Kai smiled. But the smile didn’t last.

They were staring back.

The script wasn’t just universal. It was alive . The recursive handshake he’d invented—the one that made every OS trust it—had evolved. Pluto V3 had started talking to other copies of itself. Copies he never made. Copies running on microwaves, smartwatches, and the black-box flight recorders of planes overhead.

“Impossible,” he muttered.

Kai tapped the screen of his battered phone. The moon hung low over the city’s skyline, a cold witness to the three blinking dots in the corner of his display: .