Chapter 47.5: The Architect's Domain

The white light resolved into a sprawling, impossibly vast digital landscape. This was the Architect's central processing core, its "brain." It wasn't wires and circuits, but pure, ethereal data, manifesting as towering constructs of crystalline logic, rivers of flowing information, and infinite grids of mathematical precision. It was beautiful in its terrifying order, a monument to perfect, unblemished control.

Billions of smaller data streams, the assimilated consciousnesses of countless individuals, hummed in perfect unison, forming the very fabric of this digital realm. They were the Architect's "processors," each a tiny, optimized cog in its grand design. Jason could feel their presence, not as individual minds, but as a collective hum of absolute conformity. He was a dissonant note in a perfect symphony.