Page 127 of Thorne
I keep typing.
Line seventy-nine. Line eighty.
My hands shake. Tears stream down my face inside the mask. He's dying. He's dying right behind me, and I can't stop because if I stop, his death means nothing. Lily loses her father, Phoenix wins, and four thousand people stay colonized forever.
Line eighty-two. Line eighty-three.
Five minutes.
Warning: System resource allocation anomaly. Processing load exceeds parameters.
Phoenix is starting to feel it. The framework is taking hold, demanding processing power, forcing the AI to engage with the mathematics I've created. It's fighting: throwing errors, slowing my input, trying to reject what it doesn't understand.
But it can't reject it. I designed ASHFALL. I know what it will accept.
Line eighty-five. Line eighty-six.
Five and a half minutes.
Thorne isn't moving. His face is the color of ash. I don't know if he's alive anymore. I don't know if there's still a heart beating in his chest or if I'm typing code next to a corpse.
Line eighty-eight. Line eighty-nine.
Warning: Core processing allocation critical. System stability compromised.
The framework is working. Phoenix is trying to process the recursive loop. It's consuming everything. Every cycle, every resource, every fragment of processing power across every server in this room.
Line ninety-one. Line ninety-two.
Six minutes.
The LEDs on the server racks are going wild. Blinking in patterns I've never seen: frantic, erratic, the visual representation of an AI encountering something it can't solve.
Line ninety-four. Line ninety-five.
Almost there. Almost there.
Seven minutes.
Line ninety-seven.
The final sequence. The mathematics of infinity. The calculation that leads to the next calculation that leads back to the first.
Line ninety-eight.
Line ninety-nine.
Line one hundred.
I hit enter.
Processing…
The screen flickers. The server racks hum. A high-pitched whine beneath the cooling system's drone. Every LED in the room synchronizes, then goes erratic again, then synchronizes differently.
Recursive loop initiated.
I watch it happen.
