The physical impact of the connection was not spark. It was gravity.
The needle-fine pure-crystal star-white-gold tip of Lin Tao’s metal pen seated into the central gold pin of the test sky-slit. Then, the air pressure in the Processing Cathedral seemed to invert. A silent, blinding ring of violet soft glow swelled from the stone stand, washing over the black glass steps and shaking through the marrow of Lin Tao’s bones.
His visual senses shattered into millions of sparkling prismatic fragments.
The physical world—the soaring dark rock giant pillars, the frost-rimmed cooling trenches, Tie Shan’s towering bronze dark shape standing guard at the base of the dais—dissolved into an endless, cascading curtain of glowing green glowing and Precursor machine glyphs. The air whistled as surrounding magnetic power-coil pulled micro-arcs of violet static from his fingertips. It curled like tiny fiery serpents across the brushed metal console.
In low-level kernel debugging, Lin Tao thought, his mind straining against the huge incoming data stream, you don’t attach a probe to a live bus unless you’re prepared to receive the entire unbuffered state of the machine. The Warden’s Token has bypassed the authentication gate. But my living cortex is acting as the end-post monitor.
