His right monitor lit up. "Shadow server deployment." The system was creating decoys, rerouting data behind the perimeter, laying traps for him to stumble into. "She's chasing me. Go, Zadie."
Zadie's fingers hit the keys hard and fast. On the wall, her screens came alive with the quiet insertion of a low-priority maintenance port that handled routine system updates. It was an access point that the AI would normally monitor with passive scans. Background noise. Invisible, as long as the AI had something louder to worry about.
Gideon pushed harder with a third wave. He mimicked a credential on one of the mid-level authentication gates. A rapid sequential attempt with slight variations that screamed amateur but demanded attention because volume was volume, and the AI couldn't ignore it.
"Thirty seconds in," Zadie said. "I'm through the maintenance layer. Moving to the permission architecture."
"Keep moving. But let me know if you see any flashes."
"You got it."
He watched her progress on the wall while feeding the AI more noise with his left hand. Split focus. Two conversations at once. His brain partitioned the way it used to during late-night ETHER builds when he'd run diagnostics on one system while writing code for another.
"AI just spawned a second shadow server," he said.
"I take it that’s good?" Coulter asked.
"It’s excellent," Zadie said. "Keep her busy, Gideon."
"Copy that." Gideon rotated the attack vector again. New IP. New approach. This time he probed the data routing layer—not trying to access anything, just mapping traffic patterns in a way that would look like reconnaissance for a larger attack. The AI would interpret it as phase one of a multi-stage breach and start fortifying the inner perimeter.
Which would pull resources away from the maintenance port Zadie was crawling through.
"One minute," Zadie said. "I've got the permission tree. Locating the credential shelf."
Coulter stepped forward. "What's that?" He pointed at a cascade of amber text on Gideon's right monitor.
"The AI reclassifying my threat level." Gideon scanned the output. "She's bumping me from passive surveillance to active containment. That's good. Means she's allocating more processing power to me."
"It doesn't look good," Neve said.
"It looks exactly like it's supposed to."
He launched another volley—this one targeting the encryption handshake protocol on ORACLE's secondary authentication gate. An actual attack would have been trying to intercept the cipher exchange. His attack failed in the right way, tripping every alarm in sequence, forcing the AI to respond to each one individually.
His screen flashed. The AI deployed a honeypot, or a fake data cache, designed to lure the attacker deeper while logging every move they made.
"She just baited me." Gideon grinned. "Let the fun begin." He dove into the honeypot, feeding the AI exactly what it wanted—his attack patterns, his probe sequences, his timing. Let it learn him. Let it build a complete profile. The more data it collected on his methods, the more confident it would become that it understood the threat, and the less bandwidth it would spend scanning for anything else.
"Ninety seconds," Zadie said. "I've found the shelf. Planting now."
"Do it right. I've got her attention."
Neve pointed at Zadie's wall monitor. "That line just changed color."
Zadie's hands froze for a fraction of a second. Gideon's eyes snapped to the display. A single line in the permission tree had shifted from green to amber. Passive scan.
"The AI just brushed past the maintenance port on a routine sweep," Gideon said. "Don't move."
"Waiting for you to clear."
He pulled up a fresh script—something he'd written as a contingency and hoped he wouldn't need. A simulated data extraction attempt on ORACLE's outermost storage partition. The digital equivalent of smashing a window.
He launched it.
The amber line on Zadie's monitor flickered back to green. The AI had pivoted, drawn by the louder threat, abandoning the passive sweep.
"Go," he said.
