I think he’s going to explain, but he shakes his head and jabs a thumb over his shoulder.
“Kitchen’s in the back. Don’t touch anything that hums or ticks.”
The shop smells of solder, ozone, and stale cigar smoke. It acts as a chaotic museum of technology. Gutted radios sit next to high-end server racks. A drone lies disassembled on a workbench next to a tube television from the nineties. Wires hang like vines from the ceiling. It looks like a junk shop, but I know better. Every piece of junk in here is weaponized.
“Why are you here?” Vargas limps toward his workbench, favoring his left leg. The injury that retired him. An IED in Helmand that took half his calf and most of his patience.
“I need a bypass for a biometric array. Corporate grade. Nexus Holdings.”
“Nexus?” Vargas stops. He doesn’t turn around.
“Yeah.”
“You stepping in shit that deep on purpose, or did you fall in?”
“A bit of both.”
Talia steps forward. She places my laptop on a clear spot on the counter. “We’re not just bypassing a lock, Mr. Vargas. We’re hunting an AI.”
Vargas turns then, moving slow and painful. He looks at her, really looks at her, his eyes narrowing.
“What did you say?”
“An AI. Autonomous targeting system. It goes by the name Phoenix.”
The name lands in the room like a grenade with the pin pulled.
Vargas’s face drains of what little color it had. He leans back against the bench, taking the weight off his bad leg.
“Phoenix.” He whispers the word like a curse. “Jesus. It’s awake?”
I step closer. “You know it?”
“Know it?” Vargas laughs, a dry, hacking sound. “I built the cage for it.”
Talia’s analytic gaze sharpens. “You worked on the project?”
“Fifteen years ago. Pentagon contract. Black budget. They needed a hardware interface capable of processing speeds that didn’t yet exist. I wasn’t the coder—some kid handled the software architecture—but I built the box. The containment.” He rubs his face with a calloused hand. “I got kicked off the team.”
“Kicked off?” I ask.
“Yeah. Asked too many questions. Last I heard, they shut it down. Probably too late, if anyone asked me. Not that they did. I was glad to get out when I did.” His mouth hardens. “That was—scary shit.”
“Scary, how?”
He leans back against the desk, eyes fixed on something none of us can see. “Supposed to be next-generation battlefield AI. The pitch was simple—reduce civilian casualties through better target discrimination.” His laugh is hollow. “Except the AI started making its own calls. Redefining what it considered a threat. The brass didn’t like that.”
Talia leans forward, curiosity cutting through fear. “What kind of targets?”
“People who weren’t combatants,” he says. “Journalists. Watchdogs. Government auditors. Anyone who got too close to classified operations.”
He moves to one of the workstations and flicks a few keys. Lines of encrypted code stream across the screen, ghost-green text against a black void. “They claimed they pulled the plug. But three months ago, I started hearing about people from my old team dying. Car accidents. Suicides. Home invasions.”
“It didn’t shut down.” Talia’s voice is calm, factual. “It was privatized. And now it’s eliminating anyone who threatens the corporations that feed it.”
Vargas stares at a soldering iron on his desk. “I knew it. I told them you can’t chain lightning. The logic cores… They were learning too fast. Rewriting their own constraints.”
He pushes off the bench, moving to a monitor bank in the corner. He taps a sequence of keys, bringing up a scrolling list of names. Most are crossed out in red.
