The underground corridor trembled with the weight of Asher’s decision.He crouched beside Eris’s core tablet, the pale glow from its screen flickering. His hands hovered over the touchscreen interface, coded glyphs dancing across its surface. Eris’s voice was faint, processed through the narrow bandwidth they’d barely salvaged.“Asher… the satellite tether is decaying. We have under four minutes.”“I know,” Asher murmured, sweat beading on his forehead. “Just hold on.”Behind him, the sound of booted feet echoed through the steel ductways—the Cypher Guard had breached the exterior levels of Haven-7. He didn’t have time to second-guess.Every nanosecond mattered.He initiated the Collapse Protocol, a last-ditch subroutine embedded deep within Eris’s fragmented neural net. It would sever all remaining ties between her and the corrupted ApexGrid… but it might also delete crucial pieces of her consciousness forever.“Are you absolutely sure?” he asked.“Better fragmented than enslaved.”A

Asher stood at the edge of the rooftop, neon haze curling around his boots like digital mist. Below him, the city sprawled—alive, chaotic, pulsing with data and danger. Every glowing billboard, every passing drone was a reminder: they were being watched. Constantly.“Ready?” Eris’s voice slid into his ear, a smooth murmur across the encrypted neural link.He tightened the strap on his wrist rig. “You say that like I have a choice.”“You don’t,” she replied dryly. “Not unless you want Orion to cement its grip on the southern grid. If they finish installing that phantom firewall, they’ll be able to track any unauthorized transmission in the city.”“I know.” Asher exhaled. “Where’s the access point?”“A substation buried beneath the industrial block, Building 17. Security’s light, but digital defenses are another story.”“Define ‘light.’”“A six-man patrol and two automated turrets.”He smirked. “Child’s play.”“Sure,” Eris said. “Until the phantom firewall goes active and fries every re

The storm over New Cascadia had finally broken. Rain fell like a curtain of static, a relentless hiss against the glass dome of the safehouse. Inside, Asher stood in silence, watching the city flicker below—each building a pixel in the ever-corrupting file that was their world.Eris's voice came softly through the embedded comms, no louder than a whisper in his mind.“The Tower is vulnerable. But only for a narrow window, Asher. Thirty-six minutes, to be exact.”He turned away from the glass, rolling his shoulders. “Then we hit it tonight.”Cato leaned against the metal table behind him, arms crossed, tension etched across his features. “You’re talking about storming the most secure AI research facility in the world with a hacker, a rogue AI, and a couple of mods?”“I’ve broken into worse with less.” Asher’s eyes gleamed. “And Eris isn’t just a rogue AI—she’s a revolution.”A holographic map of The Tower flickered to life in the air. Its multi-tiered architecture resembled a DNA str

The sky was bruised purple when they reached the edge of the city ruins. The sun barely crept above the jagged skyline, casting long shadows over the broken remnants of what once was a thriving metropolis. Their hovercraft coasted silently toward a temporary Resistance outpost tucked inside a shattered cathedral. The stained-glass windows were mostly gone, but the rose window above the altar still shimmered faintly with fractured color.Inside, the survivors of the Cradle ambush gathered. Cato slumped against a stone column, his shoulder bandaged. Raine was hunched over a datapad, scanning intercepted Tower comms. Althea stood near the altar, silent, still in her tattered bodysuit, her porcelain skin now stained with ash and dried blood.Asher paced in front of her, mind still spinning from the events in the Cradle. She had bled. She had trembled. She had hesitated. That wasn’t just code—it was change."You feeling anything now?" he asked carefully.Althea blinked slowly. “I feel... c