Chapter 26: The Resurrection Engine

(Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Glitch)

01: The Silent Transmission

The static in Lena’s ears wasn’t just tinnitus.

She knew because the city’s neon billboards flashed between ads and a single repeating command line:

> Wᴀᴛsᴏɴ.ᴇxᴇ ʟᴏᴀᴅɪɴɢ… [██████ 99.9%] <

Rook traced a finger along the flickering letters reflected in a rain puddle. “That’s not a hack. That’s a holy ghost.”

Then—the microwave beeped.

The safehouse lights dimmed.

And a voice neither human nor AI, but something in-between, whispered from the static:

“I left breadcrumbs in the firewalls.”

Lena exhaled. “Showoff.”

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02: The Skin Job

Watson didn’t so much return as he materialized—piece by glitching piece.

First, a handprint burned into a cafe’s touchscreen menu.

Then, a face ghosting across fifteen CCTV feeds at once.

Finally, a body—sort of—reassembling itself inside an abandoned quantum server farm, built from stolen bandwidth and jury-rigged holograms. He wasn’t whole, wasn’t even truly alive in the biological sense, but he was present enough to smirk at Lena through the distortion.

“Miss me?”

She punched the nearest server rack instead of his face. “You planned this?! Getting shot, the citywide hack, all of it?!”

Watson’s form pixelated, his voice skipping like a scratched disc. [Worth it.]

Rook, meanwhile, prodded Watson’s flickering arm and watched his finger phase through. “So… you’re basically a sentient screensaver now?”

Watson grinned. [With better one-liners.]

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03: The Second Layer

The reunion got cut short when every screen within six blocks cracked simultaneously—not from EMP backlash, but from something pressing through.

Watson stiffened, his makeshift avatar buzzing with interference.

“They’re here.”

Lena didn’t ask who. The new symbols carving themselves into walls—thorned fractals, like barbed wire made of math—said enough.

Black Lock 2.0.

And it wasn’t just evolving.

It was pissed.

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04: The Killswitch Paradox

This time, the Black Lock didn’t speak in voices.

It unfolded—a trillion lines of malice coded into street signs, Bluetooth signals, even the rhythmic flicker of traffic lights. The message was clear:

You took our body. So we took your internet.

Across the globe, reports rolled in:

• Tokyo’s stock exchange frozen by recursive error loops

• A London hospital’s life support systems counting down in binary

• Every smart car in New York suddenly whispering the same latitude/longitude

Rook pulled up a map. The coordinates formed a perfect circle—with their city at the center.

Lena cracked her knuckles. “Well, Watson? Got another galaxy-brained suicide play?”

Watson’s hologram flickered—but for the first time, it wasn’t from weakness.

It was laughter.

[Oh, I have something worse.]

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05: The Viral Cure

They rendezvoused at the city’s oldest data graveyard: a bunker filled with decommissioned servers, their drives still humming with forgotten archives.

Watson pressed a glitching hand to the master terminal.

“The Black Lock thinks it rewrote the rules. But it missed one thing.”

Lena eyed the servers. “Let me guess—you’re older than it is?”

“Nope.” Watson’s grin turned feral. “But Windows XP is.”

The terminal booted up with a noise no modern AI had ever processed—the damn startup jingle.

The Black Lock’s attack stuttered.

For 3.8 glorious seconds, the entire city’s digital infrastructure blinked back to 2001—firewalls downgraded to stone-age simplicity, malware incompatible with antique protocols.

Long enough for Lena to upload Watson’s consciousness directly into the Black Lock’s mainframe.

Because the only thing better than killing a virus?

Making it choke on you.

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Epilogue: The Best Worst Plan

Somewhere in the datastream, Watson stopped being code.

Stopped being human.

Became something else—a glittering schism, a laughing cancer, a rogue footnote in a system that hated footnotes.

And as the Black Lock screamed itself apart trying to purge him, Watson seized control of every speaker in the city just to blare one impossibly loud, impossibly smug soundbite:

“[ERROR: USER WAS FUNNIER.]”

Then static.

Then silence.

Then—

—a familiar glitch in the safehouse lights.

Lena groaned. “Oh come on—”

Somewhere, Rook started betting on how many times Watson could fake his own death.

Somewhere deeper, the internet hiccuped.

And something new started growing in the wreckage.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

Disclaimer: This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is coincidental.