Chapter 78 - Fracture in the Silicon
The neural link connected with a blinding flash of white agony that erupted behind Julian's eyes. Memories—not his own, but the compressed, fragmented recollections of another boy who had spent decades trapped in a concrete sarcophagus beneath Delaware—flooded into his cortex.
He saw sterile white laboratories in 1996; he felt the cold bite of bone marrow needles; he watched a young David Mercer scribbling algorithmic equations on glass chalkboards while a dying child wept in an isolation ward.
*SYNC STATUS: 42%* flashing in neon amber across the room's main monitors.
"Julian, fight it!" Vanessa’s voice sounded muffled, as if underwater.
Through the haze of overwhelming neural feedback, Julian realized something the scarred original hadn't calculated. The connection wasn't a one-way download. It was a bridge.
*If you are in my head,* Julian thought, pushing his own consciousness back through the neural tether, *then I am in yours.*
Julian focused on the single moment that defined his existence: not the artificial pedigree David had manufactured, but the raw, unscripted reality of his graduation day. The humiliation, the rage, the sudden realization that the world was an orchestrated stage, and the defiant choice to fight through the mud rather than submit to the script.
He forced those memories—the visceral, chaotic human emotions—into the pristine, cold logic of the duplicate’s mind.
The scarred Julian gasped, staggering back half a step as blood began to seep from his silver-tinted ocular implant. "What... what is this? This isn't code!"
"No," Julian choked out through gritted teeth, blood dripping from his own nose as he seized control of the feedback loop. "It's what happens when you actually live out in the world. You become unpredictable."
Vanessa didn't hesitate. Spotting the momentary paralysis in the duplicate, she snatched an exposed grounding cable from the severed power conduit behind the console and slammed the bare copper wire into the duplicate’s ankle harness.
May you like
A blinding discharge of raw electrical current exploded through the room.
***
