“Somanode factory,” she forced out.
The thought twisted my insides so fiercely, I thought I might throw up.
I opened my mouth to ask more questions – questions I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to – but movement on the screen captured my attention. A small beep, as if someone rang the doorbell. The humanoid next to the one Zafyra inhabited moved toward the door, and she followed its lead a nanosecond later. Clearly, she could act like a robot as well as human.
As the two humanoid units moved forward in smooth, gliding steps, the guard’s internal HUD layered transparent data points over the scene – sector designations, vault numbers, heat signatures. I felt a strange relief for having a human body instead of whatever this was – the constant information overload was already exhausting me, just from watching it.
Then, a smaller screen opened over the larger one – security footage. Outside, a man approached through one of the access halls – short, broad-shouldered, wearing a faded technician’s jacket andcarrying a standard-issue repair kit. His face was partially obscured by a low hood and dark AR-visor, but his movements were careful, deliberate.
“Who is this man?” I didn’t realize I’d asked the question aloud until Zafyra’s voice drew my attention away from the screen.
“Dark web contractor,” she clarified.
As if this didn’t make things even more confusing. “You… hired a dark web contractor? To do what?”
She nodded, the corner of her mouth twisting into a small smirk – clearly proud of her cunning. “You’ll see.”
“I do not like the sound of this,” Joey muttered under his breath. I bit my tongue – after everything Zafyra had put us through, I couldn’t disagree.
On the screen, the humanoid raised one hand, fingers briefly hovering over the access panel beside the vault corridor. The screen showed no ID badge on the man, no biometric match, no official record of entry – but none of that seemed to matter. A line of raw code slid into the panel like it had always belonged there – and with a soft click, the door opened.
The man stepped through. For a moment, his eyes raked over the humanoid formation, and he gave a short nod before rushing over to one of the consoles in the middle of the space.
While Zafyra’s humanoid kept its gaze focused on the intruder, through the corner of my eye I noticed two of its counterparts turned to face the camera instead – as if they detected something unusual in the recording humanoid and decided to observe it more closely. It sent a shiver down my spine.
The screen flickered again as the perspective shifted – the humanoid’s eyes now tracking the contractor from behind as it moved deeper into the factory. The lighting dimmed slightly as they entered a secondary vault chamber. Thick metal panels lined the walls like a bunker, and a low vibration pulsed through the floor, barely audible, but enough to raise the hairs on my arms.
Joey gasped. “This is a quantum transfer port.”
I blinked slowly. “A what?”
“You’ve never heard of them? They’re a pretty recent invention. Only the filthy rich can afford them yet.” He sat up straighter. Like me, Joey was a technology geek – but while my interest was mostly in AI, his was in everything about quantum tech. “That’s a QSM pad: Quantum Structure Mapper. Instead of shipping products, theydisassemble them, encode the data, and beam it across entangled anchors to be rebuilt somewhere else.”
“You’re saying… teleportation?” I swallowed the gall in my throat.
He nodded enthusiastically. “Basically, like 3D printing a thing from itself. It’s how corps move high-value cargo without risk of interception. You need paired anchors to make it work – and unfortunately, they use a huge amount of energy.”
On screen, the contractor approached a cylindrical chamber. At its base, a platform glowed faintly blue, encircled by a ring of warning symbols and hazard tape that looked far too casual for something that could rip matter apart.
Zafyra’s humanoid marched over to him, its footsteps slow and mechanical. The contractor glanced up at the camera, then back to the screen, where data appeared as if she were feeding him the passkeys to the system.
Zafyra quietly cleared her throat, though her voice still came out raspy. “He’s sending… the beans. In batches.”
My jaw clenched as I glanced over at her. “To where?”
“Various anchor points.” Her eyelids fluttered. “I’ll let you know where we need to pick them up… just… first…”
A curved control panel flickered to life beneath the contractor’s touch. His fingers moved with precision across a virtual interface, flipping through encrypted menus and authorizations I wouldn’t even try to decode. As he confirmed the upload, the crate began to shimmer – slowly at first, then rapidly pulsing with unstable blue light. A sound like a glass violin being dragged across stone echoed through the chamber. Then, with a muted implosion, the crate vanished.
Noise at the door turned my head, and Joey followed.
“I came as fast as I could.” Raphael stepped into the room, looking from the three of us to the TV. “What in the name of the developer is going on here?”
“We’re watching Zafyra’s memories on my TV.” Joey grimaced, clearly not happy with the fact. “Apparently, she possessed one of the humanoid guards at the Somanode factory, then used its information to hack the security, allowing a contractor she hired off the dark web to—”
Zafyra hissed sharply – the force of it so shocking in her current state, even Joey shut his mouth.
We all turned our gazes back to the screen.
