Riven hadn't slept.
Not because he was tired.
Because he was wired.
The Echo Cube sat in the center of ARK, floating peacefully. Too peacefully.
"One wrong signal and it could rewrite this entire station," he muttered.
ARK chimed in:
RECOMMENDATION: STABILIZATION DEVICE REQUIRED.BEGINNING: CODE ANCHOR DESIGN SEQUENCE.
They got to work.
Riven linked TOOLHAND to a neural-capture rig, feeding his thoughts, ethics, and intent into the design.
This wasn't just about coding a controller.
He needed to give the cube a rulebook—something to tell it what reality should be.
Every piece of logic. Every law of matter. Every memory of what things used to look like.
"We're not anchoring a machine," he whispered."We're anchoring reality."
By day, he coded.
By night, ARK simulated.
Failure. Retry. Glitch. Retry again.
Finally—he had a prototype.
A slim metallic bracelet.
Inside: a micro-core of his own neural imprint, bound to a self-healing quantum loop.
He slid it onto his wrist.
The cube reacted instantly—stopped scanning.Its glow dimmed, like it recognized him.
Ash walked in, arms crossed.
"That it?"
"Yeah," Riven said. "The anchor works. It listens to me now."
"Good. Because the Builder Council is watching. And if you screw this up..."
She didn't finish.
She didn't have to.
But Riven just stared at the cube, eyes lit with something wild.
"I'm not gonna screw up.I'm going to build something the world's never seen."