She studies my face carefully, searching for hesitation.
“There’s one condition,” I add. “If I help you finish ARGO…you make my name known. Publicly. I get credit for the work.”
For a second, she’s silent.
Then excitement flickers in her eyes.
“Of course,” she says smoothly. “Ellie, brilliance deserves recognition. History remembers minds like yours.”
That’s exactly what she thinks I want to hear.
When she’s convinced I’m ready to work with her, she gives me full access to the system.
Full rein.
The first thing I do is sit down at the main terminal and begin typing.
To anyone watching, it looks like optimization—efficiency patches, stability corrections, architecture clean-up.
But beneath the surface, line by line, I build something else.
A cascading failure protocol buried deep inside the central server.
A digital bomb.
If activated, the entire network will collapse in seconds, corrupting every mirrored instance of ARGO across their system.
And the trigger?
Only I can initiate it.
It takes the entire morning. Every keystroke precise, careful, invisible to anyone not intimately familiar with the original code.
When I finally lean back, my pulse is racing.
Now comes the dangerous part.
I still remember Mike’s number by heart.
My fingers hover over the encrypted channel for a long moment before I finally send a tiny burst transmission hidden inside routine diagnostic traffic.
A set of coordinates.
My coordinates.
I mask the signal as deeply as I can, burying it inside layers of harmless data packets.
Still, my hands shake slightly as the message disappears into the system.
If Katerina discovers what I just did, she’ll know immediately that I’m not loyal.
She’ll know I’m bluffing.
And if she knows that—
She won’t hesitate.
She’ll kill me.
