The data lingered in his vision, sharp and persistent. Kelani squeezed his eyes shut, the grinding pain in his skull echoing the violence of the attack. When he opened them, the cyan text was gone. A wave of relief, thin and fragile, washed over him. It was just the injury, he thought. A phantom of a traumatized brain.
He forced himself to look back at the ruined diesel generator. The text snapped back into existence, a ghostly overlay of logic on a scene of chaos.
[OBJECT: DIESEL GENERATOR]
STATUS: Inoperable
INTEGRITY: 34% (Critical Failure)
He recoiled, stumbling back. This wasn't a fading afterimage. It was responsive. He was going insane. The blow to his head had broken something vital, and now his mind was projecting nonsense. He frantically looked away, staring at the blank, corrugated iron of the wall. The text faded. He looked back. It reappeared.
Panic began to curdle the cold rage in his stomach. He was wounded, hunted, and now, his own mind had betrayed him. He needed to think, to plan, but all he could focus on was this persistent, impossible hallucination. In a desperate attempt to find a flaw, he focused his gaze on a small, insignificant object on the floor: a short length of stripped copper wire.
The system responded instantly.
[OBJECT: COPPER WIRE]
COMPOSITION: 99.8% Cu, 0.1% Ag, 0.1% TRACE ELEMENTS
CONDUCTIVITY: 5.88 x 10^7 S/m
STATUS: SALVAGEABLE
Kelani froze. That… that was correct. The conductivity value for high-purity copper was almost exactly that. It was data he knew, but not data he could recall with such instant, decimal-point precision. It wasn't something a simple, stress-induced hallucination should be able to generate. His panic began to recede, replaced by a chilling, scientific curiosity. He was no longer thinking, I'm crazy. He was thinking, What is this?
He didn't have the luxury of an existential crisis. Bayo and his men could return. The government agents Bayo spoke of could be searching for him. He was a loose end. Broken or not, sane or not, he needed to disappear. He made a pragmatic bargain with himself, a conscious decision born of desperation. I'll figure out if my mind is broken later. Right now, this… thing… helps me see what's useful. I will use it to get safe.
He began to move, his actions deliberate. He looked at a bent steel sheet. [-1 CE] flashed beside the cyan bar in his vision as the analysis appeared. He felt a faint, almost imperceptible drain, like the effort of solving a small math problem. Another piece of evidence. Hallucinations didn't have a quantifiable energy cost. He tagged the sheet as salvageable and moved on, gathering wires, scavenged magnets, and the salvageable components from the generator. With each analysis, another point of Cognitive Energy drained away, and the subtle mental fatigue grew.
Carrying a heavy sack of his chosen materials, he slipped out of the ruined workshop and into the predawn gloom. He needed a fortress, a place to work unseen. He knew just the spot: an old municipal water pumping station on the edge of town, abandoned for years. As he moved through the sleeping streets, the system became a torrent. Every derelict building prompted a structural analysis; every pile of refuse offered a materials breakdown. The constant stream of data was an assault, a cacophony of information that gave him a pounding headache. He had to learn to control it. He focused, not on the data, but on the feeling of the system itself, and willed it to be quiet. To his surprise, it worked. The overlays faded, leaving only the idle CE bar. He had just learned his first act of control: turning down the volume.
The pumping station was perfect. A squat, concrete building surrounded by a rusted chain-link fence. After securing the main door with a scavenged length of rebar, he surveyed his new domain. He had shelter and a pile of scrap. It was a start. He dropped the sack, and the clatter of metal echoed in the cavernous space. His first priority, according to the mission slate that flickered in his vision, was to fabricate a basic toolset. He needed a forge.
His scientific mind took over completely now. He was no longer just a survivor; he was an experimenter, and the system was his primary instrument. He mentally summoned the [DESIGN] module. A translucent grid materialized in the air before him. He envisioned a small electric forge, powered by a makeshift battery, insulated with whatever he could find. A wireframe model shimmered into existence. This was the hypothesis.
He focused on the simulation tool. "Run simulation," he thought. [-25 CE] flashed in the corner of his eye, and the mental fatigue was no mere distraction this time; it was a physical wave of exhaustion that made him grit his teeth. The wireframe model glowed, and then, a section of the wall abruptly flashed a brilliant, angry red.
SIMULATION FAILED: THERMAL CONTAINMENT BREACH. REFRACTORY LINING INSUFFICIENT.
This was the moment. The irrefutable, falsifiable result. A wish-fulfillment hallucination would have succeeded. It would have given him the perfect answer because that's what he wanted. But this… this was a logic engine. It had identified a flaw his own hurried design had missed. It was real.
A grim smile touched his lips. He trusted it now. He scanned the dirt floor of the station. [ANALYSIS] flared to life: COMPOSITION: 78% SILICA, 16% CLAY, 6% ORGANIC MATTER. He had his refractory lining. He modified the blueprint, thickening the walls of the virtual forge with a new layer. He ran the simulation again. Another draining -25 CE. This time, the entire model flashed a cool, satisfying green. SIMULATION SUCCESSFUL.
An assembly guide appeared, projecting holographic instructions onto the very air he was working in. He followed them meticulously, using the generator's salvaged heating elements and wiring, packing the dense clay he dug from the floor to form the insulated chamber. When he was done, he connected his crude battery pack. The forge hummed to life, its interior glowing cherry-red, holding the temperature exactly as the simulation predicted.
The skepticism that had plagued him shattered into dust, replaced by an overwhelming sense of power. He didn't know the system's origin, but he could no longer deny its reality. Just then, a soft chime, audible only in his mind, drew his attention.
OBJECTIVE COMPLETE: [✓] Fabricate Basic Toolset <<
REAL-WORLD APPLICATION CONFIRMED <<
TECH TREE NODE UNLOCKED: [BASIC FABRICATION] <<
He picked up a piece of rebar, heated it in the glowing heart of his new forge, and began to hammer it into the shape of a tool on a solid chunk of concrete. Each ringing blow was a declaration. He was no longer a victim. He was not broken. He was the Architect, and he was building his new world, one piece of scrap at a time.