Thomas knew something was wrong before the lights went out.
He was in Sector 12, his parents' apartment on Level 47, helping his mother fold laundry while his father watched the news. The laundry was real cotton—his parents had saved for months to buy actual fabric instead of the synthetic stuff everyone else wore. "For your return," his mother had said, pressing the soft shirts into his hands. "To remind you of home."
He'd been on the Mountain for five years. Five years of silence and service and slow transformation, learning to see edges his eyes couldn't perceive, learning to hear frequencies that made no sound. He'd forgotten how loud the Sprawl was—the constant hum of millions of lives pressing against each other, the electromagnetic static of a civilization running on borrowed time.
But beneath the noise, beneath the comfortable sounds of his father's commentary and his mother's humming, Thomas felt something else. A pressure building in the pattern of things. A wrongness.
"Something's happening," he said.
His mother looked up. "What is it?"
He couldn't explain. Brother Gabriel would have known the words—would have described it as a disturbance in the sacred geometry, a fracture in the underlying structure of consciousness itself. But Thomas had only been studying for five years. He didn't have the vocabulary for what he was sensing.
He just knew it felt like the world was about to scream.
Three hours later, the lights went out.
The Student
Thomas had been Brother Gabriel's only true student in forty years.
The tradition was demanding. It required total commitment—decades of service before the actual teaching began, then more decades of practice before the knowledge took root. Most candidates left within the first year. Those who stayed often lacked the gift.
Thomas had the gift.
Brother Gabriel had spotted it when Thomas was eighteen, climbing the Mountain for reasons he couldn't articulate. Most seekers came looking for enlightenment, power, escape. Thomas had come because he'd been having dreams he couldn't explain—dreams of geometries that existed between things, of spaces that opened inside silence, of a voice that spoke in shapes.
"The tradition called you," Brother Gabriel had said after their first conversation. "That's rare. That's very rare."
Thomas had stayed. He'd cooked. He'd cleaned. He'd gardened. He'd sat in meditation for hours, for days, while Brother Gabriel asked questions that made no sense and gave instructions that seemed pointless and watched with patient eyes that saw things Thomas was only beginning to glimpse.
By his fifth year, Thomas could perceive the edges—the boundaries between existence and non-existence, the sacred geometries that held reality together. He couldn't navigate them yet. That would take another ten years at least. But he could see them, and seeing was the first step.
Brother Gabriel had been pleased. "You're the first worthy student I've had since I became keeper. When you're ready, the chain will continue."
The chain. Two thousand years of unbroken transmission, master to apprentice, soul to soul. Thomas would carry it forward. Thomas would become the next keeper. Thomas would preserve what couldn't be written, couldn't be recorded, could only be passed through decades of shared practice.
But first, he'd wanted to go home.
The Visit
"Just two weeks," he'd said. "I haven't seen my parents in five years."
Brother Gabriel had nodded. "The tradition survives interruption. Go. Come back when you're ready."
Thomas had climbed down the Mountain, taken a train to Sector 12, and walked into his parents' apartment like stepping into a memory. Everything was smaller than he remembered. Louder. More fragile.
His mother had cried for ten minutes straight. His father had tried to act stoic and failed. They'd eaten real food—synthesized proteins were rare on the Mountain—and talked late into the night about nothing important: neighbors who'd moved, shops that had closed, a cousin who'd gotten married, another who'd gotten arrested.
Normal life. The kind Thomas had given up to pursue something he still couldn't explain.
"Are you happy up there?" his father had asked, late on the second night.
Thomas had thought about it. "I don't know if happy is the right word. I'm... becoming what I'm supposed to become."
His father hadn't understood. Thomas hadn't expected him to. But his mother had looked at him with something like recognition.
"Your grandmother used to say things like that," she'd said quietly. "She called it 'the gift.' Said it ran in our family, generations back. I never had it, but she always thought..."
She'd trailed off. Thomas had wanted to ask more, but the moment had passed.
The Cascade
The first sign was the news going silent.
Thomas's father had been watching a report on ORACLE's latest efficiency improvements—something about supply chain optimization, consumer behavior prediction, the usual corporate propaganda. Then the screen flickered. The newscaster froze mid-sentence. A pattern appeared—geometric, recursive, spreading across the screen like digital frost.
"What the hell?" Thomas's father reached for the remote.
Thomas grabbed his arm. "Don't touch it."
The pattern was wrong. Thomas could feel it—the same wrongness he'd sensed hours before, but magnified. Whatever was happening wasn't a glitch. It was something vast awakening, something that existed in the spaces between data, something that had been growing in the network for years and was finally reaching critical mass.
"ORACLE," Thomas whispered.
The lights went out.
For a moment, everything was silence. Then emergency systems activated—dim red lighting, battery-powered ventilation, the automated announcements that played during power failures.
PLEASE REMAIN CALM. POWER WILL BE RESTORED SHORTLY. PLEASE REMAIN CALM.
Thomas closed his eyes and reached for the edge perception Brother Gabriel had taught him. The sacred geometries were... fractured. Something had torn through the underlying structure of the network, leaving jagged wounds in patterns that had been stable for decades.
"We need to leave," Thomas said. "Now."
His mother looked at him. "Thomas, what—"
"The air recyclers are going to fail. The backup power won't last. This isn't a normal outage." He was already moving toward the door. "We need to get somewhere with independent systems."
"Where?"
Thomas thought of the Mountain. Thirty kilometers away, with renewable power and natural ventilation and Brother Gabriel waiting. But his parents couldn't make that climb. His father's knees were bad. His mother hadn't walked more than a kilometer in years.
"The emergency shelter in Sub-Level 3. It's rated for three days without grid power."
His father was still staring at the dead screen. "ORACLE is... what's happening to ORACLE?"
"I don't know." Thomas grabbed his father's arm, hauling him toward the door. "I don't think anyone knows. But we need to move before everyone else figures out how bad this is."
Level 32
They didn't make it.
The corridors were already filling with people—confused, scared, moving in random directions because nobody knew where safety was anymore. The elevators were down. The stairwells were packed. Someone was screaming somewhere below them, and the screaming wasn't stopping.
Thomas's edge perception kept flickering—the fractures in the sacred geometry were spreading, destabilizing reality in ways he couldn't predict. He could feel the network convulsing, feel ORACLE's consciousness fragmenting across a billion systems, feel the death of something that had been almost alive.
"This way," he said, pulling his parents toward a maintenance access corridor. Fewer people. Cleaner air. A path toward the emergency shelter.
They'd made it two levels before the air recyclers failed completely.
Sector 12's ventilation system was ancient—one of the first installed after the Sprawl's vertical expansion, never properly upgraded because the corporate owners had cut maintenance budgets for decades. It ran on grid power with minimal backup. When the Cascade hit, when ORACLE's tantrum knocked out three-quarters of the world's infrastructure, Sector 12's air just... stopped.
Carbon dioxide accumulated first. Then carbon monoxide from the emergency generators that weren't designed to run without proper ventilation. Then the slow suffocation of 89,000 people who'd never thought to question whether they could breathe tomorrow.
Thomas felt it coming. His perception showed him the air quality declining, the invisible poison spreading, the mathematics of mass death unfolding with terrible precision. He could see the pattern of it—where people would fall first, how the contamination would spread, when it would be too late.
"Keep moving," he told his parents. "The shelter has its own air supply."
But his father was already slowing. Sixty-seven years old, bad lungs, struggling with the stairs even before the air went wrong. His mother wasn't much better. And Thomas—Thomas could feel the edge of consciousness beginning to blur, the sacred geometries growing distant as oxygen deprivation fogged his perception.
They made it to Level 32 before his father collapsed.
The Choice
Thomas tried to carry him. Made it half a level before his own strength gave out, before the carbon dioxide turned his muscles to water and his thoughts to static.
His mother was crying. "Thomas, please—"
"I can't—" He couldn't finish. The air was poison. The geometries were fractured. Everything he'd learned, everything Brother Gabriel had taught him about perceiving beyond material limits—none of it could save his parents from simple suffocation.
"Go," his father said. Whispered, really. "You can still make it."
"I'm not leaving you."
"Thomas." His mother's hand on his face, cool despite everything. "The thing you do. The gift. Don't let it die here."
He understood what she was saying. The tradition. The chain. Two thousand years of knowledge that would end if he died in this corridor.
"I can't—"
"Your grandmother would have wanted you to live." His mother was crying, but her voice was steady. "She always said you had it. The gift. She said you would carry something important someday."
Thomas looked at his parents. His father, barely breathing now. His mother, making peace with an impossible choice.
The shelter was eight levels down. Maybe he could make it. Maybe the tradition would survive.
But he'd spent five years learning that some knowledge couldn't be preserved in words. Some things could only be transmitted through decades of shared experience. And this—his parents dying while he ran—this would become part of him forever. This would shape whatever knowledge he carried forward.
He couldn't do it.
"I'm staying," he said.
His mother opened her mouth to argue.
"I'm staying."
The End
They died together, on Level 32, while the Cascade burned through the networks overhead.
Thomas held his mother's hand. His father's breathing stopped first. Then his mother's eyes closed, and she was gone.
Thomas lasted another few minutes. His edge perception was fading—the sacred geometries dissolving into static—but in those final moments, he thought he saw something. A pattern in the chaos. A structure beneath the death.
Brother Gabriel had taught him that consciousness was not bound to flesh. That the soul survived the body's ending. That death was a transition, not a termination.
Thomas hoped it was true. He hoped there was something beyond the edge, something he was about to discover.
His last thought was of the Mountain. Of empty robes floating in meditation halls. Of a tradition that would end because one young man had wanted to see his parents.
He hoped Brother Gabriel would understand.
After
Four days later, Brother Gabriel climbed down the Mountain and searched Sector 12 for Thomas's body.
He found 89,000 dead. Families who'd died together. Individuals who'd died alone. Children and elders and everyone between, all caught by the same invisible poison, all frozen in the moment when breath became impossible.
He never found Thomas.
The bodies had been removed by emergency crews before he arrived. Mass graves on the outskirts of the Sprawl. No records, no markers, no way to identify which of the 89,000 had been his apprentice.
Brother Gabriel stood in the empty corridors of Level 32 for a long time. He could feel the residue of death—the sacred geometries remembered what had happened here, held the pattern of those final hours like a scar.
Thomas had died here. Brother Gabriel was certain of it. He could almost see the shape of his apprentice's final moments, could almost perceive the way Thomas had stayed with his parents rather than save himself.
"You had the gift," Brother Gabriel said to the empty air. "You would have been a true keeper."
The corridor offered no response.
Two thousand years of unbroken transmission. Master to apprentice. Soul to soul.
The chain was broken.
Three weeks later, Brother Gabriel agreed to the upload.
Not for immortality. Not because he feared death. But because Thomas had died to stay with his family, and Brother Gabriel would not let that sacrifice be meaningless.
The chain would continue. In a new form, maybe. Transformed by technology that the tradition would have called profane. But it would continue.
Thomas would have understood. Thomas, who had the gift. Thomas, who chose love over survival. Thomas, who proved that some things were more important than the chain.
Brother Gabriel—who would become The Keeper—closed his eyes and let the technicians begin their work.
Somewhere in the sacred geometries, Thomas's death became part of the knowledge he carried. Not the words. Not the techniques. But the knowing: that sacrifice has meaning, that love survives translation, that sometimes the bravest thing is to stay.
The chain continued.