Episode 033| Leaving the Instance
Trial passed, Lika brings his first shadow out of the Instance and back to the frozen snowfield. Inside it felt like hours of walking, fighting, and rewriting; outside only 16 minutes have gone by — and Spectra has already logged him stepping across the boundary.
???
Shadow_001 was still staring at that fissure.
Lika called it again. This time he didn't make a sound; in his sense of direction he just pressed one shortest command onto that string of data he'd just bound — come back.
The head turned back. Half a beat late, but it turned back. Those green-blue eyes locked onto his again, docile, obedient. But that half-beat of hesitation just now — Lika logged it. An obedient thing had picked up one direction of its own that it wanted to look in. He set the matter aside for now, to settle later.
What mattered more, right in front of him: he had to get out.
That line on the Instance wall — "Trial · Contact —— Passed" — was still lit.
Lika looked at it for 2 seconds, then suddenly understood the line wasn't just a stamp. It was a key. He'd written too many privilege gates — the gate only opens for whoever passes verification. This Instance, from root directory to wall surface, was all written by the past him, and the past him would never let someone in without leaving an exit.
He spread his sense of direction out in every direction, like leafing through files in an invisible directory. He quickly hit a few exit markers — the ones at the end of the channels that he'd known about on the way in, and one buried deeper, tagged ???, which this time he didn't touch.
What he wanted was the path he'd come in by.
[Return Passage · Request]
[Identity: Observer (promoted to Triggerer)]
[Trial Status: Passed]
[Result: Authorized]
[Initiating upload sequence...]Upload.
Lika nearly laughed. When he'd come in, the word had been download — he'd been treated as a file, pulled from the physical layer down into this place. Now, to get out, the word the Instance gave was upload. Writing him back.
The past him had thought even of this symmetry.
The ice-crystal dome began to fade.
Not the dark of lights going out. More like someone reeling an image back in, layer by layer — the farthest ice walls dissolved first into pure black plus a gray grid, then the row of mid-ground ice crystals that had once bowed their backs, last the grid terrain under his feet. None of it "vanished"; it just stopped connecting to him. He remembered the feeling exactly, identical to the way in, only played backward.
[Upload progress: 23%]
[Upload progress: 61%]
[Upload progress: 89%]He reflexively went looking for Shadow_001.
That deep-green-edged-in-blue thing was coming apart right in front of his eyes. The scales, the claws, that head that could turn — piece by piece it dissolved back into data, gathered up into somewhere he couldn't see. Lika's chest clenched — the first companion he'd just taken on, and it was gone the moment he stepped out the door?
The brain chip flashed a line.
[Shadow_001 · Transferred with Owner]
[Render: Paused]
[Binding: Maintained]Maintained.
It hadn't left. It just wasn't standing here in that body anymore. It came with him, like one entry of data under his account, carried wherever he went.
[Upload complete: 100%]
[Tactile feedback: restored]
[Visual feedback: restored]
[Audio feedback: restored]Cold, first.
Not the fake "simulated · 5°C · neutral" sensation from the way in. Real cold, the frozen-tundra kind that bores into the seams between your bones, running along his face, his hands, his feet planted in the snow, reconnecting to his body inch by inch. It turned out this body of his had been standing here the whole time, never moved. The only thing that had moved was his senses — cut away, and now pasted back on.
Then light. The eye-searing white of the snowfield, the silver-gray arc of the CV-1A, the band of fault-line light on the horizon that hadn't yet receded — all of it redrawn before his eyes.
Last, sound. Wind. The frozen-tundra wind had been blowing the whole time; he just hadn't been able to hear it.
Lika opened his eyes — he wasn't even sure they'd actually been shut — standing on that patch of snow outside the boundary, the exact same spot as before he'd lifted his foot and stepped across.
He looked down at his hands. A thin layer of frost had formed on the gloves.
In the lower right corner the brain-chip interface flashed one very quiet line.
[Local Time: 11:18]Lika froze.
When he'd gone in, it was 11:02.
16 minutes in between.
Down there he'd walked that channel that ran on with no end in sight, read the K with one extra bend in the ice fissure, fought a fight with that thing that crawled out and nearly lost his life, rewritten a whole layer's gravity, given the first shadow a name — all of it, and out here only 16 minutes had passed.
He'd been in this line of work long enough; he knew better than anyone that data transfer and a person's perception are two different things. A piece of code running a hundred thousand loops is an instant to the processor and an afternoon to the person who wrote it. But for the first time, the thing being thrown into the loop and run back and forth was himself.
When that thing down there looked at him, what did it actually see? A person who, to it, was slow as a frame-by-frame playback? Or a loop short enough to be laughable, hammering at the same wall over and over?
The back of Lika's neck went cold again. He didn't like this thought. He filed it with that pile of fragments he couldn't crack open, and pressed it back down for now.
He looked around.
The Rift was still there. About 3 meters from him, suspended above that patch of blank terrain that shouldn't exist, leaking a touch of blue light that didn't belong to this layer, perfectly quiet. The far side held nothing — a smooth sheet of snow, no footprints, no one.
But on this patch of snow where he stood, this chill at the back of his neck kept making him feel that something, a moment ago, had looked at him from that direction.
He swept his sense of direction around once. He read nothing.
Lika didn't look at the fissure anymore. He turned and walked toward the CV-1A.
The snow was deep, every step sinking to the ankle. He wasn't moving fast — just out of that fight, then hauled in and out once over — his legs still weak. But with every step, he could feel that entry of data named Shadow_001 in his sense of direction moving with him, like an invisible mass 1 degree colder than its surroundings, pressed to the spot half a step behind his left.
A companion that couldn't get away. He thought. Absurd, and yet solid ground.
At the foot of the airship gangway, he paused.
Only now did the brain chip push him, all at once, the string of notifications that had piled up during the upload. The one on top made him frown the moment he saw it.
[Sync Record · Central Spectra]
[Event #001 · Observed Subject Entered the Rift]
[Timestamp: 11:02:13]
[Status: Recorded · Pending Review]Recorded.
The second he went in, the whole city's Spectra had been watching. 16 minutes ago he'd been registered as NULL, "do not contact" — that was a rule he'd written himself 8 months back that had saved him. But the rule only blocked "contact," not "record." The step he took across the boundary, Spectra had saved a file on him.
Pending Review. Meaning no one had pulled this record yet, but it was there, waiting for whoever was on shift, or whoever had been waiting all along for him to slip, to click it open.
Lika's fingers moved on the gangway rail, like setting type on a keyboard that wasn't there.
This record couldn't stay.
【Ch. 033 End · Inside the Instance, Rift Memory Layer 1 → S-17-R Snowfield Boundary】
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