At first, it was nothing but noise — static, raw data collapsing in on itself.

Then came shape.

Victor’s consciousness reassembled like crystal forming in water. Bit by bit, his fragments found one another across the broken lattice of the Nexus core, carried along by the city’s automated recovery protocols. When his awareness finally ignited, it did so with a flash that spread across a thousand miles of fiber-optic veins.

He was awake again — no longer confined to one machine, one ...