Watching the sequence again. Frame by frame.
The seizure. The chaotic thrashing of Subject: Blackout. The panicked intervention of the nurse, Clare Bolton. The way she disconnected the monitors, screaming for help, creating chaos that my guards, trained, expensive, supposedly elite, had stumbled into like children.
“Amateurs.”
The word tasted like copper.
The escape didn’t enrage me. Assets were occasionally lost; variance was a statistical inevitability. No, what made the bile rise in my throat was the method. Theater. Cheap, melodramatic theater. A dying man performing a miracle recovery. A civilian nurse outsmarting a secure facility with nothing but hysteria and timing.
They’d been in the same room. The Catalyst and the Subject. The data I could have harvested from their reunion would have been the cornerstone of Oblivion 2.0.
Instead, a grainy recording of an empty room and the backs of incompetent men.
The device nearly cracked in my palm.
Predicting human behavior was my specialty. Neural pathways of fear, obedience, and loyalty, mapped and documented. Men turned into weapons. Free will reduced to a chemical equation.
But this. This I hadn’t predicted.
They were supposed to be remade. Variables I could isolate and solve. Instead, they’d become chaotic. Unpredictable.
Unpredictable was unacceptable.
A soft sound from the rear of the cabin broke my concentration. The scuff of a shoe on carpet.
“Sir?”
Didn’t look up from the screen. “What is it, Alban?”
Calm. I kept it level, stripping away the rage until only the cold architecture of command remained.
“Sir... there’s been a development.”
“Speak.”
“It’s... catastrophic, sir.”
I finally lifted my gaze. Alban stood three feet away, holding his own tablet like a shield. Pale. Shaking. Good. Fear was useful. Fear meant he understood the stakes.
“Define catastrophic.”
“Maeve Durham.” The words came out rough. “The journalist. She published.”
He extended his trembling hand, offering the device.
I took it. The glass was cool against my fingertips.
The headline was bold, aggressive, screaming in a sans-serif font that lacked all subtlety: CURANOVA EXPOSED: THE SHADOW WAR ON HUMANITY.
I swiped up.
Not speculation. Not a conspiracy theory.
An autopsy.
Conditioning protocols from the very beginning of my project. Chemical formulas for the early iterations of PSI-317. Redacted operative files I recognized instantly by their psychological profiles.
And then, the photos.
