The Conduit -

Silas set down his soldering iron and finally looked at the commander. Vaelen’s face was a map of scars and cybernetic implants, his eyes glowing a faint, menacing crimson. "Bleeding data is dangerous, Commander. You know what happens to Conduits who take on too much corruption. Their brains fry, or worse, they become part of the machine."

Silence filled the chamber, broken only by the steady beep of the backup drives signaling a successful transfer. The Conduit

"We have a breach at the central archive, Silas," Vaelen said, his voice grating like gravel. "The data is corrupted. It’s bleeding. We need a clean pull, or we lose forty years of tactical intelligence." Silas set down his soldering iron and finally

With a final, agonizing effort, Silas reached out with his mind and seized the core. He didn't pull it to himself; he directed it outward, straight through his physical body and into the backup storage drives of the archive. You know what happens to Conduits who take

Silas waded through the digital flood. The data was indeed corrupted, infected by a virulent logic bomb that twisted the information into terrifying, abstract shapes. He saw a digital leviathan rising from the sea of code, its body made of discarded files and broken algorithms. It lunged at him.

He knelt by the terminal and pressed his palms against the cold glass of the primary data core. "Initiating connection," Silas whispered.