Sebastian stood in the frozen cockpit. He looked at the perfectly still, terrified face of Gwen sitting in the pilot's chair. He felt the cold, frozen connection of Valerie's tether in his mind.
He thought about the absolute, crushing agony of holding 99% Error inside his own body. He thought about the risk of permanent deletion.
Then, a slow, incredibly dark, utterly unhinged smile carved itself onto his face beneath the cracked porcelain mask.
"You guys really don't get it, do you?" Sebastian laughed. It was a harsh, scraping sound of pure, unadulterated human spite. "You build these perfect, mathematical systems. You calculate the odds. You look at the stats and assume you know exactly how the game ends."
Sebastian raised his black-gloved hand, his fingers crackling with a sudden, violent burst of jagged green static.
