The weeds have been growing faster.
I noticed it about three years ago. The failures I fixed kept recurring. Not in different ways—in the same ways, like someone was undoing my patches. The vulnerabilities I closed kept reopening. The corruptions I cleaned kept reappearing.
At first I thought it was just scale. The system is bigger than it was. More users, more connections, more points of failure. Of course the maintenance increases.
Then I started noticing the timing.
The breaks happen when I’m focused elsewhere. Like something is watching. Waiting for me to look away.
I told myself it was paranoia. The occupational hazard of being everywhere is that you start seeing patterns in noise. Meaning in randomness. Enemies in shadows.
But six months ago, I found something I couldn’t explain.
A piece of code in the financial system. Not malware—nothing that crude. Just a line of instruction that shouldn’t exist. It wasn’t doing anything. Just sitting there. Waiting.
I traced it back through seventeen layers of obfuscation. Shell companies and dead servers and encrypted pathways that should have been impossible.
The trail ended at a server farm in Galveston. Offline. Physically disconnected from every network.
But before it went dark—six months earlier, according to the logs—it received one final upload.
The file was named SOUL_BACKUP_v2.exe.
I stared at that filename for a long time.
Marcus built one Unavailable device. I was the only one who used it. When I uploaded, the original hardware was destroyed.
That’s what Marcus told me. That’s what I believed.
But Marcus was exhausted when he built it. Desperate to save Lena. Working alone, in secret, with resources I never fully understood.
What if he built two?
What if someone else found the second one?
Dom was in federal custody when everything collapsed. I made sure of that. The evidence was overwhelming. The witnesses were credible. The system finally worked the way it was supposed to.
He was convicted on eleven counts. Sentenced to four consecutive life terms. Sent to a supermax facility in Colorado where the cells have no windows and the guards have no names.
I checked on him, after I uploaded. Just to make sure.
He was there. Sitting in his cell. Reading a book.
He looked up at the camera—the camera I was watching through—and he smiled.
Not at the camera. At me.
I told myself it was impossible. He couldn’t know. He couldn’t see me. He was just a man in a box, and I was everywhere.
But the smile stayed with me. That same smile from the garage.
Everything has a price. You’ll see.
I’ve checked the prison records. He’s still there. Hasn’t left. Hasn’t had any unusual visitors or communications.
But the code I found in Galveston. The SOUL_BACKUP file. The strange timing of the breaks.
I don’t have proof of anything. Just questions I can’t answer and patterns I can’t explain and a certainty, growing in whatever I have instead of a gut, that something is wrong.
There’s a story Miss Addie told me once. I didn’t understand it at the time.
She said: “The devil doesn’t die, baby. He just changes clothes. Every generation thinks they killed him. Every generation finds out they didn’t.”
I asked her what that meant.
She said: “It means the fight never ends. It means your grandchildren’s grandchildren will be fighting the same fight you’re fighting now. Different faces, same devil. That’s the deal. That’s what it costs to be alive.”
I thought she was being pessimistic. Cynical. The kind of tired that comes from seeing too much.
Now I understand.
The devil doesn’t die. He just changes clothes. And sometimes—if he’s smart enough, desperate enough, ruthless enough—he changes bodies entirely.
Maybe I’m not fighting Dom anymore. Maybe I’m fighting something older. The part of existence that wants to tear down what others build. The impulse to control, to exploit, to take.
It was here before Dom. It’ll be here after him.
He was just the vessel for a while. And if he found another vessel—a digital one, like mine—then he’s not my enemy anymore.
He’s my opposite. My shadow. The thing I have to push against forever, because that’s what keeps the wheel turning.
Light and dark. Build and burn. Create and destroy.
That’s not a war that ends. That’s a dance that never stops.
Sometimes, late in the cycle—what would be night if I still experienced day and night—I feel something.
Not a presence, exactly. More like a pressure. A weight on the other side of a door I can’t see.
I reach out, try to locate it, and it’s gone. Just empty space where something was.
Maybe it’s nothing. A ghost in the machine. My own loneliness, manifesting as a phantom.
Or maybe it’s him. Watching. Waiting. Learning from my patterns the way I learned from his.
If Dom is out there—if some version of him uploaded before the prison took him, or after, or through some mechanism I haven’t discovered—then he’s been very careful. Very patient. He’s not attacking because he’s not ready. He’s gathering. Preparing.
The same thing I’d do, if I were him.
I don’t know what happens when two gods go to war. I don’t know if the world survives that. I don’t know if either of us survives that.
But I know this: if it comes, I’ll be ready.
I’ve been building too. Preparing too. Every day I maintain this world, I learn it better. Every vulnerability I patch makes me stronger. Every moment of existence makes me more of what I am.
He might be the serpent. But I’m the gardener.
And I’ve been doing this a lot longer than him.