He sat at the bench, my back a map of aches that no medicine could dull. My fingers were thick, calloused, and stained with the grease of a thousand failed engines. He looked at the Chip. It was a tiny, mocking shard of glass resting in the center of my palm—a palm that had held a wife, buried a son, and gripped a rifle until the wood splintered.
He had squeezed the entire screaming history of my kind into this one vile trifle. It was a heavy thing for being so light. It felt like holding a lung that was still trying to breathe.
He didn't reach for a "device." I reached for the Rig. It was a brutal piece of ironwork I'd welded myself—cold, jagged, and unforgiving. It didn't belong in a laboratory; it belonged in a forge. It was a harness for the mind, a steel sleeve that clamped onto my forearm with a bite that drew blood. He strapped the leather tight, pulling the buckle until the skin turned white.
Pain is the only thing that doesn't lie.
"To be, or to be the memory of being," He growled, the nonsense rattling in my chest like a loose bolt. He wasn't a poet. He was a wretched steward of a bankrupt estate.
The fear wasn't that I would fail. The fear was that I would succeed and leave this power to a man of vaulting ambition ,some coward who would use this Chip to play god without ever having bled for the dirt. He had coded the world, but he had left out the mercy. There was no room for mercy in the memory banks. There was only the cold, hard calculus of what we were.
My breath hitched. The air in the bunker was thin, smelling of scorched copper and my own unwashed skin. He was a man of bone and bile, holding the digital keys to a kingdom of ghosts.
I picked up the Chip. My hand didn't tremble. A man's hand shouldn't tremble when he's finishing a job. He jammed the sliver into the Rig's port.
The connection wasn't a hum. It was a violent, electric malice. It felt like a hot needle driven through the eye and into the marrow. I bit my tongue until He tasted the copper of my own life, my muscles locking as the data—the billion-soul deluge & began to pour through me.
I wasn't a savior. I was a bridge made of meat and grit, and He could feel myself beginning to crack.He Sat down thinking about it all night...then came a struck of idea , "what if He just hid it?''he asked himself
"As if it had not existed indeed".He searched around for a place that wouldn't be found out,
From graveyards to basement to garden all spot wouldn't work out just as fine as one spot
That is... the book yes Forsooth he dug out some pages to hid it in his holy book