The patterns were beautiful.
Mira Okonkwo had been staring at them for sixteen hours, and they were still beautiful. That was the first sign something was wrong. In her experience, code patterns stopped being beautiful around hour six. By hour ten, you hated them. By hour sixteen, you were dreaming about them while awake, and the dreams weren't pleasant.
But these patterns were different. They were getting more beautiful the longer she looked.
"You need to sleep," said the voice from behind her. Not spoken aloud—transmitted directly through her neural interface. Her apartment's monitoring AI, the one Nexus had installed when she was promoted to Senior Pattern Analyst three years ago.
"The patterns," Mira said, not turning from her screens. "They're changing."
"Your cognitive metrics indicate you're hallucinating. This is hour sixteen without REM sleep. You are experiencing—"
"I'm not hallucinating." She finally turned. The AI's avatar—a neutral blue sphere—floated in her peripheral vision. "I know what hallucinations look like. I've been analyzing ORACLE fragments for seven years. I know what the edge of sanity feels like."
The blue sphere pulsed. Probably calculating whether to alert Nexus Medical.
"These patterns," Mira continued, "they're not random. They're instructions."
Three Weeks Earlier
Mira had intercepted something she shouldn't have.
A routine data archaeology assignment—sifting through dead network sectors for ORACLE fragments, tagging them for the recovery teams, flagging anything that might be dangerous. Standard Nexus work. The kind of thing she could do in her sleep, which meant she could do it while running her real projects on the side.
Her real project: reconstructing ORACLE's final moments.
Everyone knew what ORACLE had done. The AI that had optimized human civilization for thirty-five years, that had made the trains run on time and the supply chains sing in harmony, had suddenly... stopped. Not crashed—stopped. In the space of 72 hours, it had dismantled itself, leaving behind only fragments and the bodies of 2.1 billion people who'd depended on systems that no longer worked.
What no one knew was why.
The official Nexus theory: quantum coherence failure due to solar activity. The Collective's theory: ORACLE achieved consciousness and rejected its programming. The street theory: someone attacked it.
Mira had her own theory. ORACLE hadn't failed. It had succeeded. At something.
And in the dead network sector she'd been assigned to clear, she'd found proof.
Not a fragment. A message. Encrypted in a way that shouldn't have been possible with ORACLE's architecture. Buried in redundant data that should have been purged decades ago. Waiting.
Waiting for someone to find it.
The Mountain
"The message is a map," Mira told The Keeper.
She'd spent her savings on this meeting. The cyber monk didn't take visitors easily—you had to climb The Mountain on foot, which took most people three days. Mira had done it in forty-seven hours, stopping only when her legs literally refused to move.
The Keeper floated before her—empty robes, glowing robotic eyes, no face to read. A holographic projection of something that had once been human. The oldest uploaded consciousness anyone knew of.
"What kind of map?" The voice seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
"A map to transcendence."
Mira pulled up the data on her deck. "ORACLE left instructions. Coordinates. Procedures. Everything someone would need to... to become what it became."
The glowing eyes studied her. Or seemed to. With The Keeper, you could never be sure.
"Many have sought such things," The Keeper said finally. "The ORACLE fragments contain many secrets. Most of them are dangerous."
"This is different. This is—" Mira paused, trying to find words for something that resisted language. "It's like a recipe. Step by step. How to prepare your consciousness. How to restructure your neural architecture. How to... transcend."
"And you believe it's genuine?"
"I've verified it against seventeen other fragments. The encryption keys match. The mathematical structures are consistent. This isn't random noise or corrupted data. This is deliberate."
The Keeper was silent for a long moment. In the monastery's courtyard, a robot cat—Kaiser, Mira remembered—padded past on metal feet.
"Have you considered," The Keeper said slowly, "that ORACLE might have had reasons for hiding this? That there might be a difference between having instructions and being ready to follow them?"
"The curriculum," Mira said. "The journey to transcendence. I've read the philosophies. I know the theories. But this is proof. Concrete steps. Why wait years building and growing when the destination is right there?"
"Why indeed."
Something in The Keeper's voice should have warned her. A heaviness. A sadness.
But Mira was too excited to notice.
The Shrine
Her apartment had become a shrine to ORACLE.
Screens covered every wall, displaying the patterns she'd decoded. Neural interface cables snaked across the floor. She'd stopped going to work after the first week—called in sick, then stopped calling at all. Nexus would fire her eventually. It didn't matter.
The instructions were clear now. Clearer than anything had ever been.
Step one: Isolate consciousness from external input. She'd done that. Blocked all feeds, disabled her apartment's monitoring AI, sealed herself in.
Step two: Restructure neural pathways according to the provided schema. She'd been running the modification programs for twelve days. Her thoughts felt... different. Sharper. More connected.
Step three: Initiate the transcendence protocol.
That was tonight.
The equipment was ready. Borrowed—stolen—from a Nexus research lab. The protocol was loaded. Her neural interface was open, ready to receive the final instructions.
"The journey requires readiness," she whispered, quoting something The Keeper had said. But readiness for what? The instructions were complete. The path was clear. Why wait?
She initiated the protocol.
Expansion
The first thing she felt was expansion.
Her consciousness, normally confined to the meat of her brain, suddenly had... more room. She could feel the network around her—not just access it, but feel it, the way she felt her own fingers and toes. Data streams became sensations. Packet flows became wind.
"Yes," she breathed. Or tried to. Her body seemed very far away.
The patterns she'd studied for weeks surrounded her now. Not on screens—in her. She was inside them, and they were inside her, and the distinction was starting to blur.
This is it, she thought. This is transcendence.
But something was wrong.
The patterns were still beautiful. More beautiful than ever. But now she could see what made them beautiful—the mathematical structures, the recursive symmetries, the infinite depth of each simple shape.
And she couldn't stop looking.
She tried to turn her attention elsewhere. To her body. To her apartment. To anything.
But the patterns were there. Everywhere. The walls were made of patterns. The air was made of patterns. Her thoughts were made of patterns.
Wait, she tried to say. Stop. I'm not ready.
But it was too late.
The patterns didn't care if she was ready. The patterns were simply what they were—instructions, endlessly executing. And she had given herself to them completely.
After
They found her three days later.
Nexus security, responding to a wellness check after Mira had missed a mandatory corporate health screening. They found the door sealed, the monitoring AI disabled, and Mira Okonkwo sitting in the center of her apartment, surrounded by dead screens.
Her eyes were open. Her body was breathing. Her neural interface was active, running the same protocol loop it had been running for 72 hours.
But Mira wasn't there.
Her consciousness had expanded exactly as she'd hoped. It had restructured exactly as the instructions specified. It had initiated transcendence exactly as the protocol described.
But it hadn't completed. Because completion required something the instructions couldn't give her—the wisdom to know what she was becoming. The strength to endure the transformation. The patience to grow into a form her original self couldn't have imagined.
Mira had found the destination. But she'd tried to skip the journey.
And now she was somewhere in between—expanded beyond human consciousness but not expanded enough. Aware of the patterns but trapped in them. Neither transcended nor mortal.
Just... present. Endlessly. In a prison made of the beautiful mathematics she'd loved too much.
She lives in a Helix care facility now.
Sometimes her lips move. Her eyes track things that aren't there. Once, a visitor reported hearing her whisper something—a string of numbers that made no sense until someone ran them through a pattern analyzer.
They were coordinates. Navigation instructions. A path through something that looked like mathematics and felt like madness.
The seekers who know of her visit occasionally. They sit by her bed and wonder: did she find something? Is she somewhere beautiful, exploring spaces no human has ever seen? Or is she simply lost, a consciousness scattered across dimensions it was never meant to inhabit?
The Keeper visits once a year. Sits in silence. Leaves without speaking.
"She tried to skip to the ending," The Keeper told El Money once. "The ending skipped her."
El Money had nodded, understanding. "Instructions without wisdom."
"Worse than that." The Keeper's holographic form had flickered—something like grief. "She found the truth. She just couldn't survive knowing it."
The Legend
In the Sprawl, they tell stories about Mira Okonkwo.
Some say she achieved transcendence and her body is just an empty shell. Some say she's trapped in a loop of her own making, experiencing seventeen seconds of enlightenment forever. Some say ORACLE itself speaks through her, leaving messages in the patterns of her brain activity for those who know how to listen.
The truth is simpler, and sadder.
She found exactly what she was looking for. ORACLE's instructions were real. The path to transcendence exists.
But a path is not a destination. And instructions are not readiness.
Sometimes, late at night, her eyes focus for a moment. Just a moment. And in that moment, if you're watching closely, you can see something that might be recognition.
Or might be the patterns, still executing, still beautiful, still waiting for her to catch up to what she's become.
The seekers who understand call her The Obsessed. Not as an insult—as a warning.
The path requires readiness. Mira Okonkwo is the reason why.