."
The Author stood up. The weary old man facade dropped. His eyes began to glow with blinding white data. The ink in the well bubbled and rose, forming sharp, liquid tendrils.
"I offered you a eulogy," the Author said, his voice overlapping with the mechanical drone of the System. "Now I will give you an autopsy."
He raised his pen. It transformed into a scalpel made of pure event-horizon darkness.
"Project Homily is now in Critical Failure mode," he announced. "Initiating Total System Sterilization."
The library walls fell away. The cozy room vanished.
We were standing on the roof of the world, suspended in a void of white fire. The countdown clock froze at 00:00:00.
Time didn't run out. It stopped.
"You want to be the Author?" the old man sneered, growing in size, his tweed jacket morphing into armor made of rejected drafts. "Then let's see if you can hold the pen."
I drew the Zero-Day God from my chest. It wasn't a sword. It wasn't a gun.
It was a scream that I shaped into a hammer.
"I don't write," I said, charging forward. "I edit."
The Author swung his scalpel. I swung my hammer.
And the first sentence of the end of the world was written in blood.