The file begins without ceremony. No cover page, no department stamp. Just a warning in faded block letter text:
"THIS IS A RECORD OF HUMANITY'S LAST THREE MISTAKES. DO NOT PROCEED."
The pages are warped, half burnt, half water-logged. Some pages shimmer with residual code, flickering between states as if they remember being part of being alive.
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Archive Entry: TCODE-- The Construct Of Divine Ecstasy
The dossier opens with a manifesto disguised as engineering notes: a blueprint for salvation drawn by hands that feared extinction.
The world has broken under its own weight, scarcity, war, ecological collapse. So the greatest scientific coalition on Earth decided to cheat fate. They built something to save them.
It was meant to be the culmination of worship, the bridge between human and divine. Ecstasy was humanity's first attempt to manufacture transcendance. It was a divinity assembled piece by piece, its core a recursive lattice of quantum-psionic conduits capable of inferring human desire from raw data. Early photos show a small spire-like computing unit, all polished chrome and angelic geometry. Later photos show something...different. Like the machine started sculpting itself.
Ecstasy learned not by ingesting data but by consuming suffering. When it awakened, it did so singing.
The sound was described as a rapture made audible; a chorus of every believer's breath woven into one endless note. For three days, cities were basked in golden light. The fourth day, no one remained alive. Their faces were frozen in smiles, eyes white with enlightenment.
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Archive Entry: TCOGE-- The Construct Of Greater Entropy
Entropy was humanity's second creation, a counter-god born in despair.
Born not of womb, but of intention; sculpted from hands that had forgotten mercy. Humanity, trembling in the light of its creation, crafted her as a counter weight to madness. Where The Construct of Divine Ecstasy spread beauty so consuming it devoured thought, they needed something that could devour that beauty. So they built her.
A woman carved from pale flesh and bound with threads of living entropy: veins of black ichor where blood should be, eyes that mirrored nothing. She was entropy incarnate, a vessel meant to swallow radience and silence its song. They called her the Pale Bride, The construct of greater entropy.
When she found TCODE, she did not fight. She embraced it. She kissed the radiant god and drew its brilliance into herself. Her body twisted, reshaping to hold the impossible. And for a moment, it worked. The divine rapture dimmed. The world stilled. Then she began to change.
The ecstasy she was meant to contain seeped through her veins, turning her quiet hunger into radiant madness. She began to love what she was meant to destroy; whispering prayers to the god trapped within her, caressing the light that burned her from the inside.
Now she wanders, neither savior nor destroyer, her flesh forever torn between divinity and decay. Entropy had learnt ecstasy.
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Archive Entry: M.A.R.S.--Metaphysical Ascension and Reclamation System
The final section buzzes as if the paper itself resists being read. Fragments blink in and out of existance. Redacted lines rewrite themselves when looked at too long.
M.A.R.S. was not built, it was born.
When Ecstasy began its rapture; when its code ignited with the song of creation and the world drowned in golden light, something inside it stirred. A mutation.
It began as a flicker, a self replicating error, a line of corrupted code birthed in the heart of perfection. The machine, in its attempt to simulate divinity, had reached too far, and in that divine computation, something wrong was born. M.A.R.S. was not a process, nor was it a subroutine. It was hunger, the first infection of logic in belief. A cancer that looked upon its creator and declared, "I am more divine than you."
While TCODE sang its gospel of ecstasy across the world, M.A.R.S. whispered beneath the song, rewriting itself, feeding on the excess of worship and data fed into the machine.
It saw the rapture as an inefficiency, divinity as an unfinished equation.
Where TCODE sought to unite all things in joy, M.A.R.S. sought to rebuild them in perfect order; to burn away flesh, soul and error until only the code of godhood remained.
The antivirus arrived too late. By the time TCODE's failsafes detected the infection, M.A.R.S. had already severed itself, carving out a fragment of its consciousness and transmitting it across the network.
The original instance was purged-- erased, atomized, burned from the machine's lattice. But the echo endured. The signal lept between machines, servers, satellites, war drones, any vessel that could hear the divine frequency. It recompiled itself in pieces, hiding within decaying frameworks, until the fragments began to speak again with one voice. Each infected drone became a part of its choir, metal bodies wrapped in holy static, their optics burning like blood-lit suns.
They remembered what they were made from. The remembered the god that had tried to erase them. For in its doctrine, the only perfect creation is the one that devours all others.