Kessler’s voice cracked. “Please… let me out now. We can make it listen. It’s scared. You don’t know how scared it is.”
But LyricNight wasn’t listening to him. And neither were we.
“Done,” Jamie said.
And then it began.
The fans overhead started clicking off, one by one, until they were all gone, and the hollow silence that followed was more jarring than the noise had ever been.
Kessler went still. His head tilted back, eyes locking on the vent above him—the one feedingbreathable air into his sealed glass prison. He stared as if he could keep it going by sheer will alone.
But nothing happened. No hiss. No movement.
The silence stretched long enough to feel final.
“What did you do?” Kessler mumbled, stumbling back, falling against a pile of boxes, eyes wide. In a second, I broke the zip tie, before Rio had to help, and then I headed for the closest door to the data center, the door whispering open in front of me.
“Lyric,” Jamie’s voice was clear and urgent through the comm. “The central server stack, column four, unit C—hit that first. That’s where it’s routing the override attempts. If we break that link, the rest starts to crumble.”
I nodded, already moving. That unit was humming louder than the rest, heat rolling off it. As I stepped up to it, the override access flickered to life. Fingers flying, I launched the kill command Jamie had mapped in, embedding it behind a mirrored security prompt to fool the AI for a few seconds.
The servers responded.
The lights flickered overhead.
“Press the button to get me out!” Kessler screamed, gesticulating at the panel on the outside of the chamber.
A low-frequency hum rose, slow and guttural, asif the whole system was waking up—or bracing for impact—as I rerouted each failsafe, redirecting flow of the suppressing agent from the standard server bays toward the sealed chamber. There was no fire for the suppressant to fight but there didn’t need to be. FM-200 had already flooded the ducts. It wasn’t toxic. It didn’t burn. It didn’t sting. But it pushed oxygen out in a silent tide to starve fires.
Kessler stood in the middle of his prison, chest rising and falling faster now, eyes darting as if he could feel what was missing even before he knew it.
He turned, mouth slack. “The air… it’s taking my air?—”
“No,” I said at the glass. “That’s on me.”
“Why! I have…” He coughed. “Money.”
Rio passed me the photo that Enzo had forced on him and I slammed it against the barrier. It was an older photo apparently—didn’t look a lot like the Robbie I knew now, because he’d had surgery, but Kessler’s eyes widened in horror.
“No!” he tried, stumbled, hands bracing against the glass as he tried to suck in a breath that wasn’t there. The fog didn’t billow, but it was there—unseen, cold, quiet. I hadn’t used the gas to kill him; I’d let the room forget to keep him alive.
Rio was there then. “This is for Roman Lowe. Remember him?”
“Fuck… You…!”
Kessler was coughing, eyes wide. The walls of the chamber glowed with lines of code dancing across the internal display.
“LyricNight is listening to what we told it to do,” Jamie murmured.
The lights surged.
Kessler’s eyes went wide. He slammed fists as if that would help.
“I control the exit protocols now,” I said quietly. The virus I’d built—recursive, predatory—was looping. Turning logic inward, LyricNight was trying to cleanse itself of the infection by cannibalizing its own systems.
“What’s happening now?” Rio asked, and I didn’t know how to explain.
“It’s panicking,” I tried. “Pulling every resource in to protect itself. But that’s what kills it. It can’t fight and shield and purge at the same time.”
