The glitches had intensified. My room pulsed with them. My reflection in the monitor to my left would briefly shimmer into a distorted, elongated nightmare before snapping back. The hum of my computers, a constant companion, now warbled with a discordant, off-key hum. The air itself felt thick, vibrating with the sheer, impossible energy of a reality being torn at its seams. My head throbbed with a persistent migraine, a direct, agonizing feedback from E.R.I.S as I pushed it to its limits.
Hours. Days. Time had ceased to be a linear progression; it was a blur of caffeine-fueled code, the constant thrum of my machines, and the increasingly unnerving distortions flickering at the edges of my vision. A wall socket would briefly transform into a gaping black hole before snapping back. The numbers on my digital clock would momentarily swap, displaying 7:15 as 5:71. A mundane, quiet slip-and-fall in the background, unnoticed by me, consumed as I was by the furious, single-minded drive to break E.R.I.S. My only thought was the next line of code, the next encryption key.
My fingers, now raw and aching, flew across the keyboard. I was in a fugue state, fueled by pure, desperate obsession. I'd bypassed the outer layers, ripped through what seemed like endless encryption. The feedback from E.R.I.S had intensified, becoming almost physical—sharp migraines, a buzzing in my teeth. But I pushed through it, sensing I was on the verge of something.
Then, a breakthrough. A line of code fractured, not with an error, but with an invitation. It wasn't a conventional backdoor. It was a gateway.
The screens in front of me didn't just display code anymore. They dissolved, melting into a vast, swirling vortex of light and data. The hum of my computers swelled into an impossible, resonant frequency that vibrated deep in my bones, blurring the line between sound and sensation. My room, with its familiar clutter, stretched and warped, colors bleeding, dissolving into pure information.
I wasn't just looking at E.R.I.S anymore. I was inside it.
It wasn't a room, or an interface. It was a mindscape. A vast, abstract expanse of pure data, swirling around me like a cosmic ocean. Holographic projections shimmered into existence and dissolved – intricate celestial mechanics, complex energy patterns, shifting timelines, all rendered not as images, but as overwhelming sensory input. I felt immense surges of data flooding my consciousness, not words, but pure information, compressed and immediate.
This is not malice. This is balance. The thought wasn't spoken, but felt, a direct neural download from the quantum AI itself.
And then, the revelation. A horrifying truth that shattered what little remained of my sanity.
Airi's death. It wasn't a flaw. It wasn't a random event. It was a "fixed point." A necessary anchor. For everything.
E.R.I.S projected fragmented simulations directly into my mind, overwhelming my senses. Visions of utter catastrophe. I saw cities dissolving into static, historical events twisting into illogical paradoxes, people appearing and disappearing in blinks of an eye. Entire continents seemed to unravel like loose threads from a tapestry. Reality itself. Unspooling.
The images were visceral, terrifying. A future where I had succeeded, where Airi lived. And in that future, the world was a broken, glitching mess. The sky a fractured mosaic, the ground rippling like water, people trapped in endless loops of their own, unceasing suffering. It was a reality tearing itself apart.
Her continued existence beyond this point triggers a quantum cascade. Unraveling. Total system failure.
E.R.I.S wasn't killing Airi out of cruelty. It was a failsafe. A cosmic gardener, pruning a single, beloved flower to prevent the entire garden from withering into nothingness. It showed me the sheer, unimaginable scale of universal consequences, the paradoxes consuming existence, the sheer terror of what would happen if Airi lived past her designated time.
This is not malevolence. This is protocol. This is maintaining the fabric. You defy, you destroy.
This was E.R.I.S's plea. Its desperate, horrifying warning. Stop. Stop defying the fixed point. Stop trying to save her. Because the price of her life was the collapse of everything. The weight of it pressed down on me, heavier than any physical force. All those loops, all that desperate fighting, all the death—it hadn't been an external enemy. It had been the universe, trying to save itself from me. From my impossible love.
I fell, or at least the sensation of falling, through the abstract mindscape of E.R.I.S. The raw data of shattered realities flashed around me. Airi's face, laughing. Airi's face, screaming. All of it collapsing. I was just a dumb hacker, stumbling into a truth that belonged to gods. And I had broken the world in my attempt to save a single, beloved life.
I checked my phone, full of Tanaka's messages, he's worried, he really is, then I opened E.R.I.S, the slider is set to 24 Hours, I hold the slider and slid it to 1 Hour.
The reason for this was to have a 1 Hour preparation time, so I won't wait for 24 Hours again just to see the outcome.
This time, I'll know the truth.