/~Contrario~/
There was no up, no down.
Just the sensation of being peeled, one layer at a time.
The world folded in on itself, light becoming shadow, data becoming sound, time was bending.
My heart pulsed. Stray's pulse echoed it, synchronized like twin heartbeats across a canyon of memory.
And suddenly...
I was somewhere else.
The lab was dim and humming with cold light.
Not the sterile gray of Irish Valley. This was different. Older. Tangled with wires. Dust in the corners. Terminals stacked on top of one another, fans spinning lazily in the overhead vents.
I stood….no I floated, unseen, like a ghost. And in front of me was the past.
A tall man hunched over a glowing rig. His back was stiff, lab coat wrinkled and spotted with old coffee stains. Code scrolled across the curved monitor in front of him, long strings of syntax too fast for most people to read, but I recognized parts of it.
He was writing base-level architecture. For Stray.
