I woke up screaming.
Not in the chair. Not in quantum space. On cold concrete in a room I did not recognize. Subject Seven was beside me, also gasping. Both of us ejected from the network violently.
"What happened?" I managed between ragged breaths.
"He deployed both patterns simultaneously." Subject Seven clutched his head. "Modified and natural. Overlapping. Conflicting. Creating quantum interference that crashed the entire network. Three thousand subjects received contradictory instructions. Their consciousness tried to integrate two incompatible protocols at once."
"Are they—"
"Alive. Barely. Fragmenting. Dissolving. Screaming across seventeen facilities." Subject Seven pulled himself upright. "The boy made a mistake. His first real miscalculation. He thought he could merge contro
