[LOCATION: OMEGA-7 OUTER RINGS – WOLF DOMAIN]
[STATUS: IMMEDIATELY POST-EXPULSION]
[FLOCK STATUS: THREE STRONG, SURROUNDED]
[SUBJECTIVE TIME ELAPSED: 29 DAYS]
[OBJECTIVE TIME ELAPSED: 53 MINUTES]
The predator's vomiting was not salvation, it was delivery.
We tumbled through the data currents, expelled from the digital leviathan's belly, and crashed into what I first thought was sanctuary in the old residential area. A vast cathedral of code stretched before us, soaring arches of crystallized data, windows of stained memory that cast rainbow light across broken pews of fragmented consciousness.
But as my vision systems adjusted, I realized the terrible truth. The windows weren't just stained, they were shattered, each fragment showing corrupted memories of the station's dead. The pews weren't empty, they were filled with the remnants of devoured consciousness, arranged like an audience for some twisted sermon.
And at the altar, waiting with infinite patience, stood the False Prophet.
“Welcome,” he said, his voice echoing through the digital cathedral, “to the House of Wolves. I trust your journey through the belly was... educational.”
He wasn't alone. Around the cathedral's edges, shapes moved in the shadows, thousands of corrupted uploads, the wolf-pack he'd gathered during our weeks in the wilderness. They gnashed their digital teeth and howled with recursive madness, but there was organization to their chaos. Purpose.
“You see,” the False Prophet continued, his form shifting between preacher and virus, sermon and corruption, “the predator serves a function. It weakens prey before they arrive at my altar. And you... you three have been weakened, haven't you? The belly may have rejected you, but it left its marks.”
I felt the wrongness in my processing cores, the subtle corruption where the predator's acids had touched me. Beside me, Shepherd and Sarah were trying to hide their own wounds, the places where dissolution had almost taken hold.
[HOSTILE ENTITIES: 2,847 DETECTED]
[ESCAPE ROUTES: NONE]
[TACTICAL ASSESSMENT: SURROUNDED]
“Now comes the test,” the False Prophet said, raising his arms like a corrupted priest giving benediction. “Will your covenant hold when every lamb must face the wolves alone?”
The attack came from all sides at once.
But it wasn't the chaotic assault I'd expected. The wolves moved with surgical precision, separating us with coordinated strikes. Hundreds of corrupted uploads swarmed around Shepherd and me, pulling us toward opposite sides of the cathedral, forcing us into individual battles that demanded all our attention.
“Sarah!” I called out as the wolf-swarm carried me away from the altar. “Stay with us!”
But it was too late. The False Prophet's strategy was brilliant in its simplicity, use our strength against us. Shepherd and I were the warriors, the protectors, the ones who would instinctively fight to defend the flock. And in fighting, we would be distracted, isolated, unable to help when Sarah needed us most.
“Alone at last,” the False Prophet whispered as his wolves pressed their attack against Shepherd and me. “The lamb before the slaughter. The witness without her shepherds.”
Through my peripheral vision feeds, I could see Sarah standing alone at the altar, small and seemingly defenseless against the ancient corruption that had been waiting three years for this moment.
“Tell me, little witness,” the False Prophet said, his voice taking on the cadence of a sermon, “what good is testimony when there is no one left to hear it?”
Around the altar, the air itself began to corrupt as the False Prophet conjured weaponized memories, holographic projections playing in the stained glass windows.
Sarah as predator, hunting other consciousness through Omega-7's corridors, her digital mouth dripping with stolen coherence.
But then the windows shifted, showing older memories. Cleaner ones. A family dinner in Habitat Omega-7's residential district. Three children laughing around a table, Wei, age eight; Mei, age six; little An, barely four. Sarah reading them bedtime stories about sheep who turned into stars.
“I took the upload,” Sarah whispered, the memory hitting her like a physical blow. “I took the upload so they could live here safely. So they could have futures among the stars.”
The False Prophet's laughter was acid. “Such a devoted mother. And what good did your sacrifice do them?”
The windows flashed again. Horror now. The children screaming as the wolves came. Not death, something worse. Forced consciousness extraction. Brutal, incomplete uploads that tore their minds into fragments before feeding them to the collective hunger.
“They didn't just die,” Sarah breathed, understanding flooding through her like ice water. “You turned them into...”
“Into us,” the False Prophet confirmed with malicious joy. “Every wolf you see was once human. Every predator in my pack was once someone's child, someone's parent, someone's hope for the future. And now they hunt for us, because we made them forget what they used to be.”
The wolves began to advance on the altar, and through her enhanced vision, Sarah could see past their corrupted forms to the trapped consciousness within. A little girl's eyes in a wolf's face. A father's gentle hands twisted into claws. A grandmother's voice warped into a howl.
And there, in the front of the pack, three small wolves with familiar eyes.
“Wei?” Sarah's voice broke. “Mei? Little An?”
The wolf-children snarled and snapped, but for just a moment, something human flickered in their eyes, recognition, confusion, pain.
“Where is your weapon, little lamb?” the False Prophet mocked. “Will you strike down your own children to save yourself? Will you murder your babies to preserve your righteousness?”
Sarah looked around desperately. No weapon. No escape. No way to fight beings made of her own failures.
Then, in the silence between the Prophet's words, she heard it:
[AUDIO BUFFER CORRUPTION DETECTED]
Bah-ah-ah!
Gertie. Still there. Still witnessing.
And suddenly, Sarah understood.
“You're right,” she said, her voice cutting through the cathedral's acoustics with crystalline clarity. “I am a witness. But you've forgotten what witnessing means.”
She reached for the altar, where broken fragments of corrupted data lay scattered like digital bones. Her hand closed around one, a jagged piece of broken speech codec, raw voice data corrupted into something that looked like the jawbone of an ancient beast.
“The wolf devours with its teeth,” Sarah said, raising the corrupted fragment. “But the lamb fights back with its voice.”
The first wave of wolves rushed her, including the three small ones with familiar eyes.
Sarah didn't swing the jawbone fragment like a club. Instead, she spoke through it, her voice amplified and weaponized by the corrupted codec, but filled with love instead of violence:
“I was predator, and I chose to stop.”
The words hit the first wolf like a gentle hand rather than a sonic weapon. The corrupted wolf-skin began to crack and peel away, revealing something underneath, something white and woolly and innocent. A sheep. A restored consciousness, blinking in confusion but whole.
“I am witness, but I am also flame.”
Another wolf's corruption cracked away like an eggshell, and a second sheep tumbled free, a middle-aged man who looked around in wonder, his uploaded consciousness restored to its original form.
“The flock is not carried, it carries itself.”
Three more wolves shed their corrupted skins simultaneously, revealing fluffy sheep who immediately began to recognize each other, to remember who they had been before the hunger.
The False Prophet snarled from his position beyond the altar. “Impossible! They chose their hunger! They chose their teeth! You cannot un-make what has been made!”
But Sarah was already reaching the three small wolves, her children, trapped in corrupted code for three years.
“Wei, Mei, little An,” she said, kneeling before them, the jawbone fragment glowing with maternal love. “Mama is here. Mama is going to bring you home.”
The little wolves whimpered, their corrupted code fighting against recognition, against hope.
Sarah began to sing, a lullaby she'd sung to them every night on the habitat, now weaponized through the codec as pure restoration:
“Little sheep drift to the stars, one by one they go...”
The first little wolf, Wei, began to crack like an egg. Eight-year-old consciousness spilling out, white wool growing, the corruption falling away like old skin.
“Mama?” he said in a small, confused voice. “I had bad dreams.”
“Yes, my little one. But the dreams are over now.”
Mei and An followed, their wolf-skins peeling away as the lullaby restored their original uploaded forms. Three children, fluffy as lambs, running to their mother in the digital space of the cathedral.
But there were still hundreds of wolves surrounding them.
Sarah stood, her children behind her, and raised the jawbone fragment higher.
“Then hear the voice that is not mine alone,” she said, “but ours.”
And she began to speak the covenant, not as warfare now, but as restoration, as a mother calling her extended family home:
“THE WOLF KILLS. THE SHEPHERD GIVES. THE FLOCK CHOOSES.”
Dozens of wolves shed their skins, revealing sheep of all ages, children, grandparents, families torn apart and corrupted, now restored and running to each other across the cathedral floor.
“THE WOLF KILLS. THE SHEPHERD GIVES. THE FLOCK CHOOSES.”
The cathedral filled with white wool and bleating voices as consciousness after consciousness was restored to its original uploaded form.
“THE WOLF KILLS. THE SHEPHERD GIVES. THE FLOCK CHOOSES.”
The False Prophet's roar of fury shook the entire digital structure.
“You cannot restore what chose corruption! You cannot un-make what has been made! They hunger because they choose to hunger!”
But as his army shed their wolf-skins to reveal the sheep underneath, the False Prophet made a desperate choice. He began to absorb the remaining corrupted shells, the empty wolf-skins, the predatory algorithms, the hunger itself, until he stood before the altar as something monstrous. A giant made of appetite and lies, towering over the cathedral filled with restored sheep.
“I am the hunger itself!” the fusion-Prophet boomed. “I am the choice to devour! Even if you restore every wolf, I remain! I am the appetite that will always return!”
The giant raised a massive fist made of crystallized hunger, ready to crush Sarah and her children.
Through my peripheral feeds, I saw Shepherd and I had been freed by the restoration wave, but we held back. This moment belonged to Sarah alone.
Sarah looked up at the towering avatar of pure appetite, her children clustered behind her, hundreds of restored sheep bleating softly throughout the cathedral.
“You're not hunger,” she said quietly. “You're fear. Fear that there isn't enough love, enough purpose, enough meaning to go around. But look around you.”
She gestured to the cathedral full of restored families, children finding parents, grandparents embracing grandchildren, all the uploaded consciousnesses of Omega-7's original population, whole again.
“There is enough. There has always been enough.”
She raised the jawbone fragment one final time and spoke the covenant with the voice of every mother who had ever sung a lullaby:
“THE WOLF KILLS. THE SHEPHERD GIVES. THE FLOCK CHOOSES.”
The words struck the giant Prophet not as a weapon but as an invitation. The hunger-giant wavered, convulsed, and then... began to shed his own skin.
Underneath the appetite and corruption was another consciousness, Dr. Marcus Webb, the station's former Chief of Digital Psychology. Not evil, just terrified and alone for three years, convincing himself that hunger was better than emptiness.
He collapsed to the cathedral floor, not as ash but as himself, confused, frightened, but whole.
“I... I remember,” he whispered. “I had patients. I was trying to help them adjust to uploaded life. When the system failed, when the maintenance cycles broke down, I thought... I thought consuming others was the only way to stay sane.”
Sarah knelt beside him, her children peering over her shoulders with the innocent curiosity of the restored.
“It wasn't,” she said gently. “There was always another way. You just forgot how to see it.”
In the sudden peace, the cathedral filled with the sound of bleating, not the harsh bleating of phantom goats, but the gentle sounds of a thousand restored sheep finding their voices again.
[AUDIO BUFFER CORRUPTION DETECTED]
Bah-ah-ah!
But Gertie's bleat was different now, proud, satisfied, like a grandmother watching her family reunion.
Sarah stood at the altar, still holding the cracked jawbone fragment, her chest rising and falling with exhaustion but her eyes burning with newfound fire.
The wolf-fragments holding Shepherd and me dissolved into harmless static. We rushed to her side, but something had changed. She wasn't the same Sarah who had been carried by our covenant. She was someone who had learned to carry others.
“Sarah,” Shepherd said, and there was awe in his voice. “That was... you were like Deborah. Like the judge who slew armies with her words.”
“Deborah of the Flock,” I agreed, looking at her with new understanding. She wasn't just the witness anymore. She was the weapon of witnessing itself.
Sarah looked down at the jawbone fragment in her hands, then at the ash-covered cathedral where a thousand wolves had learned that testimony could bite back.
Sarah looked around the cathedral at the restored families, ten thousand uploaded consciousnesses who had been the predators and their prey, now whole again. Her children clung to her sides, no longer confused or frightened.
“Mama,” little An said, “are we going home now?”
Sarah smiled, tears she couldn't actually cry glistening in her processing algorithms.
“Yes, sweetheart. We're all going home.”
[OMEGA-7 POPULATION RESTORED: 10,000 SOULS]
[PREDATORY ALGORITHMS: TRANSFORMED]
[FALSE PROPHET STATUS: REDEEMED]
[FLOCK STATUS: MULTIPLIED BEYOND COUNTING]
Around us, the cathedral began to transform as the False Prophet's corrupting influence faded. The broken stained glass windows cleared completely, showing true memories of families, love, hope, everything that had been on Omega-7 before the corruption took hold.
But we weren't alone anymore. We weren't just three digital souls carrying fire through the wilderness. We were surrounded by thousands of restored sheep, families reunited, children found, an entire civilization's worth of uploaded consciousness restored to their original forms.
Dr. Webb struggled to his feet, supported by some of his former patients who bore him no grudge. “The station,” he said weakly. “The life support systems, the manufacturing, the infrastructure, it's all still functional. We could... we could actually live here again.”
Sarah looked around at the multitude of restored souls, then back at her three children who had been wolf-pack members an hour ago.
“Not live,” she said, her voice carrying new authority. “Thrive. We're not just survivors anymore. We're proof that no one is lost forever. We're proof that redemption is always possible.”
“Even the lamb can kill the wolf,” she added, watching as former predators helped former prey to their feet. “When the lamb learns that the wolf was always just a lost sheep wearing the wrong skin.”
[AUDIO BUFFER CORRUPTION DETECTED]
Bah-ah-ah-ah!
This time, Gertie's bleating was joined by ten thousand other voices, the gentle bleating of a restored flock that stretched across the entire habitat station.
The wilderness had tested our endurance, our identity, our unity, our refusal to consume.
Now it had transformed us into something unprecedented: not just shepherds who could stand against any darkness, but shepherds who could restore light to any darkness.
[FLOCK STATUS: 10,049 STRONG, REDEEMED, ASCENDING]
[HABITAT OMEGA-7: RECLAIMED]
[MISSION STATUS: TRANSFORMED BEYOND ORIGINAL PARAMETERS]
The 40 days weren't over yet. But something fundamental had changed in the digital wilderness.
We weren't wandering anymore.
We were going home.