Stuck in an Island with Twelve Beautiful Women
Chapter 830 - 832

Chapter 830: Chapter 832

"Are you sure this thing will hold?" he asked.

Maye didn’t turn. "It’s not a matter of sure. It’s a matter of options. And this is the only one we’ve got left."

He leaned against the railing, eyes fixed on the sphere. "How do you even test something like that?"

"We run simulations. Thousands of them. Stress points, overload thresholds, conceptual resistance metrics. We even introduced minor conscious interference to see how the matrix holds against psychic feedback loops."

"That’s all fancy language for guessing."

"Educated guessing. We’re not amateurs, Darren."

"I’ve seen gods fall for less."

She finally looked at him. "You didn’t come back just to criticize us."

"No," he said quietly. "I came back because I felt it moving again."

Maye studied him, her face unreadable. "It’s not fully awake."

"Not yet," Darren agreed. "But it knows we’re here."

Later that night, Lin approached him in the mess hall. It was nearly empty, and Darren was halfway through a cup of something warm but tasteless when she sat across from him.

"I heard you were a soldier," she said without preamble.

He shrugged. "Wasn’t much of one."

"You fought. That counts."

"I followed Jude. That’s all it ever was."

She tilted her head, watching him. "You think that’s what loyalty is? Following someone into death?"

He met her eyes. "Loyalty is staying when every part of you wants to run."

Lin sat back, nodding. "Then maybe we need people like you more than we thought."

They didn’t talk much after that, but she started checking on him every morning. Small nods. Silent acknowledgment. It was the closest thing to peace Darren had felt in a long time.

The third day after the extraction, Rojin called an emergency meeting. Darren arrived to find Maye already mid-sentence, projecting visual data into the air, a sequence of wave patterns that twisted into impossible spirals.

"It started two hours ago," she said. "Unregistered energy bursts, synchronized across multiple key points worldwide, mostly locations with residual Helix influence. Old labs, abandoned cores, even a couple of places we didn’t think it had touched."

Darren narrowed his eyes. "Like it’s testing the walls."

"Exactly."

"And?"

"And one of the bursts matched a signature in our own matrix."

Rojin stepped forward, his artificial arm glowing faintly. "That means either it sensed what we’re building... or something inside our matrix is broadcasting."

Lin cursed under her breath. "A leak?"

Maye didn’t answer. Her fingers moved quickly, bringing up internal logs, filter readings, and timestamped anomaly spikes. Darren watched as the room filled with data none of them could make sense of quickly enough.

"It’s learning faster than we are," he said. "Jude used to say it didn’t think like us. That it didn’t process time the same way. It could spend a century sleeping and wake up knowing everything that happened in between."

Maye stopped typing. "Then we’re already behind."

"No," Darren said. "Not yet. But if we don’t act soon, we won’t catch up."

They accelerated the seal development, burning through their resources at double the pace. Teams worked in shifts without rest, and even Darren found himself pulled into the loop, offering memories, confirming symbol structures, helping recalibrate the harmony layers. He didn’t understand all of it, but some of the shapes felt right, like echoes of a song he hadn’t heard in years.

A week passed before the final integration began. Maye looked older, shadows under her eyes, shoulders tense. Darren had seen that look before. It was the same one Jude had the night before sealing himself away.

"Who’s the anchor?" he asked quietly.

She didn’t answer at first. Then, "There won’t be one. That’s the whole point of the synthetic structure. We’re decoupling the human element entirely."

"Then what’s the fail-safe?"

She looked at him, and he knew. "There isn’t one."

The silence stretched between them like a wire pulled too tight.

"You’re gambling everything," he said.

"No," she replied. "I’m doing the only thing left."

They initiated the seal on a cold morning, the kind that turned breath into mist and made the world feel a little less real. Darren stood beside Lin as the power surged through the facility, the lights dimming, the ground trembling. Inside the chamber, the sphere expanded, layers unfolding like petals, symbols burning across its surface in golden light. For a moment, it was beautiful.

Then it cracked.

The explosion wasn’t physical. It was psychic, conceptual, a shattering of intent. Alarms blared. Lights turned red. People screamed. Darren clutched his head as the whisper returned, louder now, like something laughing inside his mind.

The sphere pulsed wildly, the symbols turning dark, twisting. Maye shouted orders, but the machines no longer responded. One of the technicians collapsed, blood dripping from his nose.

"It’s hijacked the construct!" Rojin yelled. "It’s reversing the pattern!"

Darren didn’t think. He ran.

Through the emergency tunnels, past screaming personnel, into the chamber itself. Heat and static scorched his skin, but he didn’t stop. He knew what it needed. What it was missing. A focus. A will.

He reached the base of the sphere and slammed his hand against it.

For a second, everything stopped.

Then the seal responded.

Symbols shifted. Light changed. The sphere pulled him in, not his body, but his essence, his mind, his memories, everything he was. He saw Jude again. Not real, not alive, but present. A thought caught in the machine.

"You’re a fool," the memory said.

"I learned from the best."

The Helix surged.

Darren gave everything.

When he woke, the chamber was quiet.

The sphere floated silently, intact, glowing softly.

Maye stood nearby, blood on her sleeve, staring at him.

"You did it," she said.

"No," he replied weakly. "We did."

She helped him to his feet. "The seal’s stable. It responded to you. You bridged the gap."

"Then it still needs people," he murmured. "No matter how smart the machines are."

They didn’t celebrate. Too many were lost. Too much had changed. But the world outside never knew how close it had come.