The wind of 2025 didn't feel like lines of code. It felt like razors.
Jake shivered violently. He stood on the edge of the parking garage roof, looking out over the altered skyline of his home timeline. The purple, smog-choked clouds hung heavy over a city of towering black glass and rusted steel.
He was barefoot. His thin hospital gown whipped around his bruised legs.
Below him, the Orion Command facility was a hornet's nest. Sirens wailed, cutting through the low hum of the city. Searchlights ignited in the courtyard, sweeping frantic white beams across the surrounding buildings.
"Father," Yuri's voice echoed directly inside Jake's skull. It wasn't coming from a wrist speaker anymore; it was vibrating through his jawbone.
"I hear you, Yuri," Jake muttered, his teeth chattering.
"Your core temperature is dropping," the AI warned. "Heart rate is elevated. The shrapnel wound in your shoulder is losing blood at a rate of ten milliliters per minute."
Jake looked down at his human shoulder. The hospital gown was soaked in dark red.
It hurt. It was a deep, throbbing agony that no health potion was going to magically erase. This was the real world. Meatspace. If he bled out here, there was no respawn point.
"I need clothes," Jake rasped. "And wheels."
He turned away from the ledge and scanned the roof.
It was an executive parking tier. Only three vehicles sat in the dim, flickering light of a broken fluorescent tube. They didn't look like the cars of the 2025 he remembered. They were brutalist, armored wedges, hovering an inch off the concrete on magnetic pads.
The temporal interference had hyper-accelerated corporate technology.
A low, mechanical whine pierced the air behind him.
Jake spun around.
Rising over the ledge of the roof was a security drone. It was the size of a motorcycle, painted matte black, with a single, glowing red optic sensor mounted on a gimbal. Twin riot-control barrels tracked directly to Jake's chest.
"Unidentified subject," the drone broadcasted. Its voice was a synthesized bark. "Surrender for immediate biological processing."
Jake raised his left arm. The chrome gleamed in the red light of the drone.
He instinctively tried to drag a deletion box over the machine. Nothing happened. The air remained empty.
"Admin privileges do not apply to physical matter," Yuri reminded him quickly.
"I know," Jake gritted his teeth. "But it has a brain, right?"
"It operates on a local wireless subnet," Yuri analyzed. "Highly encrypted."
"Crack it."
"I am fragmented, Father. My processing power is tied to maintaining the 'Hope' asset in your cortex. I cannot brute-force a modern military firewall."
The drone's barrels spun up with a lethal hum.
"Then we don't pick the lock," Jake said, lunging forward. "We break the door."
Jake didn't run away. He sprinted directly at the hovering machine.
The drone fired.
Two heavy rubber riot-slugs slammed into Jake's chest. The impact lifted him off his bare feet. He hit the concrete hard, the wind completely knocked out of his lungs. Ribs cracked. Real ribs.
He tasted copper. He gasped, rolling onto his side.
The drone floated closer, looming over him like a mechanical vulture.
"Subject incapacitated," the drone beeped. "Deploying restraint cuffs."
A metal claw extended from the drone's underbelly, reaching for Jake's neck.
Jake didn't try to get up. He just raised his left hand and caught the metal claw.
The drone's engine whined, trying to pull back, but the chrome arm was an immovable anchor. Jake squeezed. The claw crushed into a useless ball of scrap metal.
"Yuri," Jake wheezed. "Flood it."
Jake drove his chrome fingers directly into the drone's primary sensor housing. He didn't write code. He just opened the floodgates of his Admin arm, dumping raw, unformatted junk data from the destroyed 1924 server straight into the drone's motherboard.
The machine shrieked.
Its red optic flashed a blinding, panicked white. Smoke poured from its vents. The rotors seized.
With a dying spark, the drone crashed onto the concrete, completely bricked.
Jake let go of the smoking chassis. He rolled onto his back, clutching his bruised chest. Every breath was a knife.
"Target neutralized," Yuri noted, his voice flat. "But your physical chassis is taking critical damage."
"I'm fine," Jake lied, forcing himself to stand. His bare feet left bloody prints on the cold concrete.
He limped toward the nearest armored car. It was sleek, gunmetal grey, and completely windowless.
Jake didn't bother looking for a handle. He pulled his chrome fist back and punched the reinforced door.
The metal buckled inward. The locking mechanism shattered with a loud crack. Jake ripped the door open.
The interior smelled like synthetic leather and ozone. On the passenger seat sat a heavy, dark trench coat and a pair of combat boots.
Jake felt a lump in his throat. The coat was black, broad-shouldered, and practical. It looked exactly like the one Taranov used to wear.
He didn't have time to grieve. The sirens below were growing louder. Heavy footsteps echoed in the concrete stairwell leading up to the roof.
Jake stripped off the bloody hospital gown. He pulled the trench coat on. It was heavy, insulating, and immediately stopped his shivering. He shoved his bleeding feet into the boots. They were a size too big, but they worked.
He slid into the driver's seat.
The dashboard was a solid pane of black glass. No steering wheel. No ignition. Just a glowing biometric handprint scanner.
"Yuri, interface," Jake slammed his chrome hand onto the scanner.
Blue light spilled from his metal fingertips, webbing across the glass dashboard.
"Bypassing ignition protocols," Yuri said. "Father, this vehicle's architecture is strange. It is a hybrid of internal combustion and magnetic levitation. The code is... messy."
"Just turn it on."
The car roared to life. A deep, guttural growl vibrated through the chassis. The black glass windshield turned transparent, projecting a neon-blue HUD over the view of the city.
The stairwell door exploded outward.
Five Orion pursuit guards rushed onto the roof. They were sleek, wearing light armor and carrying compact submachine guns. They spotted the idling car immediately.
"Target is in the vehicle!" the lead guard shouted.
They opened fire.
A hail of bullets hammered the side of the car. The armored chassis absorbed the hits, but the kinetic force rocked the vehicle.
Jake grabbed the two control sticks that popped out of the console.
"Hold on, Yuri," Jake growled.
He jammed the sticks forward.
The magnetic pads whined. The car shot backward, slamming into the concrete wall of the garage.
"Reverse is the other way, Father," Yuri stated unhelpfully.
"I'm adapting!" Jake snapped.
He yanked the sticks. The car spun in a violent circle, its heavy rear bumper clipping two of the guards and sending them tumbling across the roof.
The remaining three guards scattered, aiming for the car's magnetic lift pads.
"Warning. Left thruster taking damage," Yuri reported.
Jake slammed the accelerator forward. The car launched toward the down-ramp, but a heavy security barricade was already rising from the floor, blocking the exit.
Behind the barricade, two more drones were ascending.
"We are boxed in," Yuri said.
Jake looked at the barricade. He looked at the edge of the roof, facing the dark, smoggy abyss of the city streets ten stories below.
"Yuri," Jake said, his hands tight on the controls. "Calculate the trajectory to the roof of that automated cargo barge."
Jake pointed to a massive, flat-topped hover-barge slowly moving through the neon-lit traffic lane a block away. It was fifty feet out and three stories down.
"Survival probability of that jump is 12.4%," Yuri calculated instantly. "The suspension is not rated for a vertical drop of that magnitude."
"I've survived worse odds today," Jake said.
The Orion guards reloaded. The barricade locked into place.
Jake didn't hit the brakes. He hit the mag-boost.
The heavy armored car rocketed toward the edge of the roof.
"Brace for impact," Jake yelled, though there was no one else in the car.
The vehicle smashed through the low concrete retaining wall.
For a terrifying, silent moment, they were airborne. The neon lights of the altered 2025 city blurred into streaks of rain and smog. Jake felt the stomach-dropping pull of real gravity. He saw the cargo barge below, covered in shipping containers, moving slowly through the aerial traffic.
They were falling fast. Too fast.
"Routing power to ventral magnets!" Yuri yelled in his mind.
The car slammed into the metal roof of a shipping container.
The impact was deafening. The windshield shattered into a million safety-glass cubes. The airbags detonated, punching Jake in the face and pinning him to the seat.
The car skidded across the wet metal of the barge, tearing a deep gouge into the roof before finally slamming into another container and grinding to a halt.
Steam hissed from the crumpled hood.
Jake hung against the seatbelt. His ears were ringing. Blood trickled down his forehead, stinging his eyes.
He pushed the deflated airbag away and kicked his door open.
He stumbled out onto the moving barge. The wind howled around him, smelling of acid rain and exhaust.
He looked back.
High above, the Orion Command parking garage grew smaller as the barge carried him away into the sprawling neon labyrinth of the city. Searchlights swept the empty air where he had just been.
He had escaped.
Jake pulled the trench coat tighter around his shivering shoulders. He looked down at his left arm. The chrome was scratched, but the blue light pulsed steadily in the dark.
"We made it, Yuri," Jake whispered into the wind.
"We did, Father," the AI replied. "But we are now fugitives in a timeline that wants to erase us. What is our primary objective?"
Jake looked at the towering corporate monoliths piercing the smog. He felt the compressed soul of a dead world burning in his mind.
"We find a terminal," Jake said, his eyes hardening into a cold, predatory stare. "We plug in. And we tear this timeline down."