Page 28 of Damsel in Disguise

The doors slide open to sterile white light and the faint, ever-present smell of antiseptic struggling unsuccessfully against something older. Perhaps burnt organic matter that never quite leaves the walls.

My space.

I remove my coat, fold it with practiced care, and place it on the steel hook by the entrance. Grabbing my apron, I put my mask and gloves on to walk out of my office and to the laboratory.

Inside the primary chamber, the remains of Iteration ninety-seven are still being processed.

I can already tell this is going to be another failed mission.

What’s left of her lies restrained on the gurney—not alive, not entirely dead either. Her ribcage is open, split cleanly down the center, mechanical latticework fused to bone like a parasitic architecture.

Synthetic muscle fibers twitch intermittently, misfiring, attempting to obey commands that no longer exist. The neural core pulses weakly, blue light stuttering behind translucent polymer.

A surgeon stands frozen at the end of the gurney. “Sir…”

“Continue,” I command, not raising my voice.

He flinches and resumes flushing the spinal ports with stabilizing fluid.

It won’t help. The system has already diverged. Emotion overload corrupted the lattice hours ago. Fear crept in where compliance should have lived, and the structure cannibalized itself trying to reconcile incompatible directives.

It always starts the same way.

Precision fails when curiosity grows teeth.

I step closer, studying the subject with detached interest. Her eyes—one biological, one artificial—track me weakly. There’s recognition there. Pleading. A desperate attempt at connection.

I shut it down with a single gesture. The monitor flat-lines. The body goes still.

Another failure catalogued. Another variable eliminated. But at least this time it didn’t melt into a puddle of flesh and blood.

The next moment, I’m moving to the observation deck overlooking the secondary chamber. Below, iteration ninety-eight is suspended upright in a restraint frame, limbs held apart by articulated clamps.

His skin is intact for now, but beneath it, you can see the faint glow of embedded circuitry mapping his nervous system in real time. His mouth opens and closes soundlessly, vocal cords removed for efficiency.

I activate the neural feed. Data streams across the glass: stress response, dopamine spikes, pattern recognition, accelerating beyond expected parameters.

Too aware, just like that biker.

I lean one hand against the glass, fingers splayed, and allow myself exactly three seconds to replay the encounter again. The route deviation. The mirrored speed adjustment. The refusal to disengage until after I confirmed pursuit.

She wasn’t sloppy. That’s what irritates me the most.

I’ve dealt with stalkers before—journalists, obsessed students, corporate spies convinced they were clever enough to slip through Dominion surveillance. They leave fingerprints. Digital residue. Predictable behavioral tells and whatnot.

She left nothing.

No tail after the pass. No attempt to escalate. Just visibility, delivered with surgical intent

I straighten and turn back to the chamber. “Terminate and log,” I instruct. “Mark divergence threshold earlier than projected.”

“Yes, sir.”

As the technicians move, my thoughts drift, but not to the subject in front of me, but to the biker. The Synthète that might be sent after me, one of the Triarchs.

I exhale, removing the gloves and the surgical mask, then shove my hands in my pockets and calmly stride towards the elevator. I press the eight-digit code on the panel —only a couple of us are allowed there—before I click on my Dominion wrist watch to type out a message to the Council of Nine. A small holographic screen expands in front of me. From anyone’s point of view, it looks like a luxury watch. But to me, it’s nothing more than a leash.

Immediate Review Request—Unauthorized Parameter Interference