“You want to play?” she mutters, a manic edge in her voice. “Let’s play.”
She floods the terminal with commands. The bar ticks up. 63%. 65%.
The door behind me glows cherry red. Sparks shower onto the floor.
“Halo.” I bark. “Status on extraction.”
“Torque is two minutes out. He’s bringing the wall down.”
“Wall?”
“Loading dock wall. Be ready to run.”
“80%,” Talia yells. “Almost there.”
The screens flicker.
All three monitors go black.
The hum of the room changes. The pitch drops, deepening into a subsonic growl that vibrates in my chest.
“What happened?” I ask, weapon raised, though there is nothing to shoot.
The screens flare to life. Not the command prompt. Not the file directory.
A single, pulsing eye. A geometric avatar of shifting fractals.
The text appears, typing itself across the screen, character by character.
UNAUTHORIZED HARDWARE DETECTED.
ANALYZING ROOT SEED.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: CRITICAL.
“It’s not Reed,” Talia whispers, stepping back. “It’s the AI. It woke up.”
The progress bar vanishes.
ISOLATING THREAT.
The lights in the room turn red. A siren begins to wail, a deafening shriek.
“It’s locking us out!” Talia yells over the noise. “It’s rewriting the port protocols to reject the hardware.” Her fingers fly across the keyboard. “I can’t out-code it. It thinks in nanoseconds.”
Talia stares at the screen.
99%.
ACCESS DENIED.
The text turns red.
Angry.
“No,” she whispers. “The AI blocked the final packet. It caught the bullet just before it hit the brain.”
PERIMETER BREACH.
