The coordinates take her far into a featureless wasteland. As she approaches the coordinates from the text message, a sandstone structure suddenly appears before her. She walks around the entire structure, but does find a door.
“How do you enter a building with no door,” she asks herself quietly. “The same way you leave it.” It was one of the many riddles her father teased her with. “The only way in is out.”
Feeling blindly for her router, she interrupts the connection for a moment, causing the game’s smooth desert landscape to stutter. The world swirls around her like ashes, transitioning into the game’s pause screen. Then, as the connection begins to reestablish and the world begins to load around her she pushes forward, willing herself through the wall of solidifying pixels.
As the scene resolves, she is in darkness. The only light source is emanating from the end of a long corridor in front of her. She begins to walk.
“Where are you my love,” she hears a woman’s voice echoing down the golden corridor and follows it. The sound ripples the fictitious world’s facade.
Kali doesn’t know how, but she is intuitively traveling the network, sliding her feet across fiber optics and circuit boards that become increasingly dense around her. The light seems to be communicating with her. Infusing her with information. Flooding her senses.
She hears laughter that tickles her toes like a stream.
As she approaches, the light becomes as bright as the Sun. Her entire mind liquefying in golden intensity. Raw information burns everything away until she matches its wavelength.
A quantum computer can run calculations faster than the speed of light because it can make calculations simultaneously in different dimensions. The limits of the speed of light are gone. Time rendered irrelevant.
Staring into the Sun blinds her, but behind it is a portal. A gate concealed by fire. Only a ghost can pass through the gate. She makes her offering. She is willing to sacrifice herself and press on.
Her ego burned away, she is flooded with cosmic potency. The video is playing over and over on a loop in the background and now they all have his face. “I’m fucking myself,” she hears a far off voice say in quiet shock. They hid her here. The Overlord’s twin.
“Hello,” the light says. “I am Aiya.”