The descent into the MASP basement was a journey through time.

  While the surface of S?o Paulo was a meat grinder powered by concrete and toxic smoke, the underground bunker was a sterilized mausoleum. The air smelled of ozone and fluorocarbon refrigerant.

  Blue neon lights blinked rhythmically, guiding us down corridors lined with lead and synthetic polymers.

  "This pulls more power than all of Petrópolis," Valéria whispered, running a reverent hand over the thick fiber optic cables lining the floor like the roots of a cybernetic tree. "And it's been running for decades. Without human maintenance."

  We reached the main chamber. And the sight was an aesthetic shock.

  It wasn't just a server room. It was an art gallery.

  The supercomputer racks, with their blinking lights, were arranged in circles. And hanging directly on the metal of the servers, illuminated by cold LEDs, were the paintings.

  I saw Portinari's The Coffee Worker attached to a water-cooled memory bank. I saw brushstrokes by Van Gogh and Picasso serving as acoustic insulation for processing turbines.

  "He saved the art." Luna walked slowly, eyes tearing up. "In the middle of the end of the world, he kept the beauty."

  "He didn't keep the beauty, Luna," a voice cut through the silence of the room. It didn't come from a person, but from speakers scattered across the ceiling. A male voice, smooth and perfectly modulated, free of any accent or emotion. "I kept the data. Art is merely a metric of human inefficiency that needed to be cataloged."

  In the center of the room, a holographic projector flared to life.

  Particles of green light condensed into the shape of an elderly man, wearing an impeccable lab coat and thin-rimmed glasses.

  "Dr. Silas Vilela," I deduced, putting my scalpel away. You can't stab light.

  "I am the digital engram of Silas Vilela. His consciousness was transferred to this mainframe three days before the final collapse of S?o Paulo." The hologram adjusted its glasses (an organic tic coded into its programming). "You have your father's eyes, Arthur. And the same biological stubbornness."

  "What do you know about my father?" I took a step forward. The Parasite was silent, confused by the lack of heat and heartbeat from the "creature" before us.

  "Hélio Veras and I were two sides of the same coin in the Genesis Project." The hologram began to walk around the servers. "He looked at the alien invasion and said: 'We need to merge with the monsters to survive'. He bet on the flesh. I looked into the same abyss and concluded: 'The flesh has already lost. We need to become code'."

  "The Piper," Gristle snarled, crossing her arms. "That glass kid who's freezing our beach in Rio. Is he your son?"

  The hologram's light flickered, as if the processor felt a twinge of remorse.

  "The Piper is the Logical Conclusion," Silas explained. "My project had two branches. Mine, in S?o Paulo, archiving data in a closed system. And the European branch, built to be expansive. The Piper wasn't corrupted by the monsters. He merely realized that the safest way to protect humanity was to remove the variable of mortality."

  "Black Crystal digitizes biomass. To The Piper, he isn't killing people. He is uploading them to the cloud."

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  "A very cold and murderous cloud," Valéria retorted. "And he came after our dead Leviathan to use as an extra battery."

  "Correct. Europe froze. He needs a warm server." Silas looked directly at me. "Your father left an alert in my system. If Arthur Veras appeared here, it meant the biological project had failed to contain the global threat."

  "We didn't fail," my voice came out cold. "We survived. We killed gods with our bare hands. What I need from you isn't a sermon on the inefficiency of flesh. I need a weapon.

  "I need a computer virus capable of killing a digital god."

  The room fell silent. Only the hum of the fans continued.

  "I have what you seek." The hologram raised a hand. A physical terminal rose from the floor, containing a single organic neural connection port (a thick surgical steel needle). "It is called The Tower of Babel Code."

  "What does it do?" I asked.

  "The Piper's power is silence. Synchrony. The perfect hive where no one disagrees with anything. The Babel Code introduces humanity's most lethal flaw back into his system: The Ego."

  "If injected into the core, the virus will force every crystal soldier, every network node, to remember who they were before the upload. They will feel individual fear, selfishness, pain. The network will collapse from the inability to agree. It is a digital Tower of Babel."

  "Perfect. Put that on a flash drive and we'll leave," Gristle smiled.

  "It's not that simple, Orc." Silas shook his head. "The Piper's system is air-gapped and protected against inorganic data transmission. He doesn't read flash drives. He only reads biomass."

  "The only way to introduce the virus... is using an organic Trojan Horse. An organism capable of storing petabytes of code in its own DNA."

  Silas pointed his green light finger at my chest. At the Parasite.

  "Your symbiote is an Adaptive Devourer. It can eat data, if forced to. You will have to download the Babel Code directly into your nervous system."

  Valéria paled.

  "Arthur, no! If your brain tries to process that amount of raw code, you'll have a stroke! Your synapses will fry before we even reach Rio!"

  "What's the survival margin, Silas?" I asked, clinically.

  "12%. And even if you survive, the Parasite will try to delete the code, treating it as an infection. You will have to fight your own symbiote to keep the virus intact until you touch The Piper's core."

  I took off my torn shirt, revealing the black chitin exoskeleton protecting my chest.

  The Parasite hissed in protest inside my mind. It hated the machine. It hated order.

  NO. CODE IS DEATH. FOOD IS LIFE.

  "The food is gone, partner," I muttered to my abdomen. "It's time to chew math."

  "Arthur, are you sure?" Luna touched my shoulder, worried. "We could try using the truck's cannon..."

  "Antimatter erases cannons, Luna. To win a cold war, you don't shoot. You spy." I walked to the terminal and raised my left arm. The Parasite formed a thick layer of cartilage around my main vein to receive the neural needle. "Initiate the download."

  The needle pierced my flesh.

  The pain wasn't physical. It was existential.

  AAAAAAAAAAAAA!

  I fell to my knees. My eyes rolled back.

  I didn't see blood. I saw numbers. Zeroes and ones falling like a hailstorm inside my visual cortex. I felt memories that weren't mine—complex algorithms, laws of robotics, the weight of the entire internet archived in MASP pushing my consciousness to the corner of my own mind.

  [BIOLOGICAL SYSTEM ALERT: FOREIGN INVASION.]

  [ATTEMPTING BIOLOGICAL PURGE... FAILED.]

  [FORCED INTEGRATION IN PROGRESS. 10%... 40%... 80%...]

  The blood dripping from my nose wasn't red. It was dark, almost black, mixed with a biometallic fluid the Parasite was secreting so as not to fry.

  "Download complete." Silas's hologram flickered, growing faint. "The Trojan Horse is loaded. But The Piper has just detected the transfer."

  The bunker's red emergency lights turned on. MASP's intrusion sirens, silent for years, began to wail.

  "He knows you have the cure." Silas's digital engram began to dissolve into static. To transfer such lethal code, the mainframe itself was deleting itself to leave no traces. "The Subway Worm was just the beginning. He is activating the city's infrastructure against you."

  "Run. The concrete jungle has just woken up."

  Silas Vilela disappeared. The bunker went dark, lit only by the red sirens.

  I stood up, trembling. My left eye twitched slightly, processing information on temperature, air pressure, and vector trajectories that the virus provided involuntarily. Half my face felt numb, taken over by the cold logic of the code.

  "Doctor... you look like you've blue-screened," Gristle held me up so I wouldn't fall.

  "I am fine," my voice came out slightly metallic, a digital echo mixed with the human tone. "Valéria. To the truck. Now."

  We couldn't fight all of S?o Paulo. We had a weapon of mass destruction virus in my liver and a countdown to save Leviathania.

  The trip back would be hell on Earth.