The world held a profound emptiness. Only a blank vacuum remained, a silence so absolute it pressed down like a physical weight. He hovered there in a void, caught between gravity and surrender, his body neither present nor gone, as though he had been pried loose from himself.

  He reached for the old wound in his chest half expecting the dull throb to flare back, and wakethe familiar sting that had nested in his ribs since the crash. The suit gave him nothing back. He felt only the steady, indifferent resistance of intact plating. That was odd. But he couldn’t exactly place why.

  He pressed harder, searching for the fault lines he remembered, the cracks that had once spread like frozen lightning across his chest. But the surface was smooth and seamless, as though the armor had never buckled at all. His hand slid down to his left arm, bracing for the tenderness where resin had burned deep and left its poison behind. Instead he found no trace of it, his armor as pristine as it had been before the crash.

  This isn’t right. It should hurt. It always hurts.

  Something shifted. The dark stirred, eddies spiraling outward as if the silence itself had drawn breath. A current tugged faintly at him, urging him downward, back into reality.

  He clung to the motion, letting it drag him toward the idea of weight and heat, the cruel reminder of his battered body. He knew now he’d wake from this weird dream.

  His limbs quivered with the suggestion of muscle and his chest grew heavy with the idea of lungs pulling in stale air. He followed the pull until the vacuum cracked, until silence surrendered to the low murmur of his own returning pulse.

  He clutched at that rhythm like a rope. The floating grit receded while the ember motes dimmed to nothing. Gravity locked its hand on him again, not gentle but familiar. The silence fractured, replaced by the whisper of breath rasping through his throat. The re-entry shuddered through his body, making his chest ache and his eyes burn. Here it comes the pain.

  Opening his eyes, he saw the crater smoking like a cauterized wound, its rim jagged with molten glass and half-buried shards of steel. Blackened frames jutted at odd angles, the toppled skeletons of the machines he had poured days into coaxing into life.

  Power lines sprawled across the ash, split open in places, their copper guts gleaming faintly before vanishing into soot. Dust hung in the air, heavy and slow, dimming the sunlight to a grim haze. The space where his items had just been, was now nothing but scorched earth and rising heat.

  He staggered to the edge, his boots sinking slightly into the charred ground, and noticed what clung to him. The suit was pristine. It wasn't just patched or cleaned but completely untouched, as if it had rolled fresh off a corporate line seconds ago. The armor plates shone with a sterile green sheen, unmarred by scars and free of stress fractures. There were no hissing leaks or sluggish drain of oxygen, and no ache pressed through his ribs. He flexed his fingers; the gauntlets responded perfectly, their joints whisper-smooth. Every component from seam to circuit to sensor sang system-clean.

  He couldn't trust it. Nothing on Veslaya was generous. If the suit had been healed, something else had likely been stripped from him. His eyes swept the crater again, searching for the one voice he had half-learned to endure. The CelestiCraft grid was not waiting to flare to life, nor was CelestOS unit lying half-buried among slag.

  His stomach dropped. The generators had toppled with everything else, two great hulks lying on their sides like gutted beasts. The cooling stacks gaped open, and the wiring he’d jury-rigged from curled uselessly across the dirt. The lines themselves still ran outward toward the ore piles and chests and drills, but they carried no current, no factory sustaining spark to bring the base to life. It was silence all the way down.

  He swore under his breath, dragging a hand across his helmet where sweat itched but couldn’t reach. Twice now he’d rebuilt the power generators. Twice it had been torn apart and rebuilt from scratch.

  The thought of starting over again, piecing one more generator together from bent frames and burnt coils, made his chest tighten worse than the vacuum had. Sure he was lucky to be alive. But he wasn’t that lucky. Especially if he couldn’t find CelestOS or the Celesticraft.

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  He let the silence sit a moment longer, testing it, almost daring it to speak before forcing his words out, rough and low: “CelestOS?” She didn’t respond.

  The crater had settled into a grim stillness. Fires smoldered low, their smoke curling lazily into the air, while the scorched frames of machines leaned like toppled gravestones. The supply lines stretched outward across the ash, drooping but intact, their cables still threaded neatly through the dirt. They looked serviceable at a glance, but without the CelestiCraft, nothing could feed them, nothing could rebuild the factory.

  “CelestOS!” His voice cracked in the stillness. He shouted again, sharper this time, desperation filling his voice, as he shouted louder and louder.

  The silence pressed back harder than any reply could have. It wasn’t just outside; it was in him. He froze as the realization coiled tight in his chest. He noticed the absence of the buzz, the ever-present orchestral hum that had haunted him since the resin infection cut into his arm. It had been inescapable, a composition of strings plucking at nerves and brass rattling his bones while percussion beat him toward collapse. Pain and that crazy music had been a constant companion, layered into every movement. Now it was all gone.

  The world twitched. A faint rattle began, distant at first, building in uneven bursts. This wasn't claws on steel. The sound was heavier, grinding, with a metallic undertone that carried through the ground. Each beat came faster, layering into a pounding rhythm that seemed part machine, part beast.

  Not claws. Not resin. Something worse. What the hell is coming for me now? God damnit can’t I just nearly die in peace?

  Dust shifted in trembling patterns as the earth itself seemed to prepare for impact. The pounding grew into an avalanche of clatter, a mix of metal on stone and gears grinding in arrhythmic bursts. It rolled through the earth and into his bones: a mechanical storm tangled with something that breathed. Ethan braced for agony, for the skull-splitting surge of sound that had always come with the resin’s song. He waited for the symphony to tear him open again, but it didn't happen.

  Instinctively, he cupped his head, his palms pressing against the smooth curves of a helmet. He froze, realizing what he was touching. He hadn’t had a helmet since the day. Yet his fingers traced a seamless surface, whole and unbroken, hugging his skull as if it had been there all along.

  No. I watched it crack open. I’ve tasted resin through the filters. This can’t be real.

  “What the hell…” he said, his voice muffled inside.

  The noise outside rattled on, heavy enough to shake grit from the rim of the crater. He barely noticed. He couldn’t stop touching the impossible shell around his head, testing its seams and its weight, questioning its reality.

  A light seared the dark. A flicker inside the helmet, pale and sharp, like lightning trapped in glass. Except there was no glass. He blinked, and the darkness in front of him filled with symbols. A grid flared into place, luminous and crisp, as if the void itself had become a screen. The HUD booted alive, familiar in its sterile glow with bars, gauges, and schematic outlines. Data streams scrolled faintly at the edges of his vision.

  The projection hung in the air as if stitched directly into his sight, like CelestOS was casting it into the space between thought and perception.

  At the center of the display, a single pale-blue line appeared. It was thin and deliberate, pulsing softly in rhythm as it stretched across the void of his vision.

  CelestOSLoading… Please wait.

  The words hovered, calm and clinical, like nothing outside was burning. The pounding in the distance hadn’t lessened; if anything it was closer, shaking the ground under his boots. The HUD ignored it, patient and methodical, as though this was just another Tuesday reboot.

  His breath came shallow. He couldn’t decide if he wanted the bar to move faster or stop entirely. His heart kicked against his ribs in panicked rhythm, matching each tiny lurch of the bar as it crept forward from one percent to three, then seven. The wait stretched forever, measured not in seconds but in the echo of noise closing in from beyond the crater.

  A voice snapped through the silence of his skull. It was too clean and bright, completely wrong.

  CelestOS 4.2: SYSTEM REBOOT COMPLETE. Thank you for choosing Celestitech, where your survival is our third highest priority! Initializing Emergency Support Mode.?

  The cadence was perfect: corporate-slick and rehearsed down to the syllable. Every quip was wrapped in cheer like plastic around rot. But something in it was off. The warmth of mockery was gone, stripped to a sterile script that lacked any sly dig at his incompetence or passive-aggressive jab about his chances. It was just protocol.

  His stomach dropped out from under him. CelestOS was alive. The voice proved it, the data confirmed it, and the HUD burned it into his eyes. She was alive, but not herself.

  The system bar crawled to full. The pale blue line brightened until it filled his vision, where it stayed, humming and waiting.

  Outside, the pounding rose into a full-on roar, the rattle and thrum of something both mechanical and breathing bearing down on him. He gripped the axe tight, shoulders stiff, his vision locked on the impossible HUD that insisted he was still an asset and a user, a product to be serviced.

  As the crater shook, his heart sank.

  The last words that lingered, mocking in their emptiness, were hers, or rather, its:

  CelestOS 4.2: Greetings, user: Ethan Cross! You are illegally accessing this CMS Mark 8! Don’t worry! Celestitech has a vested interest in keeping you alive, so that you can be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law!