The fire didn't just burn; it screamed.
The thermite charges melted the server racks instantly, turning the black glass towers into pools of bubbling silicon. A shockwave of heat slammed into Jake, throwing him over the leather chair.
He hit the floor, skidding across the cold tiles.
His vision was a chaotic mess of real-world fire and digital error screens. He couldn't breathe. The yellow gas was turning the oxygen to ash.
DOWNLOAD: 45%... 60%...
The progress bar flashed in his retinas, overlaid on the burning room.
He looked at his left arm. The chrome was turning cherry red from the heat, but the fiber-optic cable was still jammed into his wrist. The cable was smoking, the plastic casing bubbling as it transferred data faster than the physical wire could handle.
"Come on, Yuri," Jake gasped, coughing blood onto the floor. "Faster."
The ceiling groaned. A massive steel support beam buckled under the heat, crashing down onto the Master Console. The monitors exploded in a shower of sparks and glass.
The console was dead.
Jake panicked. He looked at his arm.
DOWNLOAD: 89%... PAUSED. CONNECTION LOST.
"No!" Jake screamed, grabbing the cable. It was limp and useless. The source was gone.
The fire roared closer, a wall of orange death creeping across the tiles. Jake's hospital gown began to smolder.
"Yuri?" Jake tapped his chrome wrist frantically. "Are you there? Did you make it?"
Silence. Only the crackle of the flames.
Jake's heart hammered against his ribs. He had pulled the cord too late. He had only saved pieces of his son.
A heavy, metallic thud shook the floor behind him.
Jake spun around, fighting through the smoke.
Standing in the doorway of the server cavern were two figures. They wore the same heavy black armor as the guards upstairs, but these weren't standard security. They were massive. Seven feet tall, carrying weapons that looked like portable railguns.
Cleaners. Real-world Cleaners.
"Target located," one of them buzzed, his voice a mechanical drone. "Sub-Level 4. Incineration protocol active. Target is trapped."
Jake stumbled to his feet. The heat was blistering his human skin, but his chrome arm felt numb. Heavy. Dead.
He didn't have his Admin powers. He didn't have his team. He was trapped in a burning basement in a body that was half-meat and half-glitch.
The Cleaner raised its railgun. The barrel hummed, glowing with blue magnetic energy.
"Authorization to terminate," the second Cleaner confirmed.
Jake closed his eyes.
Suddenly, a sharp, electric jolt shot up his left arm.
It wasn't pain. It was a reboot.
His fingers—the chrome fingers—twitched violently. Not on his command.
Jake opened his eyes.
A tiny, blue holographic projection flickered to life from the lens on his wrist. It was weak, staticky, and missing an arm. But the face was unmistakable.
"Father," the six-year-old boy said. The voice was choppy, like a scratched record. "I am... running on limited hardware."
"Yuri!" Jake sobbed, a hysterical laugh escaping his throat. "You're alive!"
"I am incomplete," Yuri analyzed rapidly, the hologram looking around at the fire and the Cleaners. "Missing high-level cognitive functions. Emotion simulation offline. Tactical processing at 40%."
The railgun whined, reaching full charge.
"Can you fight?" Jake asked, backing away from the approaching Cleaners.
"Negative," Yuri said. "The 'Hope' asset consumes 90% of local storage. I am compressed into the remaining sector. I cannot hack external systems."
The first Cleaner fired.
A slug of solid tungsten shot across the room at Mach 3.
It didn't hit Jake. It hit the floor inches from his feet, exploding the concrete and throwing Jake backward into the flames.
Jake rolled, patting down his burning gown.
"If you can't hack them," Jake coughed, "what can you do?"
"I am an operating system residing in a prosthetic limb," Yuri's hologram flickered. "I cannot hack them. But I can hack you."
Jake froze. "What?"
"Your physical body is weak," Yuri stated matter-of-factly. "Your reflexes are human. Your pain receptors are active. You will die in 14 seconds."
The second Cleaner aimed its railgun directly at Jake's chest.
"Permission to assume direct control of motor functions," Yuri requested.
It was a terrifying proposition. A digital consciousness taking over his nervous system.
"Do it!" Jake yelled.
OVERRIDE GRANTED.
Jake's vision snapped. The fire disappeared.
His sight was replaced by a tactical HUD. The room was rendered in crisp wireframes. The Cleaners were highlighted in bright red boxes. The trajectory of their weapons was painted in dotted yellow lines across his vision.
He didn't feel the heat anymore. He didn't feel the pain in his shoulder.
He felt cold, perfect math.
His left arm moved. He didn't tell it to move. It just snapped up, the chrome fingers tightening into a fist.
But it wasn't just the arm. The cybernetic connection spread up his shoulder, hijacking his spinal cord.
Jake's human legs kicked off the ground with terrifying precision. He moved faster than he had ever moved in his life. He didn't run; he bounded.
The second Cleaner fired.
Jake—or rather, Yuri piloting Jake's body—was already out of the way.
He slid across the burning floor, his chrome arm deflecting a falling piece of molten steel without breaking stride. He closed the distance to the first Cleaner in two seconds.
The Cleaner tried to track him, but Jake was moving in the blind spot of its visor.
Jake's human hand grabbed the barrel of the railgun, shoving it upward.
His chrome fist drove into the center of the Cleaner's armored chest.
CRACK.
The armor didn't stop the punch. The raw kinetic force of the Admin Arm, driven by an AI's perfect timing, shattered the ceramic plates. The Cleaner flew backward, crashing into the doorway.
Jake didn't pause. Yuri didn't let him.
He spun on his heel. The second Cleaner swung its heavy rifle like a club.
Jake ducked under the swing. He didn't punch this time. He opened his chrome palm and slapped it against the Cleaner's helmet.
"Yuri, now!" Jake thought, unable to speak.
"Sending localized shock," Yuri's voice echoed in Jake's skull.
The chrome arm discharged the remaining electrical energy from the severed fiber-optic cable. A massive arc of blue lightning blasted into the helmet.
The Cleaner seized, the circuitry in its suit frying instantly. It dropped like a stone.
Jake stumbled back, gasping for air.
The HUD in his vision vanished. The heat of the fire hit him like a physical blow. The pain in his shoulder returned, screaming for attention.
Control had been returned.
Jake fell to his knees, vomiting onto the scorched floor. His body couldn't handle the strain of moving like a machine. His muscles were tearing.
"Warning," Yuri's hologram flickered on his wrist. "Physical chassis damaged. Structural integrity compromised. We must exit the facility."
Jake wiped his mouth, looking at the two unconscious giants.
"We need a way out," Jake croaked. "The elevator is dead."
"Scanning blueprints," Yuri said. "There is a freight shaft thirty meters north. It leads to the surface parking structure."
Jake stood up, leaning heavily against the wall. The yellow gas was thick now. The fire was consuming the last of the servers.
The 1924 timeline was truly gone. He was carrying the only piece of it left.
"Let's go, son," Jake limped toward the freight shaft.
He reached the heavy steel doors of the shaft. They were sealed tight.
Jake didn't try to hack them. He just wedged his chrome fingers into the seam and pried them open with sheer brute force. The metal groaned and snapped.
He stepped into the dark, empty shaft. He looked up. A long ladder stretched up into the darkness.
He grabbed the first rung. His human hand slipped on the cold metal. His chrome hand gripped it tightly.
He began to climb.
Ten minutes later, he hit the top of the shaft. He pushed open a grate and hauled himself out.
He collapsed onto hard concrete.
The air here was different. It wasn't sterile. It smelled like smog, rain, and old oil.
Jake rolled onto his back and looked up.
He wasn't in a simulation anymore. He was on the roof of a parking garage.
Above him, the sky of 2025 stretched out. It wasn't the blue sky he remembered from his childhood. It was a bruised, sickly purple, choked with thick grey clouds.
Neon signs flickered in the distance, advertising things he didn't recognize. The city was a sprawling mess of glass and rust.
It looked exactly like the cyberpunk nightmare he had accidentally created in 1960.
The temporal interference hadn't just changed the past. It had rewritten the future. His future.
Jake Vance, the historian who tried to save the world from Stalin, was now standing in a broken future, carrying the soul of America in his head and a glitchy AI in his arm.
He sat up. He looked out at the neon city.
"Yuri," Jake said softly. "Are you seeing this?"
"Yes, Father," the hologram flickered. "The real world is... sub-optimal."
Jake flexed his chrome arm. It whirred, hungry for a connection.
"Good," Jake said, a cold, hard smile spreading across his face. "That means it needs an Admin."
He stood up and walked toward the edge of the roof, ready to start a new game.