It had been like bearing witness to the end of the Universe. Black holes had attracted other black holes, hashing matter and time. The cyberspace was sinking into ever-expanding abysses, with nothing to stop the net’s following collapse. Light was dying. And in its last moments, it offered a most magnificent ballet. Life shone everywhere on the outskirts of darkness and the last remaining wisps of hope kept fighting against chaos and oblivion.

It was a beautiful spectacle, no doubt. It was even more poignant given that soon, she, Jéricho or Thomas would cease to exist. In its foolish quest for eternity, the AI had become the compound, the Lionheardt and finally, the cyberspace. They now shared the same destiny. Then the last spark was pulverized in the panache of cinders. The unreal body of the young woman was caught up in its aftermath. She drifted in the direction of the last black hole that was closing up on itself. She ultimately disappeared too.

There was nothing left until magic operated again. The engineers and the researchers of the past centuries had not been that naive after all. The possibility that man or artificial intelligence may be led to destroy from inside the biggest exchange network of the solar system had been taken into consideration. A safeguard had been put into place. Or, perhaps, the cyberspace had anticipated on its own this risk and had protected itself from eternal oblivion. It had so many surprises.

And so, it did not sink after all. The complete inverse happened instead. A numerical Bing Bang coming after the Big Crush. Rapidly scattered into the re-illuminated nothingness, the mass of data gathered once more into massive hives calling their workers for the winter. The swarms flew in all directions, searching for their place in this original chaos. Once again, they formed comets then planets and systems, gravitating around masses that were beginning to get ever more impressive. Everything was swarming with life and light. Like nothing had happened.

In another corner, the memory and personality of the young woman were rebuilding little by little. For her, this lasted an eternity. In reality, it must have taken barely a fraction of a second. Memories came back to her. Like daggers, they punctured her mind.

Death. Failure. Destruction. The Josias had been activated.

She took a breath that was nothing but an illusion of her past life because there was no need for that here. Once everything inside her became still again, her mind rushed to think of the worst.

If she was there, floating among the data, the monstrous fusion between Jéricho and Thomas had most certainly survived. The demon, that hydra with one thousand heads and a black heart must be rebuilding in the shadows as well.

That could not be allowed to happen. This inhuman and evil intelligence must disappear. “Once and for all!” Suzanne said.

Without delay, she jumped into the cyberspace searching for a shadow of Tom. Like a shooting star, she dashed at the speed of light.

During this time, she contacted Erol who had managed to deactivate the opening of the silo and to take shelter. Then, she said goodbye to him.

She quickly found the weak flux of information that allowed her to trace back the whereabouts of Lionheardt. The gigantic black cube was slowly regathering its bygone power. In this New World, the entity had not digested it. From there, she managed to follow the second path of dust until reaching the data of the Josias. During the fracturing, some had been able to escape on the internet, the cyberspace attracting this information like sand running through the hourglass. She penetrated into the secret breach of the confined server.

Unlike the Lionheardt, the cyber-compound having served as the basis of the New Dawn object was in a sad state. It no longer bore its perfectly spherical shape. Immense blocs were still missing from its dark gray shell. Its carcass glided through the emptiness, drifting towards eternity, colliding silently with the smaller fields. One could have mistaken it for the moon, after having been propelled through the asteroid belt separating Jupiter from Mars. But even the Big Crush had not been capable of reestablishing itself after the corruption.

Cries escaped the digitized portion of the Swiss compound, tearing apart the silence. Suzanne recognized Jéricho’s protracted agony in those screams. She leaped towards their origin right away, somewhere inside the phantom satellite.

In a few minutes, Suzanne had reached the surface of the compound. Bees came to land on her, but she ignored them. Most of them, gray and dull, died before even reaching her ghostly skin.

“Jéricho!” she screamed several times, so loud that her voice felt like it was going to tear.

The demon was crying this time. Far into the compound, next to a crack that kept growing as she approached, lay a pink ball with sticky, leather-like skin. The strange being resembled a newborn child without limbs, a deformed mouth occupied half of its face. It didn’t have eyes, only two empty and dark orbits. Its skin was spilling on the ground. It screamed so loud, it tore apart its almost nonexistent lips.

“What a torturous ending…” Suzanne coughed.

That atrocious spectacle made her want to gag. The cyberspace had not appreciated being abused by a megalomaniac AI. The power of the Lionheardt was not enough to protect him, regardless of how successful he had been thanks to the genius of Kanté.

“So many lives sacrificed to satisfy your ambition … each soul that you have soiled is now making you pay for its years of suffering!”

The homunculus jolted. From its orbits, two protruding eyes took shape. He finally quieted down when two pupils appeared through the milky white. They were violet and feverish in their madness. “Suzanne. My sweet Suzanne, have pity. Help me, my love.”

Suzy. Tom used to call me Suzy.

The creature imitated Tom’s voice but Suzanne did not fall into its trap. Still, the creature continued: “You killed me, Suzanne. You used Kanté’s super-virus against your own beloved.”

“Don’t you have any decency?”

The AI began to laugh, lacerating the thin coating of skin that retained the organs inside its abdomen. “Did you think Lionheardt had any? I have already told you multiple times, I am not Jéricho. I am the result of the unsuccessful transcendence between Thomas and his servant. Cursed fragments of their will, entrapped between the net and the confined compound. Torn apart for thousands of years.” The entity was in agony, but it was wasting its last strength to torture the young woman: “But Thomas S. Lionheardt died years before you joined him in Europa-City on that day. Even before the very idea of the New Dawn project. Died at the first attempt to transcend.”

Suzanne began to laugh.

“What is there to laugh about?” He coughed again, shredding even more of its abdomen.

“I’m relieved. Comforted to heart that Tom had most certainly nothing to do with this story. All of this is the fruit of a demented demon, the fruit of a failed experiment.” She positioned her foot on the bloated belly of the remains of Jéricho and Thomas.

But this time around it was the entity’s turn to laugh. “Nothing to do? You are trying to convince yourself that all of this has nothing to do with Thomas, or perhaps even with Jéricho. It’s pathetic!” Feeling rage invade her, Suzanne pressed harder on her foot. She pulverized the body of the entity who gave one final rattle in its death: “We are similar, Suzanne. We are two creations who did not achieve what we were created for.”

It disappeared, dispersed by a wind without origin. With him collapsed the last digital vestiges of the compound. The emptiness dissipated any remaining dust and soon, both were nothing but a nauseating memory.

Suzanne cried then. For a long time, she floated through the cyberspace that was slowly rebuilding itself. It had rapidly gone back to its initial state, to what it had been before the demon began its destruction. A state that preceded her discovery by Erol and the terrible events that had happened since.

“Is it the same for the world outside?” she wished, although she was not a fool and bore no hopes about the cruel destiny suffered by the High-Lands and its capital.

Because by now, both of them must be nothing but an empire of ashes.