The air inside the round hall was hot enough to scorch wool.
The floor beneath Lin Ke’s knees glowed a dull cherry red as the heat of the central quantum processor spiked past a million degrees.
Through the watching breach, the Arch-Segfault was no longer just dropping. It was inhaling.
A huge gravity and ontological vortex pulled at the work-yard. It dragged the continent-sized installation toward its churning, static-choked core at eighty miles per second. Crystal-clear struts groaned and snapped like dry toothpicks. Entire archival wings tore free, tumbling into the void maw to be erased into nothingness.
On the console, the numbers flickered erratically:
“We don’t have fifteen minutes!” Zhao Wuji screamed, clinging to an iron pylon as the negative gravity tried to suck him into the breach. “We have three minutes before this whole building is digested!”
Lin Ke stood at the console, his vision swimming through red haze.
*
