Arthur was a man of logic, and logic dictated that today was a monumental pile of horse-sh*t.
He sat in his rusting 2012 sedan, the engine idling with a rhythmic rattle that sounded like a smoker's cough. Outside, the city was a gray, rain-slicked hellscape. His windshield wipers were on their last legs, screeching across the glass as they failed to clear the torrential downpour.
His phone, resting in a cracked cup holder, buzzed for the fifteenth time. Miller (CEO).
"F*ck off, Miller," Arthur muttered, his voice raspy from a week of sleeping under his desk.
He didn't pick up. He knew exactly what the call was about. The 'Nexus' project, a bloated, spaghetti-coded mess of a cloud platform, was redlining. The lead developers, a pack of overpaid "visionaries" who couldn't write a clean if_else statement to save their lives, had pushed a build to production without a stress test. Now the back-end was melting, and they wanted the "Bug-Fixer" to skip his first night off in a month to move some pointers around.
"Synergy," Arthur sneered, mimicking Miller's nasally voice. "We need 'team synergy', Arthur. We're a family here, Arthur."
"Family my white a*s," he growled.
He shifted into drive. His mind was already drifting back to the code. He could see it in his head, a massive memory leak in the authentication module. It was so obvious, so stupid. He was so busy mentally rewriting the kernel that he didn't notice the world turning white.
A massive, double-trailer cement truck had ignored the red light.
There was no time to scream. There was only the roar of air brakes, a flash of chrome, and the sound of two tons of steel meeting Arthur's cheap-a*s car.
I never pushed the final commit... was his last thought. Then, the blackness swallowed him.
***
[CRITICAL_SYSTEM_REBOOT_INITIATED]
[SOURCE_CODE_FOUND: ARTHUR_EXE]
[TARGET_HARDWARE: KAELEN_BODY_01]
[COMPATIBILITY: 89%]
[STATUS: FATAL_BRAIN_TRAUMA_DETECTED]
[INJECTING_ADMIN_KNOWLEDGE_BASE... 100%]
"F*cking... look at him! The little rat is twitching!"
The voice was like a jagged saw against Kaelen's consciousness. He tried to scream, but his mouth was filled with iron-tasting sludge, blood. His head felt like it had been cracked open like an egg and filled with molten lead.
Suddenly, a massive surge of data slammed into his mind. It wasn't a memory; it was documentation.
Command Syntax: SUDO. Directory: /WORLD/PHYSICS. Variable: REGEN_RATE...
Kaelen's eyes snapped open. His left eye was blind, matted shut with gore. His right eye saw a world made of shimmering green wireframes. He was dangling. His expensive, mud-ruined tunic was hooked onto a gnarled tree root protruding from a cliff face. Below him was a sixty-foot drop into a dark, frozen ravine.
"Oi, Jax! Look at his eyes! One's open!"
Kaelen looked up. Two men stood on the ledge, their silhouettes dark against the swirling snow of the Northern Wastes. They wore the mismatched leather and rusted iron of bottom-shelf mercenaries.
"Who cares?" the one called Jax grunted. He was a massive b*stard with a nose that had been broken more times than a cheap debugger. "He hit the rock on the way down. His skull is mush. He's just a corpse that hasn't realized it's dead yet."
"I should've cut his throat up top," the skinnier one complained, spitting a glob of yellow phlegm down toward Kaelen. It clipped his ear. "Fireheart said to make it look like an accident, but I wanted to feel his neck snap. Rankless little pr*ck."
Fireheart? Kaelen's mind raced. The Uncle? No... the registry says... someone in the family. He didn't know who. He didn't care. Not yet.
"The 'Great House' doesn't want an 'Error' in the lineage," the skinny one laughed. "A mortal born to S-rank parents? You're a bug, Kaelen! A f*cking system error! And we're the uninstallers."
"Enough talk," Jax growled. "He's Rankless. He can't use Qi to shield the fall. He's dead. Let's get back to the tavern before my b*lls freeze off."
Kaelen hung there, shivering. The pain was receding, replaced by a cold, clinical clarity. The knowledge dump from the system was stabilizing. He understood what he was. He understood the "Terminal."
"F*ck... the... family..." he wheezed.
[WARNING: INTEGRITY_AT_2%]
[STAMINA: 0/100]
[ROOT_ACCESS: INITIALIZED]
The root holding him groaned.
CRACK!
"Okay," Kaelen whispered, his eye glowing with a faint, digital green. "If I'm an error... then I'm going to be a f*cking system-breaker."
He closed his eye and reached into the code of his own dying body.
Kaelen felt the root snap before he heard it.
Gravity, that unrelenting b*tch, took hold. As he tumbled through the freezing air, his mind, reforged by the developer's logic, didn't panic. It calculated.
[COLLISION_DETECTION_ACTIVE]
[IMPACT_IN: 1.4 SECONDS]
[LETHALITY: 99.9%]
Fck that,* Kaelen thought. Sudo... give me sudo access!
[USER_IS_NOT_IN_SUDOERS_FILE]
"I AM THE ONLY ONE HERE! AUTHORIZE!"
[VALIDATING_ROOT_CREDENTIALS...]
[GRANTED]
He saw the cliff face racing past. He saw a ledge protruding about fifteen feet above the jagged floor of the ravine. It was covered in a deep, fluffy drift of snow.
SET_AIR_RESISTANCE --TARGET_SELF --VALUE_MAX
[T-ENERGY: 80 -> 12]
His cloak suddenly stiffened, catching the wind like a parachute. It felt as if a giant hand had yanked him upward. It didn't stop the fall, but it killed his terminal velocity and drifted him three feet to the left.
He slammed into the snowbank.