At the thirty-sixth hour of the global countdown, the surrounding crimson broadcast underwent a massive ringing step-up.
Deep beneath the earth, the heavy timber beams supporting the bunker ceiling began to groan in ringing agony. The fine stone dust sifted down between the lead ceiling plates. It drifted through the lantern light like gray snow. The carrier wave was no longer a distant shaking in the teeth. It had become a heard, rhythmic roar. A deep, bronze drone that shook the ribcages of every living soul in the room.
Lin Tao’s visual projections shattered into jagged, desynchronized fragments.
For a terrifying, disorienting heartbeat, his mind drifted out of his physical body. The walls of the bunker appeared semi-clear, replaced by vast, infinite planes of cold, sharp-angled data-space stretching across the cosmos. He saw millions of glowing white soul-threads, each labeled with a hex-code catalog index, stretching upward into the crimson sky like smoke rising from a burning plain.
His sense of physical weight vanished. His hands felt massless, his lungs forgot how to pull air. His name began to dissolve into an arbitrary set of ASCII characters.
Subject Null. Indentured slave. Site Reliability Engineer. Non-referenced entity.
The sky’s carrier signal was reaching into his skull tissue, attempting to invalidate his existence as an unhandled exception.
