End of The Line // 0x44 // Restriction

White all around them again.

It still felt artificial in the same deeply unsettling way. Walls too smooth to belong to any real interior. Light too clean to come from actual fixtures. Space that felt measured by thought instead of architecture. The door remained exactly where it had always been - white, seamless. Impossible to tell apart from the wall around it unless you already knew it was there.

Void sat on the floor with her back against the wall, one knee raised lazily. "Well," she muttered tiredly. "Proud of yourself?"

Aura stood near the center of the room with her arms folded tightly. She looked less energetic than before, but somehow more dangerous for it. Her projection glitched subtly around the edges whenever her emotions spiked, little distortions that bent the air around her silhouette. "Me?" she snapped. "You're the one who called me a fucking tumor."

Void let her head thunk lightly against the wall behind her. "Yeah," she said. "And your response was trying to fry our nervous system in public."

"OUR nervous system?" The bitterness in Aura's voice could've stripped paint. "Funny how it's suddenly shared property again."

Void exhaled through her nose, obviously too tired for this version of the argument. The sharp one, where both of them reached for the deepest cut first. "You know what?" she muttered, pushing herself upright. "This thing you're doing right now? The spiraling? The emotional detonation every time something hurts?"

"Fuck you."

"You think I don't remember?"

Aura looked away.

"You'd spiral over one awkward conversation," Void said more quietly now. "Convince yourself people secretly hated you. Pull away before they could leave first."

"Fuck. YOU!" Aura's projection flickered.

"No, seriously," Void continued, calmer now. "Panic attacks over tiny mistakes. Treating every relationship like it was seconds from collapse. One bad day and suddenly the whole fucking world's ending. She paused for a beat. "I didn't create your damage," Void finished. "I inherited it."

That one hit hard enough to silence the room. Aura's fists clenched. For a moment she looked genuinely hurt beneath the anger, and Void immediately regretted saying it out loud. She turned around in fear of something being thrown at her and noticed a second door behind her.

Her mood instantly shifted from fear into interest. "That wasn't there before."

Deep purple instead of white, edges outlined by faint geometric seams that pulsed every few seconds like a sleeping machine trying not to dream. No handle or hinges. Just a recessed rectangular slot beside it that looked almost organic, like the room had grown an infection.

Aura glanced towards it. "No shit, Sherlock."

Void approached carefully. The purple surface seemed colder somehow despite being part of a room that technically didn't exist. Up close, the faint green seams pulsed rhythmically beneath the iridescent finish. Like a heartbeat.

"How about this," she said without turning around. "We get out of this fucking nightmare first and continue emotionally maiming each other afterwards in meatspace."

Aura stayed quiet for a few seconds. "Fine," she muttered eventually. "Temporary alliance."

The door started pulsing more intensely. "Still think you're emotionally repressed enough to qualify as infrastructure though."

"Noted."

Void planted both palms against the door's surface and shoved.

Nothing.

No movement, not a sound. Not even resistance. As if the door simply refused to acknowledge physics.

She stepped back and drove her shoulder into it harder. With - rather unsurprisingly - the same result.

"Right," she hissed, rubbing her shoulder. "Symbolic brain prison. Forgot the rules."

Aura wandered closer, watching her attempt with visible disappointment. "You're really leaning into the whole 'brute force through emotional problems' thing, huh?"

"Got a better idea?"

Aura rolled her eyes.

"You know," she said slowly, "for someone with military chrome in her skull, you're surprisingly bad at noticing obvious tech."

"What now?"

Aura pointed towards the recessed slot beside the door.

Void blinked.

A tiny access port sat embedded inside it, nearly invisible against the surrounding surface.

"Ta-da," Aura said smugly. "And before you ask, yes, congratulations. You have a personal link now."

Void stared at the port.

"You're joking."

"Nope. Brain surgery DLC."

"This room isn't even real."

"And yet the fake door in the fake room has a fake fucking socket. Roll with it, grandma."

Void crouched beside the slot slowly.

"Wow, seriously" Aura said softly. "You genuinely missed that."

"Shut up." A thin filament extended from beneath the skin near her wrist with insect-like smoothness, unfolding into a silver datajack cable tipped with glowing contacts.

"No, no, this is amazing. You spent two years acting like some ultra-competent operator and you missed the only visible interface in the room."

"I hate everything about this."

"I know," Aura replied warmly. "It's adorable."

Void grimaced at Aura. "Still gonna complain about this being attached to me now?"

"Coward," Aura pouted.

Void plugged the cable into the port.

The white room dissolved instantly.

Darkness unfolded around them first. Then came a grid. An infinite black plane stretched beneath Void's feet, lined with glowing golden geometry that extended to the horizon in every direction. Above her, enormous green rings of data rotated silently through the emptiness, layered one inside another like the internal mechanisms of some impossible machine. Streams of encrypted text drifted between them in slow spirals.

Familiar corporate branding appeared everywhere: floating panels, data pillars, even the rings themselves. They burned faintly into the grid itself.

Void went still. "...oh fuck."

Aura appeared beside her a second later, staring upwards in fascination.

"Okay," she whispered. "This is cool as hell. Ihara and Grubb really went balls to the wall."

Void didn't answer immediately - she recognized it. Not personally. But she'd seen fragments of this architecture before buried in old encrypted BBS leaks. Half-finished posts from dead netrunners discussing black-budget Militech cognition systems before disappearing off the Net forever.

This wasn't normal security - this was military-grade neural partitioning. It was a failsafe containment system.

The grid pulsed once beneath their feet.

Then the warnings appeared.

The atmosphere changed immediately, as the distant rings overhead accelerated slightly.

The grid lines beneath them switched from soft gold into sharp electric red.

Somewhere out in the dark, something moved. Aura noticed it first.

"...Void?"

Tall shapes emerged between the distant pillars of data. Humanoid in the same way mannequins were. Their bodies looked assembled from shards of black armor suspended around glowing internal skeletons of cyan code. Faces polygonal and featureless except for clusters of bright optic points burning cold blue through the darkness.

Void felt her stomach tighten. "Fuck. It's ICE. Our own cyberware seems to dislike our shit now."

Aura slowly turned her head towards Void. "Yeeeah. About that tumor..." she drawled.

The nearest construct tilted its head mechanically towards them.

Aura took one slow step backwards. "Uh-oh..."

The construct moved in a slow, deliberate motion, like a predator that already knew its prey doesn't have anywhere to go.

Void grabbed Aura's wrist instinctively and pulled her back.

The moment her fingers touched her, something strange happened. Not pain. Rather, recognition. A pulse of shared instinct flashed between them so quickly it barely registered before it disappeared again.

Aura felt it too.

Both of them looked at each other briefly.

Then the grid erupted. Lines of red light shot upwards around them, forming towering walls of rotating code that slammed into place one after another until a maze surrounded them completely.

The constructs began walking forward through the corridors at an unhurried pace.

"Cunts sure as fuck ain't in a rush." Void's breathing slowed automatically. "Good... Buys us some time." Thinking mode. Her eyes scanned the walls as streams of information began populating across her vision instinctively.

Authentication trees.

Recursive encryption loops.

Behavioral adaptation layers.

The walls weren't static. They were changing constantly, rearranging themselves based on observation.

"Adaptive architecture," she muttered.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning the maze is watching us while it rebuilds itself."

Aura made a face. "That feels deeply invasive for something designed to work alongside my body."

"OUR body, idiot," Void corrected her, as she stepped towards one of the glowing walls carefully and pressed her fingers against it.

The moment she touched it, data detonated through her nervous system. Security logic stacked into recursive layers so dense they stopped feeling like programming and started feeling biological. Every pathway branched into three more, and every solution generated new locks.

The system wasn't trying to stop intrusion - that would be too computationally expensive against a biological mind. It was trying to overwhelm cognition itself.

Void hissed softly and pulled back as a faint trickle of blood slipped from one nostril.

Aura's expression shifted immediately. "...that can't be healthy."

Void wiped the blood away with the back of her hand. "Chill, it's fake. Like this whole fucking thing." She reached towards the wall again - this time a little bit slower, she pulled at one of the floating logic branches suspended inside the structure.

The moment she moved it incorrectly, the entire wall reacted, and the grid beneath them flashed crimson. A sharp burst of static tore through Void's skull hard enough to make her stumble sideways.

The ICE construct started moving faster, but they were still extremely controlled in their motion.

Void steadied herself against the wall. "Motherfucker..."

Aura watched the shifting maze carefully now, a little less manic. More focused. Her eyes tracked the movement of the code instead of the walls themselves. Then she frowned.

"Wait."

Void barely heard her, still trying to unravel one of the encryption branches without triggering another response cascade.

"No, hold on." She and touched Void's hand. "Stop doing what you're doing." She let go and stepped closer to the wall. The rotating code reflected faintly in her eyes. "It's not random."

Void grimaced. "What isn't?"

Aura pointed upward towards the giant rotating rings suspended above them.

"Expand, contract..." A short beat passed, before Aura concluded: "It's breathing... Her expression slowly changed. "...thinking."

Void looked at her.

"Not like a computer," Aura continued quietly, turning to Void "Like us."

The giant object kept approaching in the distance.