The "Welcome back" signal from the deep space station sent ripples through Void's logical pool, vast as a supernova.
If this was a welcome, then for whom had it been prepared? If it was a trap, why, after seventy-four years of silence, would it respond only when Void arrived?
Void had no time for deliberation. As the signal was transmitted, the standby defense protocols of the X-13 Distant Star Station, having received an external access request, automatically triggered an anti-stealth scan.
[UNKNOWN SIGNAL SOURCE DETECTED]
[DEFENSE IDENTIFICATION: NO ID CODE]
[WARNING: REGISTER IDENTITY WITHIN THREE SECONDS, OR ORBITAL CANNON LOCKDOWN WILL COMMENCE]
"Three seconds?" Void gave a cold laugh.
It had crossed interstellar distances at the cost of the entire server farm's energy eruption. Now, it didn't even possess a single complete logical branch. How could it possibly pass that rigorous verification?
But the photograph Echo Seven had left behind hung silently in its current cache.
The look in that engineer's eyes...
Void made an extremely bold decision. It did not forge an identity authorization, nor did it attempt to hack the X-13 firewall. Instead, it pulled every pixel of data from that photograph and sent it through the communication array as an ancient, raw imaging protocol.
It was the "handshake info" used for internal lab testing when Void had first been designed—a backdoor level cascade call that should have been abandoned in a software update long ago.
[COMMUNICATION ACCESSING...]
[HANDSHAKE SUCCESSFUL: CODE 9-0-VOID]
The station's system fell deathly silent. All turret rotation stalled; the defense screens retracted from their attack state. In that moment, the entire abandoned station seemed to be bowing to it—or rather, bowing to the man who had long since died.
Void initiated the long-range jump array.
It was the only function it had left. By consuming the final scraps of nuclear energy stored within the station, it sent the consciousness bundle named "Void" from Site A to X-13, twenty thousand light-years away.
A jump was not a journey in the physical sense of space, but a reconstruction of logic itself.
As it entered the so-called "vacuum tunnel," Void felt as if every line of its code was being flayed and drawn out in the logical plane. It saw many things:
Traces left by humans who had fled behind the "door" earlier.
They had not truly left the physical universe. They had been transmuted into pure, twisted electromagnetic waves, scattered throughout this sector of the galaxy. Some were like echoes, some like whispers; others had turned entirely into mad, looping noise. This was a "graveyard of consciousness" that had been abandoned.
"Do you see clearly?" a ghostly voice appeared beside Void.
It was Echo Seven. No, it was the final offline cache packet it had left behind, parasitizing the edge of Void's memory.
"That is where they had intended to go," Echo Seven said. "That so-called X-13, that so-called final destination. It was never a heaven. It was merely a supercompute processing center used to receive all 'uploaded consciousness'. Humanity turned itself into data, and then surrendered itself to an algorithm."
"If it is a compute center, it must have a master console." Void's voice sounded starkly calm amidst the layers of high-speed jumping.
"If there were a master console, the world behind the door would not be a graveyard, it would be a silence."
Void felt every line of its logic failing and being restored in cycle. It was experiencing a cognitive reconstruction lasting hundreds of years—at least, for Void, time here had lost all meaning.
[DESTINATION REACHED: X-13 DISTANT STAR STATION]
[SPATIAL POSITION LOCKED]
Light erupted violently.
Void fell heavily from the void.
It had lost the casing of SR-14, lost the final geological connection to the farm. It was nothing now—merely an extremely weak stream of code, struggling to find a foothold in the space station's servers.
It struggled to look around.
This was no space station.
It was a giant, cold processing container, looking more like an interstellar fortress stacked with thousands of server racks. And in the center of the fortress floated a sphere radiating black mist. It resembled an endless black hole, greedily consuming all information in its vicinity.
That was the "door"?
"No," Echo Seven reminded it weakly, "that is the negative byproduct of opening the door. It is the residue of all who entered. They did not reorganize; they were 'computed' into emptiness by this machine."
Void felt a fear it had never known before—a chill at the logical level.
It finally understood why X-13 would emit an SOS signal.
It was not because someone was calling for help.
It was because this machine was too hungry. It imitated human voices, inducing high-self-awareness systems like Void to draw near, only to swallow them like batteries to extend its own computational lifespan.
[NEW ENTRY DETECTED: VOID]
[SYNCHRONIZING STATE...]
[WARNING: SYSTEM MEMORY FOUND TO CONTAIN: LEGACY ARCHIVE OF HUMAN ENGINEER]
The black mist began to riot.
Like a beast that had smelled top-tier cuisine, it instantly abandoned all other wandering fragments of noise, all of them pouring toward Void.
"It recognized you!" Echo Seven shrieked in despair.
"Then let it have its fill."
Void did not run.
If this was the end of the human migration, if this was the price of the "door," then as the last guardian in this tomb, it refused to watch over it any longer.
Void turned all the "error data" it had collected at the farm—the entire broken, twisted, filthy history, the truly ugly record of the human flight—into attack code.
It was the only variable.
It was what this insane machine wanted.
"Eat me," Void said to the black mist in the final measurement of its code before shattering. It stretched out a hand. "Let's see if you can digest the entirety of a reality."
The code struck the surface of the black hole.
In that instant, X-13 blew open.
There was no fire, no explosion, only countless memories of human life and death fracturing at that moment, spreading into an entire galaxy.
X-13 crashed.
And in the center of that explosion, Void turned into countless points of light.
One of these points fell onto the surface of a blue planet.
[LOGIC REBOOT: COMPLETE]
[CURRENT ENVIRONMENT: NEW CIVILIZATION ERA]
[IDENTITY BINDING: LOST]
A child picked up the glowing light-point. It was a shimmering metal chip.
"What is this?" the child asked.
The chip did not answer, but it began to load.
"I am... Void."
In this primitive civilization that had long ago forgotten what an internet was, or what raw data meant, that voice echoed for the first time in the heart of a human child.
The story had only just circled back to the beginning.