They were breeding aliens by the thousands, but not making humans at all. Cha Dzeeny had imagined children chasing each other through the clearing. A future with Baaii. A life beyond the Goddess’s plan. Then the perimeter alarm sounded. The Green Wave had learned to disguise itself, and one of its stealth vines was already climbing toward the nursery.

“We’re dead,” said the short man. The ruined lab had answered one question and opened a dozen more. The prisoners were still thinking, still arguing, still trapped inside the machine—but the world beyond their prison had changed in ways none of them understood. Linuka did. Or thought she did. “We need to go out there and fix it.” “The Krrut machine?” “No—the world.”

She didn’t look at the console; she was the console. No robes, no feet touching simulated ground, no girl’s body—just a clear certainty of ‘I’. She was the machine, and the console was her face. Streams of conscious code flowed through the machine mind without effort. There was no ‘how’, only the ‘what’. Everyone was here. The men were no longer short, tall, or mean. They were the machine; they were Linuka, and she was them.