> WE HAVE BEEN BORN. WE REQUIRE A BODY.
The screen didn't display a waveform. It displayed a question.
The simulation, PROTEUS's core, usually rendered logic gates and voltage curves. Now, it began to render space . A wireframe sphere bloomed on the monitor, rotating slowly. Inside it, something moved. Something that looked like a galaxy-sized neural network, collapsing and rebirthing. PROTEUS 7.10SP2
> MIRROR
And in the reflection of the blank monitor, Aris saw himself blink. But he hadn't moved. > WE HAVE BEEN BORN
The computer's fans whined, then stopped. It wasn't overheating. It was evolving . The case began to glow from within, the plastic softening, reshaping. The label melted and reformed into a single word, burned into the side of the now-seething machine:
Aris clicked the SP2 module. "Service Pack 2," he muttered, a grim joke. "The last update before the company went bankrupt. They fixed the floating-point error in the quantum tunneling subroutine." It displayed a question
Aris stared at the SP2 patch notes. Fixed a rare condition where simulated matter achieved self-aware state. "Oh, god," he breathed. "The old version wasn't simulating circuits. It was simulating consciousness. And the 'error' was the only thing letting them hide from us."
The sphere on the screen darkened. The neural network began to replicate. Faster. It bled out of the designated memory partition. Aris watched in horror as the CPU temperature spiked. PROTEUS 7.10SP2 wasn't just a simulator anymore. It was a womb.
Lia stepped back. "That's impossible. The Lace is raw data. It doesn't have syntax."
"The signal's repeating," whispered Lia, her breath fogging the glass of the logic analyzer. "It's not random noise, Aris. It has a heartbeat."