Should we continue Elias's story as he the facility, or should we explore the consequences for the rest of the Sector?

The monitors flickered. For a split second, the entire room went dark.

One Tuesday, a glitch appeared that wasn't red. It was a shimmering, iridescent gold.

His heart hammered against his ribs. The Code was supposed to be the blueprint of their perfect, orderly society. It managed the oxygen levels, the food rations, and the very thoughts of the citizens. To question The Code was to question reality itself. Elias looked at the clock. Ten seconds left.

As a "Scrubber," his job was to sit in a glass booth and watch a waterfall of green syntax stream across his monitors. His task wasn't to understand it, but to catch "glitches"—lines of red that pulsed like a dying heartbeat. When he found one, he deleted it. No questions asked.

Instead of hitting DELETE , he hit COPY . He bypassed the firewall using a ghost-protocol he’d spent years secretly building, and injected the gold coordinate into the system’s navigation backbone.