Page 33 of 8-Bit & Cat

“Guess the program considered this more of a business deal than a sex class.” Then those emerald gems moved slower over her. “Asexybusiness deal.”

She couldn’t stop her sputtered laugh and the flame in her cheeks and other parts, before remembering the problem pulsing under their feet. “So… you were saying.” Because his smirking mouth had just blown her attention to kingdom come.

“Redirect,” he reminded, the mild smirk still there, still distracting even though it aimed elsewhere.

“And uh… how? Do we do that?”

Zero looked back at her, face all business again. Sexy business. “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

****

Zero exhaled as he watched the system shift beneath them. The deviation wasn’t slowing down. If anything, the movements were becoming more defined—less erratic, more deliberate.

Catherine’s arms stayed locked under her breasts, obliviously strengthening her presence in the system while they talked. He needed to hurry because the more she helped him, the more she cancelled out every logic he’d formed against her. The logic that had brought the deviation into existence. If it collapsed before they could redirect it, there was no guessing what might happen at this phase.

“So… are you just watching it happen, or do you actually see something useful?”

Zero’s gaze flicked toward her. “I’m… mapping the trajectory.”

She blinked. “And what is that exactly?”

“The direction of change.” His fingers twitched, and the glowing threads beneath them responded, shifting, adjusting, feeding him new information.

She squinted down at the shifting grid and he could see how it registered as complete gibberish to her. “You know, for something that’s about to rewrite reality, it doesn’t look all that exciting.”

Zero’s grin hinted as he flicked his hand, bringing a surge to the entire floor. The motion rippled outward, exposing a deeper layer beneath the visible grid.

Catherine staggered back as it rippled outward and exposed a deeper layer beneath the visible grid. “What the hell—”

“It’s not rewriting everything.”

She moved about carefully as if her feet might be damaging important things. “Then what is it doing?”

His fingers skimmed the new layer of exposed data, scanning its movements. “It’s restructuring.”

She frowned. “Isn’t that the same thing?”

“No, it isn’t.” Zero gestured at the system beneath them, drawing her attention to a specific section—one that had begun shifting into clear, vertical patterns.

She searched for the answer hiding in her ignorance. “What am I looking at?”

“A hierarchy.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Critical Error

Cat’s pulse kicked. “… A hierarchy of what?”

Zero traced one of the flickering structures and she watched as its framework began building itself upward, tier by tier.

“It’s assigning control.”

She detected an eagerness in his tone. “You mean like… a leader?”

Zero nodded as he paced along the floor, watching like a predator.

She didn’t get it, but wondered, “Who’s it choosing from?”

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