The system waited. Every fragment, every pulse of light and every line of code was suspended in a state that should not have been possible; like a universe just paused between one heartbeat and the next.
At the center of it all stood Lorenzo, no longer as a man trapped inside a machine or as a subject being rewritten. But as something the system could not longer categorize and account for.
He could feel the structure and the architecture beneath everything, the invisible framework that held the system together. It was no longer distant or hidden behind layers of control.
It was open to him. Waiting. And for the first time since all of this began, Lorenzo understood what Sofia had meant.
He wasn’t inside the system.
He was at its center.
That means everything, the every command, every
