Simon followed the map downloaded into his mind, weaving through dim corridors lit only by the occasional flicker of failing emergency lights. On their way, they encountered more constructs, but Simon dispatched them with practiced precision—a ssh of a bde, a burst of electricity, and the silence returned.

  The next door opened with a hiss. Simon stepped through.

  Jerry rested within the submersible, magnetically sealed to his back, while Amy hung in his arms like a memory he couldn't set down.

  His scanners swept the space.

  A familiar storage room.

  Shelves packed with orderly rows of components lined the walls. It was narrow, cramped, custrophobic. To the right, his sensors locked onto something embedded in the wall: a decapitated body, fused in with structure gel and metal like a grotesque mural.

  Simon stepped closer. Last time he had been here he had just grabbed the omni tool ying on a nearby table and quickly run away, scared of one of the constructs rooming around, but right now he could at least cheek out who this person had been. The diving suit was intact enough to scan. He connected to it, curious to retrieve identification data—only to freeze.

  No match.

  "What?" Simon murmured aloud.

  Amy stirred slightly in his arms, her warped voice rising. "What's the matter, Carl?"

  "That suit... its serial number isn't in the database."

  Amy processed this, then offered, "Maybe the gel mutated it? Wiped the registry?"

  "Could be," Simon said, though something about it gnawed at him. He reached into his back compartment and drew out a DNA extractor. The device hissed softly as it drew a sample from the stump of the neck.

  The result came back seconds ter.

  No match in the Pathos-II crew medical database. DNA integrity: Normal.

  Simon stared.

  "This person wasn't part of the crew," he said slowly.

  "That's impossible," Amy said. "No other facility was ever close enough to Pathos-II to make contact. No one could've just walked here."

  Simon stood up and looked again at the body. Not mutated. Not logged. Just... there.

  He would think about it ter.

  He turned and walked out, entering a rger chamber. Overhead, tracks lined the ceiling. BULL (UH3) units—submersible robots—hung from reinforced hooks like dormant beasts. Their bulk swayed slightly in the cold recycled air.

  Simon passed beneath them and followed the corridor to the main thermal power pnt door. He paused.

  "I wouldn't open that," Amy warned, her voice tinny but sincere. "There were constructs on the other side."

  Last time, Simon had crawled through vents to reach the core.

  But that was then.

  Now?

  He wasn’t the same.

  Simon lowered Amy gently to the floor beside the wall.

  "Stay here."

  He released Jerry’s submersible. It unfolded its segmented legs and crawled to Amy’s side.

  Simon turned to the door.

  The reinforced locks clunked, disengaged, and the bst doors opened with a thunderous hiss.

  A wave of metal and shrieks greeted him.

  Four constructs.

  Two had fused into a twisted quadruped, its limbs jerking in sync like a malfunctioning animal. The other two skittered forward on multi-jointed legs, their bodies riddled with exposed circuitry and burning blue eyes.

  Simon didn’t flinch.

  His right arm twisted and clicked, reshaping itself into the Tes cannon.

  FIRE.

  A searing arc of white-hot energy nced through the air and struck the quadruped in the face. It convulsed, screaming as its fused body colpsed with a bone-jarring ctter.

  The other two constructs lunged.

  Simon moved.

  Time slowed, each detail crystallized.

  His cannon retracted. Twin nanoceramic bdes extended from both arms with a slick hiss.

  He chose not the most efficient route.

  But the most satisfying.

  He dashed forward, ducking beneath the first construct’s cwed swipe. The air split as his right bde carved upward through its arm, severing it cleanly at the shoulder joint. Sparks flew like fireflies.

  The second construct tackled him from the side, but Simon rolled with the impact, using the momentum to stab upward through its abdomen, slicing its frame nearly in half.

  It writhed, trying to scream.

  Simon yanked the bde free and plunged it through its head.

  The first construct, maimed but not dead, charged again—screeching, dragging a mangled limb behind it.

  Simon let it get close.

  At the st second, he shifted his right forearm—the bde retracting, repced by his repulsion cannon.

  THUD.

  The bst unched the construct backward into the far wall. It hit with a crunch and slumped, inert.

  Silence returned.

  Simon stood in the center of the chamber, his bdes dripping with bckened oil, chest heaving in quiet, mechanical rhythm.

  Then he turned and walked back to Amy.

  The corridor ahead led to the control core.

  It was time to take the powerpnt for himself.

  As they reached the end of the corridor, Simon sent the signal for the door to open. The reinforced steel panels groaned—but refused to budge.

  "There's something blocking it," Simon said ftly, eyes scanning the panel.

  "If I remember correctly," Amy's voice crackled softly, "we sealed it on the other side—with metal beams and bolts."

  Simon slowly turned his head toward her. "Wouldn't it have been easier to tell me that before I tried to open it?"

  Amy blinked, her mechanical optic twitching. "I forgot."

  Simon sighed—not with frustration, but with weary acceptance. Of course she had.

  "It's fine," he muttered, and gently set her down beside the bulkhead.

  His right arm shifted with a subtle hiss, modur segments sliding apart as the welding torch extended from beneath the synthetic pting. Sparks showered the corridor as he began cutting a precise circle into the middle of the door.

  When the final piece gave way, Simon stepped back and used his magnetic palms to pull the metal disc free. Through the opening, a ttice of crisscrossed beams glinted in the dim light—thick, bolted from the other side.

  "Just a bit more."

  He lifted Jerry’s submersible and pced it at the opening. The machine responded instantly—its segmented legs anchoring to the frame with magnetic ease. A welding torch unfolded from its back, lighting the narrow gap with a bright, searing glow.

  Bit by bit, the beams gave way.

  A loud ctter marked the final obstruction falling free.

  The door creaked open.

  A wave of heat brushed against Simon’s facepte.

  They stood on a raised balcony overlooking the throbbing heart of the geothermal pnt. Below, the earth fell away into a wide shaft—dozens of meters deep—where molten rock pulsed in steady orange light. Pipes and supports crisscrossed the pit like veins, and turbines thrummed with mechanical breath. The air shimmered from the heat.

  Despite all that had happened, the pnt still lived.

  Simon lifted Amy once more and turned toward the right. The old control room waited just a few steps ahead.

  Inside, dim auxiliary lights cast soft halos on control panels and thick cables that had long since stopped carrying power. But something else caught his eye.

  A mutated maintenance drone y half-colpsed near the control frame. Its legs were mismatched, grafted from different unit models, and covered in fossilized structure gel. Simon knelt beside it.

  He pressed his hand to its warped chassis. The systems flickered—barely alive. But that wasn’t what he was after.

  The cortex chip embedded deep inside.

  He surged power through his palm. The structure gel slithered away from the slot, melting like wax in his presence. A compartment clicked open.

  He pulled the chip free.

  "I'm sorry for what I did, but I promise, I’ll bring you back," he whispered to the silence.

  Then he rose and turned to face the console.

  A cluster of hardened structure gel loomed at the panel’s center, like a dormant heart.

  He turned to Amy, who sat propped against the frame.

  "I’m going to need to concentrate for a few minutes," Simon said. "Please don’t speak. I might not hear you."

  Amy’s distorted head bobbed once, her voice soft. "Take your time."

  Simon gave a small nod.

  He moved to Jerry’s submersible resting beside the wall, reached into the compartment on his back, and pulled out a sealed ration biscuit. He pced it into the submersible’s hatch. The panel sealed shut with a soft hiss.

  Jerry chirped.

  Simon squared his stance.

  He reached out and pced his hand against the structure gel cluster.

  He sent a pulse of energy into it.

  The cluster twitched. Then it began to glow.

  Simon took one st breath—whatever breath meant now—and pushed his hand deeper.

  The folds opened to receive him.

  Structure gel slid around his wrist, his forearm, embedding itself into the synthetic muscuture of his body.

  And then—

  He connected.

  The world shifted.

  Simon had become Upsilon.

  The structure gel poured through every corridor, seeped into every seam, and crawled through every shattered wire. No longer just a contagion or rogue element—it had become skin, muscle, and nerve. It was Simon. He could feel the hum of turbines, the whir of magnetic coils, the flicker of surveilnce feeds. He felt everything. Every valve. Every servo. Every whisper of decaying power.

  The entire facility was alive, and its heartbeat was his.

  He pulsed a magnetic wave through the network. The response was immediate. All across the facility, corrupted machines froze—twitched—and dropped. One by one, rogue constructs colpsed to the ground, lights fading like dying stars. The screeching, the stuttering voices, the filing limbs—it all ended in silence. A silence that belonged to him.

  Next, he reached into the systems of the CRU-09. The towering colossus of steel that had once patrolled the warehouse now stood dormant. Simon infiltrated its subsystems like a shadow slipping through cracks in the wall. With a flicker of intent, he shut it down, wiped the memory grid, and initiated a clean reboot.

  The unit stirred.

  Simon opened his eyes—through it. The view was distorted through its thick sensors, but the sense of scale was intoxicating. His massive hands flexed, metal fingers groaning as they closed and opened. He looked down. Rows of crates shifted like pebbles beneath a titan’s step.

  Then came the revival.

  Throughout the facility, long-dead maintenance units stirred. Each awakening like a soul rising from a tomb.

  A spider-drone hidden beneath dust and colpsed ceiling tiles unfolded its segmented legs, crawling out like an insect returning to light.

  A half-buried loader twitched and groaned as its power core fred to life, lifting its heavy arms as if stretching after centuries of sleep.

  An old rail-arm suspended from the ceiling clicked, rotated, and activated its scanner.

  Simon guided them gently—no orders shouted, no code forced. Just a whisper of purpose shared through the network.

  Arc welders ignited. Cranes swung back into position. Lift systems reengaged. Teams of drones moved in unison, reattaching cables, reinforcing crumbling walls, repcing cracked conduits. Old infrastructure was resurrected piece by piece.

  Outside, even more emerged. Shattered tunnel supports were re-welded. Tram lines cleared. Emergency doors unjammed. What once y in ruin now stood on the edge of resurrection.

  But Simon was not content with repair.

  He watched as drones dragged the disabled rogue constructs to the processing chambers. Each one was scanned, cataloged, id bare. He would inspect them all. Manually. Personally. Each cortex chip examined for signs of retained consciousness.

  Maybe some were still in there.

  Maybe they hadn’t all gone mad.

  At the same time, Simon began building something new.

  A new type of drone—designed specifically to recim structure gel.

  Arachnid in shape, reminiscent of Solipsist constructs, each had a long segmented proboscis capable of siphoning the gel from walls, machines, and corrupted bodies. He watched as the first prototypes were assembled. Limbs clicked into pce. Scanners calibrated. They emerged from the assembly bays in single file, fanning out across the site to begin their harvest.

  Simon returned to his own body. The transition was smooth, fluid. As if stepping into warm water.

  Amy sat against the console, her glowing optic casting dim reflections across the control panel. Her gaze wandered, chasing ghosts.

  Jerry slept in his submersible beside her.

  Hours passed.

  Simon continued his work, the gel shifting beneath his hands like cy responding to will.

  Entire wings of the facility were still locked off. Rooms long rendered obsolete now waited for new purpose. Some would become energy storage vaults. Others memory cores. Others still would be reshaped into bs for new technologies.

  The station was changing.

  This was no longer a ruin.

  It was a chrysalis.

  Simon had seized the dead shell of the old world and begun sculpting it into something new.

  It would take days. Maybe longer.

  But what he was building now wasn’t just a base.

  It was a future.