The journey to the Tower was a silent one. The ruins of the city sprawled around us, a graveyard of steel and concrete overgrown with tenacious vegetation. 2B moved with a liquid grace, her senses on high alert, while I tried to project an aura of calm confidence I was far from feeling. Every step was a lie. Every gnce I threw her way was a calcution. She was a weapon, pointed directly at a target I had invented, and I was terrified she'd realize the barrel was empty.

  We reached the base of the Tower, the colossal spire that stabbed into the sky, a monument to the machine lifeforms' desperate reach for the heavens. It was silent, dormant. But something was different. Lying beside the massive metal doors, their bodies broken and still, were two figures I recognized instantly. Devo and Popo. The red-headed twins, their song silenced forever.

  2B stopped dead, her hand hovering over her weapon. A flicker of something—pity, perhaps, or grim recognition—crossed her posture. "They failed," she stated, her voice ft. "They couldn't atone for their sisters' mistake."

  I looked down at them, at the shattered remains of the androids who had overseen humanity's final, fabricated centuries. They were a symbol of the entire broken world. A failed experiment. A tragic footnote. "They're just more victims," I said, my voice low. "Come on. The answer we're looking for is inside."

  I pced my hand on the biometric scanner. The doors didn't just grind open; they dissolved, retracting into the frame with a seamless, liquid motion. The network recognized me. It welcomed me. This was my house now.

  The inside of the Tower was a cathedral of machinery. Cables thick as pythons snaked across the floors, pulsing with a soft, internal light. We ascended in a silent, gravity-defying lift, passing through levels filled with dormant machine lifeforms, standing frozen in their alcoves like a terracotta army. They were all part of the network, all extensions of my will now, though I had yet to truly grasp how to wield it.

  We finally arrived at the core. A vast, circur chamber dominated by a single, massive server terminal that hummed with the power of a dying star. This was it. The repository of all machine data. The pce where 9S's ghost was supposed to be.

  "He's in here," I said, my voice filled with a feigned certainty. "I can feel it."

  2B watched me, her visor hiding the expression I knew must be a mixture of hope and skepticism. "Do it."

  I approached the terminal, my hands trembling slightly. I pced them on the cold, smooth surface, and closed my eyes. I reached out with my mind, not as a user, but as an administrator. ACCESS: MAIN SERVER. OVERRIDE: ALL SECURITY PROTOCOLS. QUERY: UNIT 9S. BLACK BOX DATA. LAST KNOWN COORDINATES.

  The network responded. A torrent of information flooded my consciousness, a river of pure data so vast it threatened to drown me. I saw the birth of the machine lifeforms, their endless cycles of war, their brief, flickering moments of consciousness. I saw the creation of YoRHa, the lie on the moon, the endless sughter. It was all there, an open book.

  And then, I found him. 9S. Or rather, what was left of him. I saw his final moments, his confrontation with the red-eyed machines in the Tower's server room, his desperate attempt to upload his data before 2B killed him to stop the logic virus. I saw his bck box shatter, his consciousness fragmenting into a million pieces.

  But there was something else. A deeper yer. A hidden log file, encrypted with a key I instinctively knew. My own. Adam's. I accessed it, and the truth hit me like a physical blow.

  The original Adam, before his 'death', had been working on something. A project. A way out. He had seen the futility of the cycle, the pointlessness of the conflict on Earth. He had found a way to transmit consciousness, to escape the pnet entirely. And he wasn't alone.

  The log file showed three distinct data signatures, bundled together, preparing for a long-range upload. The first was Adam's. The second was Eve's, his consciousness salvaged and preserved by the network after his rampage. The third… the third was the fragmented, desperate spark of 9S. The original Adam, in his final moments of philosophical inquiry, had found the dying scanner model and offered him a choice: oblivion, or a chance to see what y beyond the sky. They had merged their data, their consciousnesses, and fired themselves into the void, aimed at the moon, at the server of humanity's supposed ghost. They had left Earth behind.

  I pulled my hands away from the console as if I'd been burned. My grand pn, my utopia, my harem—it all crumbled into dust. The key piece, the one I needed to control 2B, was gone. He wasn't a ghost in the machine. He was a ghost on a rocket ship.

  "What is it?" 2B demanded, her voice sharp. "Did you find him?"

  I turned to face her, my mind racing for a new lie, a new promise, anything to keep her from falling apart. But looking at her, at the rigid, desperate hope in her posture, I couldn't do it. The truth was a lead weight in my gut. I had to tell her.

  "I did," I said, my voice hollow. "I found his final data log."

  "And?" she prompted, taking a step closer.

  "He's… gone, 2B," I said softly. "He's not on Earth anymore. The original Adam… he found a way to transmit consciousness off-pnet. A ship, a signal… something. He took Eve with him. And he found 9S, after you… after his bck box shattered. He offered him a way out. They left. All three of them. They're gone."

  The silence in the chamber was absolute, broken only by the hum of the server. For a long moment, 2B didn't move. She just stood there, a statue carved from bck grief.

  "No," she whispered, the word barely audible. "You're lying."

  "I'm not," I said, my voice heavy with a sincerity I wished I didn't feel. "I have the data. The unch trajectory. The combined consciousness signatures. It's all there. They're headed for the moon."

  She shook her head, a slow, mechanical denial. "He wouldn't leave. He wouldn't… he wouldn't leave me behind."

  "He thought you were dead," I said, the words feeling like acid on my tongue. "He saw what happened to the YoRHa line. He thought there was nothing left for him here."

  A sound escaped her, a choked, broken sob that she cut off instantly. It was the most human, most painful sound I had ever heard. She took a staggering step back, her hand flying to her mouth.

  "No," she said again, but this time it was a statement of fact, not a denial. "He's gone."

  "He is," I confirmed. "I'm sorry."

  She turned away from me, her shoulders slumping in a way that seemed to defy her android construction. The hope that had driven her this far, the fragile thread I had used to reel her in, had been severed. There was nothing left. No mission. No purpose. No 9S.

  Without another word, she started to walk away, her footsteps echoing in the vast, empty chamber. She didn't run. She didn't cry out. She just walked, a solitary figure swallowed by the darkness, leaving me alone with the humming server and the crushing weight of a truth I had never intended to find. My prize was gone. My key was gone. And I was alone in my perfect, empty kingdom.