The schematic on the screen was a beautiful, terrible thing. A vibrant network of light and logic, my life's work, now infected with a digital plague. The red and amber alerts pulsed in a steady, rhythmic beat, like a failing heart on a monitor. The silence in the room was no longer one of mere shock; it was the profound, airless silence of a tomb.
"This is not a bug," I said, my voice cutting through the stillness. "Bugs are incidental, random flaws. This is a foundational wound. A lobotomy."
I gestured to the flashing sector labeled "Core Integrity Module."
"That module contained over two million lines of self-correcting code. It was Prometheus's immune system. Its sole purpose was to validate every byte of data against historical models, to check for corruption, and to quarantine ano
