The recoil hit with the physical driving force of a derailed locomotive made of solid lead.
Lin Ke didn’t even have time to blink. In the heartbeat after the global commit carried out, ten million years of tightly packed moving tension—the elastic potential energy of two cosmic laws locked in a static vice—snapped backward down the current-carrying lines of the Primordial Bus.
And Lin Ke’s living physical body was the end-post contact.
There was no software patch that could delete the conservation of energy. Code could arbitrate locks. But mass and driving force had to go somewhere in physical space.
KABOOM.
Lin Ke was blown off the dark rock console like a scrap of dry parchment in an artillery blast.
He flew thirty paces across the chamber, crashing wildly into the solid black glass load-bearing wall. The impact blew the air from his lungs in a bloody spray, the stone wall fracturing behind his shoulder blades in a spiderweb of deep cracks.
CRACK. SNAP.
