Lyra stepped through the door, everything dissolved.
Her feet vanished. Then her hands. Her breath stilled like it didn't matter anymore. The light wasn't light. It was thought. Liquid data wrapped in a memory. She wasn't walking through space. She was walking through code. Ancient, broken, alive.
The Root System.
Not a place. A consciousness.
And it had been waiting for her.
"Lyra Kairen," a voice said not from a speaker, but from the very air itself, coded directly into her nervous system. "We did not think one like you would come."
Her vision adjusted.
And then she saw it.
Thousands of glowing trees, made from pulsing neon wires and twisted strands of memory. The branches reached up into nothing. And beneath them, floating like ghosts, were people.
Or… they used to be people.
Now they were just data.
Frozen.
Remembered.
Stolen.
Lyra stepped forward. Her hands were flickering, glitching every few seconds. One heartbeat she had skin, the next she was transparent light. She was becoming part of the system.
"I don't want to destroy you," she whispered. "I want to rewrite you."
The voice laughed.
"You don't rewrite gods, child. You crash them."
The Memory Server
Outside the Core, Finn and Mina were panicking.
"She's been inside for three hours," Finn snapped. "That's too long."
Mina nodded, her fingers twitching on her holotab. "She's not just linked she's merging. If she doesn't come back now, we might lose her."
"Do we pull her out?"
"She'll die."
Finn clenched his fists.
Then Jez's voice cracked through the comms: "Guys… we've got movement. North side. You better see this."
They sprinted up to the surface dome and froze.
A massive crawler vehicle had arrived. Ten wheels. Pulse-blades on the front. Bearing the crest of the Regime. From the top hatch, a silver-haired woman stepped down.
Her eyes were covered in mirrored glass.
But her face…
Finn gasped. "No way."
Mina backed up slowly. "It's her."
"Who?"
Mina swallowed hard. "Lyra's mum."
The Past Isn't Dead
Inside the Root, Lyra was shown a corridor made of her own dreams.
On the walls, images moved animated flashbacks from her life. The day she won her first academic competition. The moment she first wore glasses. The time she cried over a broken droid. Each step forward was a wound reopened.
And at the end of the corridor, she saw her.
Her mother.
Not as she remembered her soft and warm but as a digital sculpture made of sharp light and unreadable code.
"Lyra," her mother said. "My sweet girl. I'm sorry."
Lyra choked. "How… are you…?"
"I'm part of the Root now. They needed a bridge. I volunteered. They promised they'd protect you."
Tears blurred her vision. "They lied."
Her mother nodded. "I know. And so did I."
And then the truth hit Lyra like a data-bomb:
Her mother didn't die. She uploaded herself into the Root. Willingly.
"You chose this?"
"To save you," her mother said. "You were too powerful. The Regime wanted you dissected. The Network wanted to weaponize you. I had to hide you inside the system, as a simple 'glasses girl'. Harmless. Invisible."
Lyra stumbled back.
"My whole life," she whispered. "Was fake."
"Not fake," her mother said. "Protected."
Outside the Core
Finn stood in front of the silver-haired woman.
"You're lying."
"No," the woman said quietly. "I'm her mother. I gave birth to her in Sector E-9. I watched her take her first breath. I encoded her DNA into the final Root sequence."
Jez stared in shock. "Wait. You made Lyra?"
"She's not just a girl," her mother said. "She's a hybrid construct. Half biological, half synthetic. The first living bridge. A Witted."
The word hit the air like a virus.
Mina's lips trembled. "You mean… she's not even fully human?"
The woman looked away.
"She was never meant to know."
Finn's voice turned to ice. "Well, now she does."
Lyra's Awakening
In the heart of the Root, Lyra stood alone.
Surrounded by thousands of echo-memories people the system had devoured, corrupted, saved. Their eyes followed her, silently begging for justice, for release, for something.
And then…
A door appeared.
It wasn't coded. It wasn't glowing.
It was wooden. Old. Real.
Lyra reached out and the door spoke.
Not with words.
But with feelings.
Pain. Grief. Fire. Hope.
And choice.
"Do you accept what you are?"
Lyra didn't speak.
She just put on her glasses those cracked, crooked lenses that started it all and nodded.
And then the door opened.
The Firewall Betrayal
Back at the hub, alarms blared.
"Something's wrong!" Mina shouted. "She's being intercepted!"
"What?" Jez screamed. "By who?"
Finn's hands flew across the emergency panel.
Then the monitors went black.
A single icon blinked on every screen.
A hand. Silver. Reaching.
"Firewall breach," the system intoned. "Echo is here."
And in the hallway… Norren stood, holding a gun.
Mina turned. "What the hell are you doing?!"
Norren didn't blink. "I'm sorry. I never wanted this. But they made me choose my family, or the girl."
"You sold us out?!"
He nodded.
And then he shot Jez.
Glitch God Rises
Inside the Root, Lyra felt it.
Pain. Shock. Betrayal.
"Jez!" she screamed, falling to her knees.
But her mother appeared beside her. "You can still stop this. But you have to let go of being human."
"What?"
"You want to save them? You need power. All of it. Even the part you've feared. The part that isn't Lyra."
Lyra stared at her reflection in the code-glass.
Her eyes were glitching.
One brown. One digital white.
She was becoming both.
And so… she stood.
She took a breath.
And then she walked into the storm. End Scene
Echo watched from his floating vessel.
"She's choosing the path of the Glitch God," he said calmly. "Interesting."
Behind him, thousands of drones activated.
"She's rewriting her code," the agent reported. "She's becoming the system."
Echo smiled.
"So we'll make her an offer."
"What kind?"
Echo turned, and for the first time, looked worried.
"A war."