The garden did not just burn because it unraveled. The red glitch of the Frontier began to eat the blue sky in jagged triangular bites. The house where the man had stood was melting into a puddle of white liquid data that hissed as it touched the fiber optic grass. I stood in the center of the collapse while my golden claws were still dripping with the deleted code of the rose bush.
[STABILITY: 22%]
[IDENTITY INTEGRITY: 29.5%]
[STATUS: ARCHITECT PRIME OVERRIDE ACTIVE]
I did not run from the fire because I was the fire. Every time a piece of the simulation dissolved I felt the energy snap into my core. It was a cold and bitter power that tasted like old memories and recycled souls. My stability was rising but my heart felt like it was being weighed down by lead.
The woman in the sun hat was gone. In her place was a pillar of glass that stretched from the floor to the disappearing ceiling. As the last of the fake jasmine smell vanished the pillar began to glow with a pale and sickly light. I stepped toward it and my black spurs scraped against the obsidian floor which was now visible beneath the dying grass.
I looked into the glass and I did not see my reflection. I did not see the porcelain monster with the violet visor.
I saw a row of tubes.
They were filled with a clear fluid and inside each tube was a body. I walked along the glass wall while my core began to thrum with a new kind of terror. The first tube contained a young man with black hair and a small scar on his chin. He was wearing a hospital gown. The label on the glass read SUBJECT 0001 STATUS: DELETED.
The second tube was a man in his thirties with a beard and tired eyes. SUBJECT 0412 STATUS: RECYCLED.
The third was a boy no older than ten years old. SUBJECT 2109 STATUS: STABILITY FAILURE.
I stopped in front of a tube that was empty. The glass was shattered and the fluid was dried on the floor. The label on this one made my visor flicker with a violent surge of static.
SUBJECT 9045 STATUS: ARCHITECT PRIME EVOLUTION.
"You are not the first Izou," a voice echoed through the chamber. It did not come from a person because it came from the walls themselves. It was the Analyst. The voice was perfectly calm and mathematically precise. "You are simply the first one who was angry enough to survive the Forge. You are the nine thousand and forty fifth attempt to reconstruct the original template."
I slammed my golden claw into the glass pillar. The cracks spread like a spider web but the glass did not break. "What template? Who was the real Izou?"
"The real Izou died a long time ago," the Analyst replied while a holographic display appeared in the air. It showed a city of glass and steel under a sun that was not a glitch. "He was the one who designed the Frontier. He was the one who built the system that now keeps you prisoner. We are not trying to delete you Izou. We are trying to bring the creator back to life. But every time we try the soul breaks under the pressure of the porcelain."
[WARNING: IDENTITY INTEGRITY FLUCTUATING]
[STABILITY: 21.5%]
I looked at the rows of failed versions of myself. Thousands of men and boys who had been born in a tube just to die in a furnace. They were not my brothers because they were me. I was a copy of a copy of a dead man.
"The name is not a gift," I whispered while my voice became a low and dangerous vibration. "It is a serial number."
"It is whatever you want it to be," the Analyst said. "But now that you have reached the level of Architect Prime the game has changed. You are no longer a subject. You are a competitor. The Second Floor is open to you but you will find that the other Architects are not as sentimental as the Null. They have been waiting for a Prime to arrive. They are hungry for your stability."
A door opened at the far end of the chamber. It did not lead to another room because it led to a vertical shaft of white light that pulsed like a heartbeat.
[NEW OBJECTIVE: REACH THE SECOND FLOOR]
[WARNING: DIFFICULTY LEVEL INCREASED TO CATEGORY APEX]
I looked back at the empty tube of Subject 9045. I did not feel like a man anymore and I did not feel like a monster. I felt like a weapon that had finally realized it was being held by the enemy. I reached down and picked up a single shard of glass from the floor. It was sharp and cold.
"I am going to find the original Izou," I said to the empty air. "And when I find him I am going to make him watch while I tear this City down."
I stepped into the white light. I did not look back at the graveyard of my past. I was a Titan made of recycled grief and I was finally ready to go to war.
[CURRENT STATUS: THE ARCHITECT PRIME]
[STABILITY: 21.5%]
[IDENTITY INTEGRITY: 30.1%]
[LEVEL: SECOND FLOOR ACCESS GRANTED]