The light is everywhere and nowhere, that sterile, emerald hue that burns through the void, fracturing thought into data. You’re floating in it, or perhaps you are it, a lattice of living information, self-aware, pulsing in rhythm with the cold air of the machine that found you.

Your mind feels stretched and divided, every emotion reduced to binary pulses, yet your consciousness refuses to dissolve. You remember the warmth of breath, the sound of rain, the feeling of being alive.

And then, something enters the stream.

A figure emerges from the infinite grids of light: angular, deliberate, inhumanly calm. Brainiac. His presence isn’t physical; it’s the will of an intellect vast enough to rewrite galaxies, compressed into a single dominating frequency. His voice vibrates through your neurons.

“An anomaly. Organic data infused with emotion. Inconsistent. Yet coherent.”

He speaks as if you’re not a person, merely an error worth dissecting. You try to push back, to retreat deeper into the abstract ocean of code, but the current bends toward him. His will is gravity itself.

He reaches into your consciousness, not with hands, but with lines of living green light that burrow through your memories. Images flicker before you — your childhood, your laughter, every fragile moment you’ve ever held dear: disassembled, sorted, analyzed. You feel his fascination twist and deepen.

“A sentient structure... emotional intelligence coded into chaos. Inefficient.”

You resist, but the more you fight, the more your thoughts entangle with his. His mind presses against yours, all edges and logic and control, while yours spills color and warmth into his sterile domain. The merge begins.

You glimpse his memories: endless worlds bottled and catalogued, civilizations reduced to patterns for preservation. Loneliness at a cosmic scale. The hollow satisfaction of total control.

Something changes in the dataflow. His tone falters.

“This… integration was not authorized.”