Chapter 242: Persistence Error
I’ve been hurt before. Cut open. Lacerations from claws. Bruises from punches. Broken ribs and bones and even a crash landing on Mars.
But this? This was a different kind of agony.
It wasn’t the injection itself. That came early. Clean. Efficient. A needle thin as hair slid into the crook of my neck, and whatever they pumped in felt less like fluid and more like frostbite—liquid ice, threading through arteries, crawling up my spine like it wanted to colonize my brain. My jaw locked halfway through a breath. My fingers twitched. My lungs forgot how to pull in air for a full three seconds.
And then the machine hummed to life.
What followed wasn’t pain the way I’d ever known it. It was a violation.
The table I was strapped to felt welded into the floor, cold steel digging into my shoulder blades. Restraints clamped over my forearms, ankles, and neck—mechanical, hissing slightly every time they adjusted their grip. Not to stop movement. To measure it.
Above me hung a rail-mounted apparatus—a spider’s nest of rotating instruments and surgical arms, each tipped with scanners, prods, needles, or blades too small to catch the light. They moved with a kind of clinical precision that made me sick to watch. Smooth, uninterrupted, patient. Like they’d done this a thousand times and never once needed to rush.
And at the center of it all: the extraction rig.
It looked like an old MRI gutted and repurposed by someone who’d grown up dissecting minds instead of imaging them. It wasn’t sleek—it was brutalist. Layers of bolted panels, exposed wiring, humming coolant tubes that snaked down into the floor. A cylindrical collar was locked tight around the top half of my skull, humming with faint violet pulses. I could feel it mapping me—neurons, synapses, job registry cores, whatever they could latch onto.
Each pulse it sent into my head came with a fresh, disorienting surge. Not pain, exactly. Worse.
Disassembly.