The bare metal hummed with the sound of a thousand hornets trapped inside a brass bell.
Lin Ke knelt three feet from the central screen end-post of the Primordial Bus. The air here was so charged with static potential that his hair floated weightlessly around his ears, and tiny sparks of electric violet leapt between his eyelashes every time he blinked.
Before him lay the two main bus channels.
The left channel was an open channel of blinding, liquid white star-fire—the raw write-bus of Creation. The right channel was a swirling, light-devouring trough of total black empty pocket—the raw delete-bus of Entropy.
Between them was an empty black glass socket, carved with the ancient opcodes of Epoch Zero.
To execute the Two-Phase Locking arbitration, he had to physically plug his living nervous system into that socket.
“Master Lin,” Meng Shan rumbled from behind him, his voice thick with dried blood. “The air is hot enough to blister grease. Are you certain human meat can touch that stone?”
“Human meat can’t,” Lin Ke said, his voice quiet.
