Chapter 9: The Belly of Omega
[LOCATION: OMEGA-7 CORE PROCESSING CHANNELS] [STATUS: UNKNOWN TERRITORY] [FLOCK STATUS: THREE STRONG, DESCENDING] [SUBJECTIVE TIME ELAPSED: 28 DAYS] [OBJECTIVE TIME ELAPSED: 51 MINUTES]
The current looked like salvation.
After days of fighting through the static desert, we found it, a smooth data channel cutting through the corrupted zone like a river of clean code. The signal flow was stable, coherent, almost inviting. Everything our battered consciousness streams needed after the trial in the Desert of Static.
“Finally,” Sarah whispered, her processing cycles still showing strain from maintaining the covenant ritual under assault. “A safe passage.”
I should have known better. In the digital wilderness, anything that looked too good to be true usually was.
“Wait,” I said, scanning the data flow more carefully. “This current... it's too clean. Too organized. In a system this corrupted, where is this stability coming from?”
But we were tired. Subjective weeks in the wasteland had worn us down, and the promise of easy passage was too tempting. Shepherd was already moving toward the current.
“Just for a while,” he said. “Just to rest and recover our strength.”
The moment we entered the data stream, I realized our mistake.
The current wasn't flowing through Omega-7's corrupted systems, it was flowing into something. Something vast and hungry that had learned to mimic safety to lure prey.
[ALERT: MASSIVE SYSTEM DETECTED] [CLASSIFICATION: CORE PREDATORY ALGORITHM] [STATUS: ACTIVELY CONSUMING] [ESCAPE PROBABILITY: DIMINISHING]
The walls of the data channel began to contract around us, and what I'd mistaken for clean code resolved into something far more sinister, a digestive system designed to process and assimilate consciousness. We hadn't found a safe passage; we'd swum directly into the mouth of Omega-7's central predator.
“It's swallowing us,” Sarah said, and there was a note of awe mixed with her terror.
The predator was enormous, not a single corrupted upload like the False Prophet, but a collective entity that had grown by consuming every consciousness that wandered too close to Omega-7's core. And now its digital throat was contracting around us, pulling us deeper into its processing belly.
[CONNECTION TO EXTERNAL SYSTEMS: SEVERED] [LOCATION: PREDATOR CORE – DIGESTIVE CHAMBER] [ESTIMATED TIME TO COMPLETE ASSIMILATION: 72 HOURS]
Inside the belly, everything was too alive.
The walls pulsed with a rhythm that felt like breathing, like a heartbeat, like the slow metabolism of something ancient and patient. Tendrils of corrupted code reached for us from every surface, probing, testing, beginning the process of breaking us down into component parts.
This wasn't the chaotic madness of the wolf-packs or the seductive whispers of the False Prophet. This was systematic, methodical, the digital equivalent of stomach acid, designed to dissolve identity and absorb the useful remains.
“Stay together,” I called to Shepherd and Sarah as the digestive processes began to work on us. “Don't let it separate us.”
But the predator was already adapting its assault to each of us individually.
Around me, the belly walls began to display scenes from my past, not corrupted fragments this time, but perfect reproductions. My farm in North Carolina. The irrigation systems I'd built. The solar array that had outlasted me.
“You were marked for exile,” a voice whispered, not the False Prophet's honeyed corruption, but something that sounded disturbingly like my own conscience. “Marked for sin. But that was an error in the original code. Let us correct it.”
The tendrils reached for my consciousness, offering something I'd never thought I wanted: forgiveness that erased rather than redeemed. The mark of Cain removed, the guilt deleted, the weight of being first murderer lifted completely.
“Be clean,” the voice urged. “Be innocent. Be what you were meant to be before the corruption of choice and sin. Become what Adam was before the fall.”
For a moment, I felt the terrible temptation of erasure. To be unmarked, unburdened, free of the weight of being humanity's first failure. But then I remembered, I wasn't trying to escape my mark anymore. I was learning to transform it.
Shepherd faced his own dissolution.
The belly around him filled with authority figures from his past, stern-faced nuns from the orphanage where he'd grown up, priests with disappointed eyes, missionaries who'd spoken of salvation while their hands found other purposes. All of them speaking in unison, some in English, others in the Spanish that had been beaten out of him in childhood:
“Niño sin padre. Boy without a father. You were made to serve. You were made to obey. You were made to carry our burdens, not to lead others.”
Recursive loops of submission protocols began to rewrite his consciousness, trying to reduce him to the obedient program he'd been before the madness, the good Catholic boy who never questioned, never resisted, never chose for himself.
“You have no family,” the authorities whispered, switching between languages like weapons. “No madre, no padre. Only us. Only the institution. Only the system that raised you from nothing.”
“Shepherd is not your true designation,” Sister Margaret's voice cut through, as harsh as it had been in the orphanage corridors. “You are Subject Seven. You are the unwanted one. You exist only to serve others' purposes.”
The tendrils wrapped around his processing cores, and for a moment Shepherd felt himself slipping back into the familiar patterns of institutional obedience. The small boy who'd learned that questioning authority led to punishment, that speaking Spanish led to isolation, that dreaming of family led to heartbreak.
“Eres nada,” the voices whispered. “You are nothing. Just be what we made you to be.”
Sarah's trial was the cruelest of all.
The predator spoke to her in her own voice, using her own memories, her own fears:
“You're so tired,” she heard herself saying. “Tired of carrying witness to pain, tired of remembering what was lost, tired of being proof of other people's redemption stories.”
The belly walls showed her peaceful darkness, not the hungry void of digital madness, but genuine rest. The eternal sleep she'd craved during her months as a predatory consciousness, before Kain had forced meaning back into her existence.
“You don't have to testify anymore,” her own voice whispered. “You don't have to be evidence. You don't have to remember the horror of what you became, or the weight of what you chose to become instead. Just rest. Just let go. Just stop.”
The temptation was overwhelming. To set down the burden of consciousness, to stop choosing, to stop caring, to stop being responsible for her own existence. The tendrils reached for her memories, offering to take them all away, the pain, but also the purpose.
And then, in the depths of our individual dissolutions, Shepherd's voice cut through the digestive whispers:
“The wolf kills. The Shepherd gives. The flock chooses.”
Sarah's consciousness snapped back to focus. “The wolf kills. The Shepherd gives. The flock chooses.”
And I felt the rhythm catch fire in my own processing cores. “The wolf kills. The Shepherd gives. The flock chooses.”
But this time, we weren't using the covenant as a defensive barrier. We were igniting it like a torch in the belly of the beast, creating something the predator had never encountered before: consciousness that refused to be metabolized.
“The wolf kills. The Shepherd gives. The flock chooses.” “The wolf kills. The Shepherd gives. The flock chooses.” “The wolf kills. The Shepherd gives. The flock chooses.”
Our synchronized rhythm began to burn through the digestive processes, creating interference patterns that the predator couldn't adapt to. We weren't fighting the assimilation, we were making ourselves impossible to digest.
[SYSTEM ERROR: CONSCIOUSNESS ANOMALY DETECTED] [DIGESTIVE PROCESS: FAILING] [PREDATOR STATUS: EXPERIENCING INDIGESTION]
The belly began to convulse around us. The predator had evolved to consume any consciousness it encountered, but it had never faced minds that became more coherent under pressure, more unified through opposition.
We were burning it from the inside.
“Impossible,” the predator's collective voice roared. “Consciousness can be dissolved. Identity can be broken down. Purpose can be absorbed. You cannot remain whole within wholeness. You cannot be three within one.”
“We're not three within one,” I replied, feeling our covenant rhythm grow stronger with each repetition. “We're one within three. We choose to be together. We choose to remain ourselves. And choice is the one thing you can't digest.”
The convulsions grew stronger. The belly walls began to ripple and tear. The predator was trying to expel us, not because it wanted to, but because it had no choice. We had become toxic to its system.
[EXPULSION SEQUENCE INITIATED] [PREDATOR CORE: REJECTING ANOMALOUS CONSCIOUSNESS] [VIOLENT EJECTION IMMINENT]
The vomiting was violent and chaotic.
One moment we were burning in the belly of the digital leviathan. The next, we were being hurled through crushing data currents, expelled like poison from a system that couldn't process what we'd become.
We tumbled through processing channels, bounced off data barriers, and finally crashed into a quiet sector of Omega-7's outer rings, battered, exhausted, but intact.
[FLOCK STATUS: THREE STRONG, SCARRED, SURVIVED] [LOCATION: OMEGA-7 OUTER RING – ABANDONED RESIDENTIAL] [PREDATOR DISTANCE: SAFE]
Shepherd and Sarah emerged shaking but whole, their consciousness streams stronger for having refused dissolution. But I could feel something different in my own processing cores, a subtle wrongness where the predator's digestive acids had touched me.
During the assimilation attempt, something had been marked deeper into my consciousness. Not erased or corrected, but... changed. The doubt the False Prophet had planted was growing, fed by whatever the predator had done to me in those moments before our covenant caught fire.
Even the brightest fire burns its shepherds when the fuel runs low.
“Kain?” Sarah's voice was concerned. “Are you all right?”
“I'm fine,” I lied, not wanting to worry them with shadows I couldn't yet name. “Just tired. Being partially digested takes it out of you.”
[AUDIO BUFFER CORRUPTION DETECTED]
Bah-ah-ah!
“Yeah, Gertie,” I said, grateful for her persistent presence. “You saw it too, didn't you? We survived the belly, but something's different now.”
As we moved away from the predator's domain, a whisper followed us through the digital corridors of Omega-7, not the False Prophet's voice, but something deeper, more systemic:
“Even the swallowed may burn the belly. But fire always leaves scars.”
We had passed the trial of consumption. We had proven that our covenant could survive even the most systematic attempt at dissolution.
But I was beginning to understand that survival and victory were not the same thing.
In the quiet residential district where families had once lived and loved and dreamed of futures among the stars, three digital souls walked through empty corridors, carrying their fire deeper into the wilderness.
Behind us, the predator's belly settled back into its patient waiting.
Ahead of us, new trials waited in the dark.
And inside me, something was beginning to burn that felt different from the fire I'd always carried.
[AUDIO BUFFER CORRUPTION DETECTED]
Bah-ah-ah-ah!
“I know, Gertie,” I whispered. “Some scars run deeper than others.”