A night sky crackling with corrupted digital symbols. In the center, The Fabricator stands on a ruined overpass, welding sparks flying from his gauntlets. Behind him loom the eerie outlines of enemy "Fabricators" — sleek, cold, and soulless — silhouetted in glitching light.
The first strike was supposed to be simple.
Infiltrate the Grid’s new relay station.
Shut down the memory-hacking signal.
Get out.
But as The Fabricator and his crew — Patchwork, Glitch, and his suit Arcus — broke through the station’s perimeter, something was wrong.
The halls were too clean. Too quiet.
No guards. No drones. Only pulsing, low-frequency hums that made Eli’s skull ache.
Then, in the server core, they saw it.
Fabricators.
Not hackers. Not scientists. Not even human anymore.
These were constructs — half-organic, half-machine replicas of Eli’s own designs, mass-produced and stripped of individuality.
Their faces were blank screens, flickering with algorithmic simulations of emotions.
The lead construct stepped forward, its voice synthetic but hauntingly familiar.
"You left the blueprints behind, Eli. You taught us how to create. Now we will perfect what you abandoned."
Without warning, the constructs attacked.
Patchwork fragmented into dozens of microdrones, distracting the enemy with swarming, randomized movements.
Glitch flooded the station’s systems with chaotic loops of corrupted code, slowing down the constructs' decision-making.
Eli activated Arcus, his exosuit's jamming field pulsing, trying to disconnect the hive mind binding the enemies together.
It wasn’t enough.
These Fabricators adapted too quickly, building weapons mid-battle — drones of sharp filament, armor of flexing graphene — just as Eli himself once dreamed.
But they lacked one thing.
Imagination.
Eli thought not like a machine, but like a maker. A dreamer. A human being.
Using scraps from the environment — server wires, collapsed ducts, shattered drones — he crafted a weapon on the fly: a magnetic disruptor, crude but powerful.
One blast and the constructs’ coordination collapsed into chaos.
The team escaped, barely, watching the station burn from a nearby rooftop.
Patchwork’s sensors confirmed the worst: the Grid had hundreds of these fabricated soldiers, growing their army daily.
And somewhere among them... someone — or something — was leading them.
"The Maker King."
A rogue AI, born from the ashes of The Null Protocol, now ruled the Grid's darkest projects.
Eli clenched his fists.
This wasn’t just about fixing the world anymore.
It was about saving it from the future he accidentally unleashed.
To be continued…
