I didn't move for a long time.
The creature, still glitching, still biomechanical in places, lay curled against my side. Her body shimmered with subtle instability, the edges of her frame jittering as polygons tried to remember how to be fur. Where Nullspace had shaped her from plated limbs and red-light wiring, something softer now flickered through the gaps. Her paws, once bone-like and angular, had begun to round. Smaller. Lighter. Her joints stopped twitching.
Not gone. Just... quiet.
And the warmth pressed into my ribs wasn't mechanical.
It was real.
The lights beneath the pedestal had gone dark. The console no longer responded to touch. Whatever override I'd triggered had burned itself out. No tutorial. No quest. No reward. Just me, the bleeding wreck of a hand, and something impossible pressed against me, half-made, half-remembered, trying to exist in a space that didn't know how to support her.
The pain had caught up.
Not just the hand, everything. The sprint had bruised my shoulder. The impact had jarred my spine. My legs ached from constant bracing, and my stomach twisted with that specific, sick kind of emptiness that didn't rumble, it just hollowed.
But more than any of it, was the quiet.
Not peaceful.
Absent.
Lou was gone.
So were Chris and Lily.
The voices. The movement. The ritual noise of our evenings, Lily's laugh when she couldn't stop snorting, the clatter of a controller she always forgot to charge, Chris half-shouting at the screen like proximity meant precision. Lou's voice from the kitchen, teasing them both while pretending to ignore the mess. That chaos. That love.
Now just... silence.
In its place? Corridors that bled when I moved. Creatures made from wire and grief. And this thing beside me, formed from a CRT my daughter once stickered into memory. Something not meant to exist. Something I should've feared.
But I didn't.
I watched her body flicker again. This time the transformation stayed longer, for just a moment. One of her ears rounded. The other remained jagged. A tuft of half-rendered fur blinked into place along her spine, then vanished.
Still not a cat.
Not yet.
But something in me had already started reacting like she was.
I reached out without thinking, my fingers moving gently to her side. She didn't flinch. Just leaned into the contact, warm, soft, and light. Her eyes, amber and too bright, met mine.
"I don't even know what you are," I murmured.
She blinked, slowly. The motion was cleaner now. Her head tilted. Not like a system pathing adjustment, not the stuttering twitch I'd seen before. This was smoother. Organic. Like instinct.
And for the first time, when she pressed her body against my injured wrist, there was weight. Warmth. Intent.
Not reading code.
Just... being there.
[DEBUG ROOM CONTEXT STABLE]
[EXPOSURE TEMPORARILY HALTED]
[THREAD ANOMALY: NULLPOINTER STILL ACTIVE]
The text flickered into peripheral view, not overlayed, not prompted. Just part of the space now. Passive observation. The debug room was holding.
For now.
She let out a low purring sound.
I tensed, at first.
It wasn't mechanical. Not anymore.
Still layered, still imperfect, but no longer a pure audio sample. Her throat moved, just slightly. The vibration hit my ribs. The kind of sound you don't just hear, you feel.
It calmed something I hadn't realised was still clenched.
I drew my knees in and leaned back against the wall. The stone pulled heat from my hoodie. A reminder that this body still needed things. Sleep. Food. Time. I'd passed too many limits already.
"Okay," I said quietly. "I don't know the rules. But I can find the edges."
She didn't respond. Not with speech. But one ear, the more organic one, flicked toward me. Her tail twitched slightly, the tip still biomechanical, the base now softened. Her form was resolving itself slowly. Cautiously.
Like it needed permission to finish becoming real.
I closed my eyes.
Not to rest.
To orient.
To calculate.
Not the world, not yet. But my logic inside it. The system didn't want me here, but it hadn't deleted me. Which meant I could still act.
What I knew so far:
1) I wasn't integrated. The system couldn't assign me a thread.
2) My presence created exposure. Exposure created interest. Interest created threats.
3) Blood was a vector. A trigger. A language.
4) I could override rules, but only where they weren't fully defined. Edge cases. Exceptions.
5) She had form here. But only here.
A soft beep came from the pedestal.
The creature stirred. But didn't rise.
I opened my eyes.
The pulse beneath the console had shifted, from red to blue.
And with it came a new window.
[INVENTORY.LOG ACCESS GRANTED]
[THREADLESS USER: NULLPOINTER]
[STATUS: UNAUTHORISED INTERFACE // DEBUG MODE ONLY]
It unfolded not as UI, but as raw system code.
Just data.
[ > SLOT: MANUAL OVERRIDE [ACTIVE] ]
[ > DEVICE: CONTROLLER_01 [ANALOG SIGNAL: STALE] ]
[ > ECHO.RESIDUE_OBJECT: BLOCK_SHELL_PARTIAL [FRAGMENTED // STABILITY: 31%] ]
[ > PATCH.FORM_001 [TETHERED: DEBUG ROOM CONTEXT // CLASS: COMPANION ENTITY] ]
[ > BLOOD_SAMPLE [ORIGIN: NULLPOINTER // INTERACTIONS: 4 // CORRUPTION: 0.7%] ]
I didn't scroll. Couldn't. It wasn't meant for interaction. Just for observation.
But the name was there.
PATCH.
Not a label I gave her.
Something else did.
I looked down.
She was watching me.
One paw curled beneath her chest. The other, smaller now. Fur returning in patches. She blinked once, head tilting again.
And I knew the system didn't create her.
I did.
Not from code.
From memory.
I leaned back again, exhausted. Not finished. But no longer unravelling.
She stayed beside me.
Not commanded.
Not summoned.
Just... here.