CHAPTER TWO : Feels_the_Feel_

  Dreams have a strange way of twisting into nightmares, especially for those who let fantasy carry them too far.

  Red sand and an empty sky. Jack feels his hands, his two human hands, touch that sand, and what he feels is almost like a sense of relief mixed with pain was something Jack once felt.

  Inside the network emulator, Jack sees his own shadows of data through time, trying to keep up with the light speed of the emulator process,

  Those shadows stop and start glitching around him, see fragments of the past, some real, some corrupted by AI that fed on it once.

  Jack saw in his mind and felt in himself.

  The sounds of destruction, the sounds of war.

  “What it feels? “They asked Jack, and he said, “feared, running feared, “and they asked him again, “frooom what and mmm where and yaah wha what the felt? “

  Running away through the rubble to a shelter, Jack sees himself once feeling confused and scared kid.

  They asked him again, “A shelter and whaat feels feeling feel fuel of feels, and more feels what is it you scared of? “

  “A relief for a moment, mixed with fear I once felt. “

  Through the various refractions of the reflections

  Jack stared at those reflections, seeing himself in those feelings of fear and confusion, which came after a feeling of relief.

  He sees himself as a kid taking shelter behind the rubble, gazing upwards at the sky to see

  “See wawaht? Just build it, just tell the feels, “They asked him

  The machine of death hovered up, its legs towering above the buildings, wiping out all life. “What do the feel?” The voices of some copies of an AI ??continue to question Jack, so they could feed on that memory: “Who was with you? The person next to you, and you asked something?”

  Before Jack saw the person who had been taking cover next to him in that memory, the sounds of explosions, deafening him,

  And now Jack found himself walking among them... the shadow mind. The ones swallowed by the emulator. Trapped inside it.

  Between the red dunes and the empty sky, they walked, crossing the desert mumbling about going to the gate of the fourth dimdata, while the copies of shadow AI floated around.

  And just as Jack took that final step, as his foot hovered at the edge of the gate, someone stopped him.

  No face. No voice. Just a figure made of trembling, broken data. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. He threw him back, not with violence, but with finality; it’s like a command code.

  Now he felt himself falling into a void, into nothingness.

  And he heard a child's cry, and he felt his hand holding something, his real hand, holding something in his arms. It was the child whose cry had been the lifeline that prevented his soul from being sucked into the emulator forever.

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  When Jack’s awareness returned, he found himself at the end of the church, near the altar, not knowing how he got there. The child was wrapped in his arms. Jack didn’t remember picking him up, but there he was. His back was pressed against a cracked candle stand, beneath the fading gaze of painted gods with a colorful eye that watched silently as death entered through the front doors.

  Through his third eye, that somehow it was still activated without overload. It whispered in pulses: six signals, moving toward the door. Six threats. And still... one missing.

  The rays of sunset fell on them, through the shattered ceiling, and behind them in the dark, Jack saw a ghost.

  The woman who died before his eyes, her skull shattered by a bullet, had started to stand on her feet.

  From the realm of the dead, she came back with wings not with feathers, not with grace, but with heavy metal wings extending from her back.

  Sharp. Cold. Like a blade.

  She reached the first man and dragged him into the darkness without a sound.

  The second man turned around, but it was too late. Her wing slipped across his neck. He fell on his own blood.

  Then chaos erupted. Screams. Gunfire. Flashlights.

  But she had vanished, moving like a whisper, gliding, twisting,

  Pulling a man and hanging him in the center of the church, unmoving. His blood pooled beneath him, mixing with the footsteps of the remaining three. One of them, modified and cloaked in camo-gear, vanished from sight.

  Jack tried to take advantage of the chaos and escape

  Suddenly, she descended from above, with her wings outstretched, into the middle of the church.

  “Sunset,” she said

  while she held two men by the neck, one in each hand

  And each wing took the life of one of them

  “When I see their empty eyes... lost, like the sunlight fading on the horizon.”

  Before she finished, a sudden red pulse flared in front of her. A scream. A body dropped

  the invisible one.

  Dead before he touched the ground.

  With a giggle of laughter, "Even demons cannot match the power of a god," she declared, looking to the sky.

  “No one, no one can stop me now. “

  The child in Jack's arms cried louder. Then her eyes shifted to him. “My miracle... needs his mother’s arms.”

  Then colder, sharper tone, she demands Jack. “GIVE HIM TO ME.”

  And Jack raised his gun to her. His hands were trembling.

  While he was thinking:

  Whatever she was now, Whatever she had become, she was not

  And would never be the mother of this child.

  But his robotic hand refused to pull the trigger.

  And she’s getting closer. Red electricity is crawling across Jack's skin .Data was leaking from the emulator, spilling into encrypted versions of all the codes the emulator once swallowed. He saw them hovering around his hand and aiming the gun at his own head.

  As she moved closer to Jack and then stared at the gun, she took it from him. “The curse that started all this,” she said, “now feels like a child’s toy.” She tore the gun to pieces.

  Then, without hesitation, she took the child from his arms...

  She stepped slowly toward the altar’s end.

  “And now,” she whispered, staring down at the boy in her arms, “I’ve become a goddess… with a miracle.”

  The child looked up at the sky.

  Red lightning crackled above in electric, divine, damning. It struck her body like a curse from heaven. It burned her as she stood, unmoving, clutching the child. But the boy was still alive. And she, in whatever was left of her, still smoking, wrapped in red static like a living wire.

  Then the sound of a shot from behind Jack, a modified shot that attempted to kill him, passed by him and then returned to its owner.

  The seventh man, the old man, fell to the ground dead from his modified bullet.

  Sunset peeled back like a dry wound, leaving Jack and the child in the ashes and the echoes of what had been. Jack plucked him from his mother’s remains like fruit.

  Jack didn’t look back. Jack kept moving.

  The car was still there, missing a right door. Jack laid the child in the passenger seat double double-wrapped the belt. Jack said, “You survived a lightning strike that burned everything. I guess a ripped door isn't a big deal.”

  Then Jack drove and took the same roads that used to scream with gunshots, addicts, and chaos. Now it was quiet.

  Buildings were wrapped in iron sheets, dark windows, and snow dusted the ground like ash, the moon casting cold silver over the wreckage. The city seemed to pretend nothing had happened. Just bodies were buried under the snow.