Suzanne and Byte had been immersed for more than two hours and Erol despaired of seeing the light of day reappear. It was very hot in the room and he now understood why Byte never wore any clothing. Slumped in the office chair, he strummed awkwardly on the screen. Tactile interfaces were not his strong suit. In this era, even Marian had gone back to mechanical systems since they were more robust and trustworthy above all.

A bright alert attracted his attention to the relief map of the High-Lands that occupied one of the larger screens above him. “Jinko? Jinko, do you know what this means?” he asked, but obtained no response from the AI.

The red dot had just left Renaissance and was moving slowly eastward. The dot represented a person, a rider given the speed with which it was traveling.

Erol tapped several times inside the red dot, but managed only to zoom in on the map, revealing a very blurred satellite view of the surroundings of Trisstiss. He had no idea if what appeared before him was a pre-registered or a real-time image. “Jinko!” he yelled again. The satellite view finally stabilized and a small window opened next to the crimson spot, moving along with the dot on the road that led south. The name Elias Meredith emerged among the coded information. “Who is this little bird?”

“The Judge-Executor,” answered Jinko, materializing in miniature format under the desk.

“Here you finally are!” Erol barked angrily, as he pivoted around the chair looking for a face to address. “Wait—what did you just say?” The archaeologist froze into place. His eyes followed the small red dot running along the path that led to the mounds.

“The Inquisition is on its way.”

Erol leaped into the air and pounced towards the pool when a metallic arm stopped his momentum. “What are you doing, stupid AI?”

“You Herr Monsieur idiot, what are you doing? We can’t wake them up like this. I must first begin the appropriate protocol.”

“Do it then!” the archaeologist lashed out, using his fists to escape his host’s grip.

A deep inhalation coming from the tub betrayed the brutal awakening of the technomancer who was overwhelmed by a barrage of coughs. In the turmoil that was her return to reality, she had accidentally drank some of the liquid. Suzanne emerged after her.

“Suzanne? How are you feeling?” asked Jinko, helping the young woman extricate herself from the viscous liquid.

The archaeologist had rushed to grab the first towels within his reach. Once he got to the edge of the tub, he became even more worried.

With the cyber-reality casket still sewn on her head, Suzanne’s entire body was shaking. The experience appeared to have been traumatic for her as Erol rushed to point out to their host.

“Calm yourself, Feuerhammer. She will recover quickly,” the technomancer replied.

“Did you get what you wanted at least?”

Byte nodded. “And beyond that. Help me dry her off. We should lay her down. Put these towels on the ground.”

Erol executed her orders without wasting any time, his eyes glued on the map and the Judge’s advancement. “Byte. We have a sort of emergency,” Erol began.

The cyborg placed Suzanne’s body on the ground and grabbed a blanket from one of the consoles. After draping it over the shaking woman’s waist, she hasted to remove the casket from her head. She then wiped Suzanne’s forehead, before finally turning towards Erol. She too seemed exhausted and was having trouble articulating her thoughts: “Do you know who this person is?”

“What do you mean?” he answered, drying off the rest of his partner’s body the best he could.

“Suzanne was witness to humanity’s last moments. She was by the side of Thomas Lionheardt when everything happened.”

“Tom!” the young woman suddenly screaming, jumping to his neck. “It’s Tom!”

“Hey!” Erol yelped, trying to escape Suzanne’s grip. “In any case, I am nothing but your humble tomb raider!”

“It was Tom, Erol. Tom is responsible for all of this. He—” She brought her hands to her stomach. Erol grabbed her by her shoulders; she was freezing.

Jinko had brought a set of ventilators next to the group, inundating them with warm air.

“I don’t understand! He activated the program. He awoke the New Dawn,” continued Suzanne.

While Byte remained silent, Erol raised his brows. “New Dawn?”

“He triggered a program meant to reset humanity. New Dawn as a project was not meant to fight against climate change. All of that was a lie. Tom and Jéricho had built a global scale eradication program.”

“Who is this Jéricho?” asked Erol who was trying to remember the details of their conversation in the black desert.

“An AI. It served this famous Tom,” Byte interceded, as Suzanne caught her breath.

“But that is not the worst of it,” Suzanne continued. She had gotten up. Removing her blanket, she rubbed her stomach under Erol’s questioning stare. “He killed me, Erol. Tom, in my visions—his Sentinels shot me in the abdomen and I died.”

For Erol, this additional information was even harder to stomach even though he had no idea what ’Sentinels’ were. “That makes no sense! You are here. And whole!” stammered Erol. “You!” He was now pointing at Byte. “Suzanne has fulfilled her end of the bargain? Now I demand answers. Right away.”

Byte had taken her spot in the chair before the screens. Her palm on her forehead, she winced. Her diving episodes into cyberspace were claiming their due, but from the look of the tranquilizer syringes that she took out from an iron box inside the armrest, she was used to this. “Thanks to this box-program, her last altercation with Thomas Lionheardt resurged from Suzanne’s memory,” Byte explained, removing the cap of one of the hypodermic syringes. She plunged the needle next to one of her tattoos and this latter turned black. The technomancer pursued her tale: “Thomas Lionheardt is one of the instigators of the New Dawn, covered by the UN. An ultra-secret project that, against all expectations, had as its real ambition to wipe humanity away from the map.”

Erol reformulated the technomancer’s statement in his head. “What? A genocide? I mean—But why? For what purpose?”

“Until now, me and the other technomancers who were interested in the question had no idea. Nevertheless, today, I learned thanks to Suzanne that the person we call Tom, because of his extravagant dreams, had a grudge against his brothers.”

“That makes no sense,” intervened Suzanne. “Tom was never a psychopath! He had never shown such a—penchant for extremism!”

“But how could he have done so?” Erol followed up. “How did he manage to annihilate all of humanity without future generations knowing about it?”

Byte turned towards one of the screens where the blueprints of what looked like a shrapnel were displayed. Its proportions were titanic based on the adjacent scale.

“The secret plan was similar to what had been declared to the public: three missiles in the shape of rockets. Spread across the globe, within gigantic compounds. The bombs contained gas that was capable of eliminating all life. Thankfully, Suzanne thwarted it.”

“Ah. The one within the Dammastock, isn’t it?” Erol winced.

Byte nodded and the screens now showed a detailed model of the center that was meant to host the Josias. Erol recognized the great hangar and the hall of caskets where he had found Suzanne a few days before. His journey through the bowels of the Earth had felt like an eternity. And yet, if you were to believe Byte’s plans, he had barely covered one tenth of the compound’s total area. Several regions, including the silo of the missile and the laboratories that were kept apart by dozens of kilometers of tunnels, were still to be explored if any of it had survived the devastation.

“I don’t understand how I could be inside one of those glass caskets. And what’s more, without any wounds,” Suzanne continued as she put her clothes back on.

“Indeed, that is a detail that we need to clarify,” Byte resumed, just as Erol began to intervene:

“Wait a minute! There is also something else that we need to sort out!”

Byte and Suzanne stared at him. Erol then tapped the screen so that it would return to the blueprints of one of the missiles.

“We are here today, because this one failed—the mission was aborted because—in the past, it was possible to block the ignition of the European Josias and prohibit the explosion of the last bomb. And this is all thanks to Suzanne?”

“Yes, Suzanne and I arrived at the same conclusion. That missile is still in the compound. Under the Dammastock.”

“This is where things get tough, Erol,” Byte replied to him. “The missile is not under the mountain.”

With her finger, she pointed to the long corridor that connected the compound to the annex containing the silo. The compound disappeared under the surface and the High-Lands now appeared on the screens. The missile, represented by a flashing green light, materialized little by little. When Erol understood where it stood, he knocked on the ground so violently that one of the screens jumped.

“Lucerne?” Suzanne guessed.

“Renaissance!” Erol translated. “Of course, it had to be right above Renaissance! And now the Inquisition is exactly on top of their goal!” A spark flashed across his eyes. What he had just come to realize sent a shiver down his spine. “That’s why they were so keen to conquer the city! With it they will have the ultimate weapon. The Foundation has fallen, nothing stands in their way!” he exclaimed. But as Byte remained silent, Erol wanted to know what she thought, but Suzanne raised another important point: “But—but how could they have learned about its existence if there is nothing on the net—or your cyberspace thing—about it?”

“Thomas S. Lionheardt,” Suzanne whispered.

The cyborg intervened finally. “Almost four hundred years ago, a young hacker named Marian managed to restore access to the global communication network to common mortals.” The technomancer sat at the edge of the pool, her legs in the liquid. “When he reactivated the network that humanity used to communicate, to move and to wage war with, he was barely twenty and already covered in implants.”

“Admirable,” the archaeologist remarked sarcastically. “And?”

Byte sighed and continued: “This restored network led him to the cyberspace beneath, that’s where he drew his strength from and became the first technomancer. A New Age cyborg, half-man, half-machine, who mastered the cyberspace. Thanks to this power, he managed to live for many years and had many disciples, including me.”

“Continue, Byte,” Suzanne encouraged the technomancer, hanging by her every word.

“But he found a demon inside this shadow sub-network. A non-human entity whose name he never revealed and who perverted Marian’s mind with dark ideas about humanity. Today, I am almost certain that it was Lionheardt.”

“You think that’s why I have the impression he tried to communicate with me, in my dreams?”

“It’s not an impression. I felt his presence around you—in the construct.”

“Exactly, look!” exclaimed the AI.

One of the screens displayed some red lines of code. Erol did not understand their meaning until Suzanne explained to him that they represented various intrusions on Byte’s servers.

Erol ultimately realized that according to the time-stamped entries, they had taken place during their dive. And more specifically, during their last seconds in the tank.

“It’s not a vision nor a dream. Thomas Lionheardt still exists. And he came here as can be attested by Jinko’s surveillance software,” Byte concluded.

“But it’s much too fast for him to be another diver,” the AI concluded. “We are presently talking about nanoseconds on a thousand-year-old network. It’s as if—”

“As if he were already in your computer,” joked the archaeologist. Then he remembered Octave’s stories. All that talk about the transferring of consciousness that he had thought to be a bunch of nonsense. “Transcendence!” he cried out.

He had surprised everyone, including the AI. “Outsourcing the human mind to a computer?” this one asked.

“I remember hearing about this during my time at Harvard. It was on TV and in the newspapers too. Later, Tom had men working on this who—” Suzanne stopped. These recent emotions seemed to have tired her extensively. “I didn’t think they would be able to achieve it. If I remember correctly, the first results were disastrous. We are talking about people merged with AI—”

“But this theory does hold based on the data we have gathered,” said Jinko. “It would be impressive, but in fact, it would require the existence of highly advanced programs that could merge—in the best scenarios…”

“In the best scenario, the human subject died on the first attempt,” concluded Byte. “It’s impossible and yet… Lionheardt isn’t diving into the cyberspace. Lionheardt is living in it, as an entity.”

Erol savored his victory. Octave could be proud of him. But Suzanne did not share his enthusiasm. “Okay, and what about Marian?” she continued, eager to learn the rest of the story.

Seeing that Suzanne could barely stand on her feet, Byte pointed her to another chair where she could sit down. Once she did so, Jinko brought her a cup of hot tea from the next room.

After making sure that the young woman was not about to pass out, Byte resumed: “The demon in question—Lionheardt—shared its knowledge in exchange for loyalty. That way, he hoped to be led to the European Josias or Josias-01. The explosion of the missiles made two thirds of the planet unlivable. The only thing left to do was finish the work, I suppose,” said Byte.

“Tom needed a person to reactivate the fuse which is the last step of the ignition process. He was always scared of hackers and that’s the reason why the activation is manual,” Suzanne added. “But all this leads me to believe that Marian finally decided not to help him?”

“Marian saw through the lies of this entity. We blocked physical access to the compound. So that no human could enter it.”

“I knew Herr Marian was a good fellow,” Erol commented, who understood his mentor’s reaction.

The archaeologist looked for a long time at the map that was regularly displayed on the screen. The missile was protected by several meters of concrete, no one could hope to touch it as long as it was so deeply buried.

“He was, yes. But many technomancers fall ill, Erol. And I am not talking about the bionic plague. I am talking about a much subtler evil, something akin to madness. When a man abandons reason for the machine, he no longer recognizes his brothers. He sinks into the most destructive psychosis.” Byte had re-entered the pool. Jinko reapplied some green bandages to alleviate the wounds inflicted by the paladins in Trisstiss. Several times, her eyes turned white for a fraction of a second. He had noticed that this happened when she was talking with her AI. “Our theory is that Lionheardt controls the Inquisition. Or rather Maev.”

Erol did not let a word escape. Suzanne had taken an enormous risk to rescue the technomancer and yet this latter was being rather stingy with her answers. He was certain she knew more.

“I still have trouble believing that the Inquisition wishes to wipe the High-Lands from the map for some fool stuck in cyberspace.”

“And yet they bear the symbol of the New Dawn,” noted Byte. “The one that appeared in this control room. Tom Lionheardt’s.”

“But then why would he warn me that the Paladins were already trying to penetrate the underground compound?” Suzanne intervened.

“What?” Byte and Erol asked in unison.

“Those were Tom’s last words in my visions,” Suzanne continued. “My memories were mixed with contemporary visions. It’s how he communicates. Everything is upside-down. But I remember that he was talking about men in white who were crossing the gates of the compound. There was a woman there too!”

Byte got up in one leap the very moment the fans began to purr in full force. It was terribly hot under the screens. “How is it possible that I did not see this when I dove with you? This means that it’s nothing but a matter of time until they manage to reach the launch center of the missile!”

“Who cares about their ambitions, this cannot happen!” Erol lashed out. “We must get there immediately and get rid once and for all of everything that concerns the missile!”

But Byte looked more defeated: “Alas, unless we can get rid of the Paladins using an army, the only solution would be to penetrate inside the compound and render the missile unusable…”

“This is in our wheelhouse, dear,” said Jinko. “No computer system can resist us.”

“The activation is manual. We have to be there! But we don’t know the access code. It’s what that idiot Marian was supposed to hand over to me at Trisstiss. To hide it from the Inquisition.”

“Going in and blowing up the compound? That I can do, but—” Erol began to say, hoping to keep a cool head. “But since we are still missing the access code…” Erol brought his hand to his neck to wipe away the sweat that was beginning to roll down his spine, when he felt underneath his fingertips the metal chain of the pendant that he had recuperated at the inn in Trisstiss. “Do you think it might be in here?”

Byte let out a cry of victory when she saw the key. As fast as lightning, she came between Erol and a huge ventilator that lifted her red hair. Behind a jumble of wires, she brought out a packet of chips and a makeshift portable computer.

“But, now that I think about it—can we really rely on these last visions? I mean…” Erol said.

“I refuse to believe that Tom could do something like this!” Suzanne cried out.

Before the cyborg had the chance to insert the external hard drive in her computer workstation, Jinko’s voice resonated, and the screens that covered the walls of the hall turned red. “In fact, Byte-love…”

“Yes, mon amour?”

“I picked up an interesting conversation a little earlier.”

Erol swore. It had completely skipped his mind.

“What does it say?” Suzanne intervened.

“Maev is in fact in Renaissance and a Judge is already on the way.”

“On the way?” asked the technomancer.

“Straight towards us,” concluded Erol, tapping the screen that now displayed the map again. “Whether they are close to the missile or not, they have a real gripe with Suzanne.”