The world didn’t explode when my hand touched the Sentinel’s golden visor; it inverted.
Inside the connection, there was no black static or red pixels. There was only a cold, clinical white space that felt like a surgical theater. My mind, fueled by the white-hot shard of the "Original Source," slammed into the Sentinel’s consciousness like a comet.
I expected a wall of ice. I expected a firewall of Thorne’s logic.
Instead, I fell into a memory that wasn't mine.
I saw a lab, decades younger than the one I knew. I saw my father, Thomas, looking younger, his hair still dark, leaning over a cradle similar to the one I was born in. But the boy inside wasn't me. He had my eyes, my jawline, but he was older—perhaps nineteen.
"Subject 1," my father’s voice whispered in the memory. "The physi
