Server 9-Chapter 35: Negotiations with a God

Up close, Malachi didn’t look like a god.

He looked like a corpse on life support.

His skin was thin as paper. Blue veins showed through like wires under plastic. Real wires ran from a heavy collar around his neck into the glowing column of light behind him. His bare feet stood in a shallow pool of coolant. It made tiny wave with every pulse from the Core.

But his eyes— they were something wrong about them.

They weren’t eyes anymore. They were two blue screens, flickering like a glitching computer. Updating. Scanning. And Never still.

"Flesh," he said, flexing his fingers like he was testing them. "it feel Strange. It’s like wearing an old coat. It’s Heavy. But... familiar."

I stepped off the elevator platform.

Below us, rows of sleepers stretched out into the darkness. Pods stacked high in rows. Hundreds. Thousands. Each one glowed a soft, sick blue.

Above the nearest row, a timer floated in the air.

[HARVEST CYCLE 7]

[DISCONNECT IN: 09:59]

I felt a strong, bad feeling in my stomach, like fear, and disgust.

"Get away from the column," I said. My voice was low. "Now."

Malachi smiled.

"You don’t give orders here, Elias. You barely count as a glitch." He tapped the side of his head. "But I—I am the Operating System."

Sarah moved to a side console. Her eyes were already scanning the screen. Glitch slipped past me to another terminal. His fingers itched for a port.

"Don’t touch anything yet," I hissed.

"But we don’t have time not to," Sarah snapped. But she held off. Watching.

Malachi followed my gaze. Then he spread his arms wide, showing off the chamber like a tour guide.

"Do you understand what you’re looking at?" he asked. "This is not a slaughterhouse. It is a refinery. Every one of these people below you... will be a waste out there."

He nodded toward the ceiling. Toward the city above.

"They will be Hungry, sick, and angry. But here? Here they are useful. They power the simulations that keep the Tower standing."

"You’re burning them," I said. "You dress it up in pretty words. But you’re throwing them into a furnace."

"Everything breaks down," Malachi said calmly. "That takes fuel. Do you know what happens when the Aether fails? When all the Ascended fall at once?"

He paused.

"they’ll be Wars. Plagues. And hundred million people will die in the real world because their digital gods panicked and crushed them. I prefer my deaths... controlled."

He looked at me. Right at me.

"You should understand that, Devourer. You’re a chaos wrapped in skin."

The word hit like a slap. ’Devourer’.

Hunger stirred in my gut. The column pulsed again. I could feel it now—each surge was a rush of power. Dense. Rich. And like a river of liquid levels.

[ENERGY SOURCE DETECTED]

[ESTIMATED YIELD: 500,000+ XP]

[WARNING: SOURCE LINKED TO LIVING MINDS]

I swallowed hard. My mouth tasted like copper.

"I can sense you tasting it," Malachi said. "The column. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Pure mind-energy. If you drink from it, you’ll hit Level 50 in seconds. Maybe higher."

He tilted his head.

"You could fight me then. Really fight me."

Maya stepped up beside me. Her rifle was aimed at him.

"If he touches that and kills them," she said. "I’ll shoot him myself."

I nodded. "Fair."

Malachi’s gaze shifted to her. His smiled Amused.

"Ah. The daughter. Maya Lysandra." He said the name like he was reading a file. "I liked your profile. Such high aggression scores. You would have done well in the Aether. It a Pity that your mother chose ’morals’ over results."

Maya’s jaw tightened. Sarah’s hands curled into a fists.

Glitch cleared his throat. He didn’t look up from his terminal.

"Uh, bad news? There’s a lock on the Harvest. The kill-signal is set at the machine level. I can try to delay the timer a few seconds here and there. But once the command fires, I can’t stop it."

"Can you cut the column?" I asked.

"If I blow it up, the feedback fries every brain plugged into it," he said. "Everything is connected directly. There is no protection between them. And It very efficient."

[DISCONNECT IN: 03:02]

I stepped closer to the column. The air was colder here. Tiny bits of frozen coolant floated around it like dust.

The energy inside called to me. It wasn’t a sound. It was a taste just out of reach.

"You built this," I said to Malachi. "With Sarah’s code. And you decided some people get to live in heaven. And the rest get turned into ash."

"I built this," he said quietly, tapping his chest, "because people asked me to. Do you think the rich wanted to see the cost? They wanted a paradise. They didn’t care that it needed batteries."

He took a step closer. The cables on his neck pulled tight. The column’s light grew brighter.

"You interest me, Elias," he said. "The Devourer was just a theory. A myth written into the oldest code. A ’clean-up’ program for when things went wrong. It was supposed to wake up inside the system."

His blue eyes scanned me.

"But you are outside. A Devourer in the real world." He smiled. "Someone pulled the plug out of the wall. And now the cleaning program thinks it’s a person."

"Cleaning program," I echoed. "That’s one way to describe me."

"You could help me," he said. The words came fast now. "You’re not like Sarah. You don’t carry her guilt. You understand cost now. The city will die without power. The Aether will crash. And the rich will not go quietly."

He gestured to the pods below.

"Fifty thousand dying here means five million get to live up above."

"Stop," Sarah said. "Don’t listen to him."

Malachi ignored her.

"Join me, Elias. You eat what I tell you to eat. Delete what I tell you to delete. And together, we can gather enough power to actually fix this mess. Instead of just kicking the table over like a child."

He gestured at the capsules again.

"In return," he said softly, "I’ll take Jasmine off the Harvest list. Forever. Her body will be upgraded. Her pod moved to the best section. No more pain. No more fear. She’ll dream of you in an endless summer. Safe from all of this."

A hologram flickered into the air next to him.

Jasmine.

Thin. Pale. Lying in a medical pod I knew too well. Her chest rose and fell slowly. The monitor above her showed steady numbers. A green tag floated over her head: ASCENSION CANDIDATE: QUEUED.

My heart clenched so hard it hurt.

Maya glanced at me. Then at the hologram. "Elias..."

Sarah shook her head hard. "He’s lying. It’s fake. He can make any image he wants."

"Can I?" Malachi asked mildly. "We are in my house, Director. Nothing here needs to be faked. I’m simply... switching cameras."

The image zoomed out. I saw the wing of a clinic I knew. The peeling paint on the walls. The flickering light in the hallway. Jasmine’s crumpled drawing on the table beside her bed.

"I’ve been taking very good care of her," Malachi said. "She’s valuable. You made her valuable by loving her so loudly. All that care. All that attention for one low-level life. The System noticed."

[DISCONNECT IN: 02:14]

The timer ticked louder in my head.

"Stop the Harvest," I said. My voice was barely a whisper. "Then we talk."

"If I stop the Harvest," he said, "I lose the power I need to keep the Ascended stable. They’ll Fade faster and they’ll start to Panic. The deaths up there will be far worse than the fifty thousand down here."

"So you’re saying there’s no way to win," I said. "Either the rich die or the poor do."

"That’s what it means to run a failing system," Malachi said. "Someone always goes first."

He held out his hand.

"You don’t have to like me. You just have to accept the math. Take my hand. I’ll show you how deep the rot goes. And we’ll cut carefully instead of... this."

He waved at the wreckage we’d left behind.

Behind me, Maya whispered, "Don’t."

Glitch muttered, "the timer is real. When it hits zero, the signal goes out. Every flagged pod? Their brains will turn to static."

Sarah’s fingers dug into the console.

"Elias," she said quietly. "I can’t stop the signal. I tried." She swallowed. "But maybe you can. You’re the only thing in this world that can actually eat commands."

The idea slid into my brain like a knife.

"Eat the signal," I repeated.

"If you bite into that column raw, you’ll fry half the sleepers," Glitch said. "Your power isn’t precise. It’s a shotgun, not a scalpel."

"Then I don’t eat the column," I said slowly.

I took another step forward. The energy pressed against my skin now. Itching. And begging.

"I eat the instruction."

Sarah’s head snapped up. "The kill-command."

She looked at the code streaming up the side of the column. Tiny threads of red mixed in with the blue.

"Malachi already loaded it," she said. "It’s sitting in the system, about to fire through the network into every pod at once."

"Can you find it?" I asked.

She paused. Then nodded slowly.

"I can mark it," she said. "I will Flag it in the stream. But I can’t stop it from leaving. Once it moves, it goes everywhere."

"Flag it," I said. "Paint the target. I’ll do the rest."

"This is suicide," Glitch whispered. "You’ll be shoving your face into the gun barrel."

"Suicide is walking away and letting fifty thousand people die so a ghost in a computer can feel safe," I said.

I looked Malachi in the eye.

"You said I’m a chaos wrapped in skin," I told him. "Here’s the thing about chaos, Malachi."

I stepped right up to the column. The heat made my eyes water. My skin prickled.

"It doesn’t make deals."

His smile finally cracked.

"Elias. Think—"

"No."

Sarah’s fingers flew.

"I’ve tagged it!" she shouted. "Kill-command is marked in red! It’s leaving the system in—"

The timer flashed.

[DISCONNECT IN: 00:41]

"Now!" she screamed.

I pressed my left palm flat against the column.

It was like touching a star.

Every nerve in my body lit up. Screaming. My teeth clenched so hard I thought they’d crack.

[WARNING: DIRECT CONTACT WITH CORE]

[RISK OF MIND GETTING PULLED IN: 99%]

Voices slammed into my skull. Thousands of them. Bits of dreams. Screams. Prayers. Memories of oceans. Of childhood. And of pain.

I could drown in this.

[Skill: Network Sense — Amplified]

[Skill: Energy Siphon — TARGET FILTER MODE? Y/N]

"Y," I hissed through my teeth.

The code wasn’t just colors anymore. I could see it now.

Threads of blue—life support.

Threads of green—dream simulation.

And there, like barbed wire woven through silk—threads of red.

The kill-signal.

Sarah had painted them for me.

"Got you," I growled.

I bit down.

Not with my mouth. Not with my teeth. But with something else. Something deeper. The black hole that lived somewhere below my stomach and above my soul.

[SKILL EVOLUTION: DEVOURER → TARGETED DEVOUR]

[NEW SUB-SKILL UNLOCKED: COMMAND EATER]

[You can now consume specific commands without draining the source.]

The red threads tore.

Malachi screamed.

Not out loud. But in my head.

"NO—"

I ripped the kill-signal out of the stream and swallowed it whole.

It burned all the way down.

[XP GAINED: +10,000]

[LEVEL UP!]

[YOU ARE NOW LEVEL 16]

The timer flickered.

[DISCONNECT IN: 00:00] 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

[STATUS: NO COMMAND RECEIVED]

[HARVEST CYCLE 7: FAILED]

In the pods below, nothing changed.

No new screams. No sudden stillness.

They lived.

I ripped my hand away from the column and dropped to my knees. Panting. Smoke curled from my fingertips. My vision swam with colors.

My nose was bleeding. So were my ears.

"Elias!" Maya rushed to my side. She caught me before I fell face-first onto the metal grate. "Talk to me. Are you in there?"

I laughed. It sounded broken.

"Still... hungry," I wheezed. "But yeah. I’m here."

Sarah checked the console.

"They’re alive," she said. "All flagged pods still show brain activity. The Cycle has stopped."

Glitch punched the air. "We just robbed Malachi of fifty thousand batteries. His system is going to lag like a cheap game."

The chamber shook.

Malachi stumbled. The cables in his neck pulled tight. His eyes flickered wildly. Code glitching.

"You... parasite," he spat. His voice was a layered now. A mess of echoes. "Do you have any idea what you’ve done? You’ve crashed an entire parts of the Aether. The Board will riot. The Ascended will tear each other apart fighting for power."

"Good," I said. I struggled to my feet with Maya’s help. "Let them see what hunger feels like."

Malachi’s face twisted. For the first time, he looked less like a god. And More like a trapped animal.

"This isn’t over," he hissed. "You think you saved them? You just pushed their deaths down the road. Chaos always—"

His voice cut off. Sharp. And Sudden.

The cables in his neck went loose. His body dropped to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

Sarah blinked. "Is he... dead?"

Glitch shook his head. He looked pale. "No. That was just a body he was using. He pulled his mind out. Ran away to save processing power."

"So we bought time," I said. "We didn’t win."

Sarah nodded slowly. "Yes. But for those fifty thousand people? This is a win."

I looked down at Malachi’s empty shell. My burnt fingers twitched.

For a second, I wanted to touch the collar around his neck. To see what kind of XP a thrown-away god-body might hold.

Not now.

I turned away.

"Can we wake them?" Maya asked. She nodded at the endless rows of pods.

"Not all at once," Sarah said softly. "Their bodies are too weak. They haven’t moved in years. If we dump fifty thousand sick, starving people into a dangerous city, they’ll die in the streets."

"So what do we do?" Glitch asked.

I stared at the sea of sleeping faces.

We couldn’t save everyone today. But we’d stopped a massacre.

"We tag them," I said finally. "Mark them in the system. Move them to the back of every queue. No more Harvest priority. Ever."

Sarah’s eyes lit up. "I can do that."

"And we wake who we can," I added. "The ones with skills we need. Doctors. Engineers. People who can help us build something that isn’t this."

I looked up the column of light one more time.

"You took your cut, Malachi," I muttered. "Now I’ve taken mine."

In the corner of my vision, a new line appeared.

[TITLE UNLOCKED: HARVEST BREAKER]

[REPUTATION — CORPORATION: HUNTED]

[REPUTATION — SLUMS/UNDERCITY: SAVIOR]

"Time to go," I said. "Before he sends the whole Iron Legion down the elevator shaft."

Glitch checked his screen. "Already on it. I faked a reactor leak warning in this section. A automatic lockdown in two minutes. No one is getting in or out unless they cut through solid steel."

"Good," I said. "That’ll slow them down."

We turned toward the elevator platform.

The Harvester Core hummed behind us. And It’s was dimmer now.

As we stepped onto the platform, I heard it again—the faint whisper of a thousand minds. Dreaming in their cages.

Not screaming. Not begging.

Waiting.

"We’re not done," I whispered under my breath. "I’ll come back for you all."

The platform began to rise.

Sector 4 was waking up to a world with less god in it.

And far more war, then before.