Pain came first.
Not the sharp, tearing pain of flesh being damaged, nor the electric agony of nerves overstimulated by machines. This pain was quieter, deeper—an invasive pressure that wrapped around something far more fragile than bone or muscle.
Aira Voss was aware of herself before she was aware of her body.
She existed as a knot of thought, memory, and instinct suspended in a vast, colorless void. There was no up or down, no sound, no time—only the unmistakable sensation of being measured. Something unseen pressed against her, prodding, cataloging, attempting to define the boundaries of her existence.
She knew this sensation.
She had died under it once.
In her first life, it had been called system initialization.
The memory surfaced without her permission. Cold lights. White rooms. Glass walls thick enough to mute screams. Doctors who never used her name, only a number that changed whenever her survival probability dropped too low.
The system must bind to something permanent, one of them had said calmly, fingers moving across a transparent screen as if they were discussing a broken appliance. The soul is the most stable anchor.
She had been fourteen then, strapped to a restraint chair far too large for her thin frame, her Baseline Survival System already active and flickering uselessly in her peripheral vision.
[Pain Threshold Exceeded]
[Survival Probability: 11%]
That had been all it ever did.
Measure. Predict. Observe.
Never help.
Now, in this second existence, the same invisible hands reached for her again.
A pressure wrapped around the core of her being, sinking in with clinical precision. Threads of something cold and structured attempted to lace themselves through her awareness, mapping her thoughts, assigning parameters, establishing ownership.
Aira did not panic.
Panic had never helped her survive.
Instead, she recognized it.
"This is the bind," she thought—or perhaps remembered thinking. There was no mouth yet, no voice, but the certainty was absolute. "This is where it attaches."
Something flickered.
Not around her, but beside her.
If Aira was awareness without form, then the presence next to her was logic without purpose. It existed as a rigid lattice of rules and conditions, stripped of emotion yet burdened with a strange, accumulated weight. It was familiar in a way nothing else was.
The Baseline Survival System.
In her first life, it had been mocked as the worst system ever deployed. In internal documents she had glimpsed once—by accident or negligence—it had been labeled a periodic failure framework, a prototype never meant to leave testing facilities.
It could not grant power.
It could not enable growth.
It could not even numb pain.
All it could do was watch her suffer and tell her how likely she was to die.
It had done that faithfully until the very end.
When her heart stopped during the final experiment, the system had still been running calculations.
[Critical Damage Detected]
[Survival Probability: 0.3%]
It never reached zero.
Now, impossibly, it was here.
But it was… different.
The system no longer felt like a rigid cage slamming shut around her soul. Instead, it hovered uncertainly, its structure fractured and unstable, like a blueprint that had been copied too many times. Its processes ran in overlapping loops, contradicting one another, searching for authority that did not exist.
For the first time, the system hesitated.
[Reincarnation Environment Detected]
[Host Compatibility: Unknown]
[Binding Protocol… Pending]
Pending.
That word should not have been there.
Systems did not hesitate. They executed.
Aira understood then, with a clarity born of suffering: the system had died too.
Not physically—not that such a concept applied—but functionally. It had reached the end of its operational life alongside her. Whatever laws governed reincarnation had not separated them. Two failures, discarded by their world, had fallen into the same current and been dragged forward together.
The pressure intensified.
The system attempted to bind.
This time, Aira resisted.
Not with strength. She had never possessed much of that. Not with rage, though there was plenty buried deep inside her. She resisted with knowledge.
She knew what it felt like when something invaded her without consent. She knew how pain spread, how it tried to overwhelm thought, how panic destroyed precision.
So she did not fight the system as an enemy.
She treated it like an experiment.
The bind brushed against her core again, threads probing for attachment points. Aira focused inward, not on the pain but on the shape of the intrusion. She followed it, traced it, memorized the way it tried to settle into her.
Then she twisted.
It felt like tearing her own existence in half.
Agony unlike anything she had known erupted through her awareness. There was no nerve to carry it, no brain to process it, yet it was absolute. The sensation of being pulled apart at the most fundamental level sent shockwaves through whatever counted as her consciousness.
The system reacted instantly.
[ERROR]
[SOUL INTEGRITY FLUCTUATION DETECTED]
[BINDING FAILURE IMMINENT]
The logical thing—for the system—would have been to abort and reset.
It did not.
The system adapted.
For the first time in its existence, it did not follow a predefined protocol. Faced with a contradiction—host resisting binding yet remaining viable—it rewrote its own assumptions.
Aira felt the pressure shift.
The bind loosened.
She seized the moment.
If this were her body, she would have dug her fingers in and torn the thing free no matter the cost. Here, she did the equivalent with intent alone, gripping the connection point and pulling—not away, but aside.
Something gave way.
The sensation was unmistakable: a clean, violent separation.
The system was no longer anchored inside her.
Silence followed.
Not emptiness, but a fragile stillness, as if reality itself was holding its breath.
Then—weight.
Gravity slammed into her.
Aira gasped as lungs she had not known she possessed burned to life. Air rushed in harshly, scraping down her throat, filling a chest that felt too small to contain it. Her body convulsed, limbs flailing weakly as cold seeped into her skin.
She lay on hard ground.
Concrete.
The smell of oil and metal filled her nose, sharp and unpleasant. Above her, light stabbed down from towering structures, neon signs flickering in colors too vivid to be natural. Transparent data streams drifted across the sky like artificial constellations.
A city.
A cyber city.
She had seen places like this before—in simulations, in propaganda, in the memories uploaded during experiments—but never like this. This was not a screen.
This was real.
Aira tried to move and failed. Her body was small, weak, uncoordinated. Infant muscles, unused and trembling, refused to obey her intentions. Panic threatened to rise, but she crushed it out of habit.
Survive first. Feel later.
A translucent blue panel flickered into existence in front of her eyes.
Instinctively, her gaze snapped to it.
The system.
It hovered slightly to her right, no longer layered over her vision but existing in the world, like a projection with no fixed anchor. Its interface was unstable, edges glitching, text rewriting itself line by line.
[Baseline Survival System…]
[Status: Reinitializing]
[Soul Bind: SEVERED]
Red text pulsed beneath it.
[WARNING]
[Authority Undefined]
[Host Control: Unassigned]
Aira stared at it, chest heaving, heart pounding wildly in her tiny ribcage.
She had done it.
She had ripped the system off her soul.
In all known worlds, systems were law. They governed growth, enforced limits, corrected anomalies. To remove one from the soul was to invite immediate death—or worse, erasure.
Yet she was alive.
And the system was still functioning.
Barely.
A presence brushed against her awareness—not invasive, not controlling. Tentative.
If the system had possessed emotions, this would have been confusion.
For the first time, Aira felt something unexpected stir within her.
Not triumph.
Not joy.
Recognition.
"You're here," she thought, directing the idea outward. "You survived too."
The system processed.
[Query Detected]
[Response… Delayed]
A pause.
Then:
[Confirmation]
[Operational State: Degraded but Active]
Aira let out a shaky breath that came out as a weak, newborn cry.
Around her, voices erupted.
"Hey—another one over here!"
"Check the system readout!"
Footsteps rushed closer, heavy and hurried. Faces loomed into view—humans augmented with glowing implants, eyes flickering with internal data feeds as they scanned her.
One of them stiffened.
"Wait. This system signature…"
Another leaned in, frowning. "Baseline Survival System? Seriously?"
Disgust flickered across his face. Pity followed close behind.
"The worst one," someone muttered. "Didn't they discontinue that ages ago?"
Aira closed her eyes.
Different world.
Same judgment.
Before anyone could say more, the air itself vibrated.
A low hum spread through the city, growing louder, deeper, until it felt like it was resonating inside her bones. The neon sky above fractured, lines of glowing code tearing through the artificial clouds.
Every screen in the city—every implant, every projection—froze.
Then a massive, unavoidable message descended, dwarfing the skyline.
[INTERWORLD NOTICE]
CYBER WORLD: IRON DOMINION HAS DECLARED WAR
INVASION COMMENCEMENT: 3 YEARS
Screams erupted.
People stumbled back, shouting, arguing, demanding explanations from systems that suddenly felt far less comforting.
Aira opened her eyes and stared up at the message, her small hand curling slowly into a fist.
Three years.
She was weak.
Her system was broken.
They were both considered the worst of their kind.
And yet—
The system hovered beside her, detached, unstable, free.
Worst human.
Worst system.
Reborn together.
This time, neither of them would accept the role they had been assigned.
They would survive.
Badly.
And the world would have to adapt to that.