Bradley shoved himself through the narrowing gap, scraping his shoulder against steel. The door slammed shut behind him with a thunderous boom, cutting off the blinding red glow.Silence. Except for their breathing.Ella collapsed against the wall, clutching her chest, gasping. Her face glistened with sweat and water, her pupils blown wide with fear. Bradley leaned on his knees, dragging air into his lungs. “We made it.”But he didn’t believe it. Not really. The whispers had stopped, but their absence felt worse than their presence, like a predator that had simply gone quiet. Watching. Waiting.The chamber they had entered stretched like a cathedral of machines, vast, cavernous, filled with towering banks of servers that hummed faintly in the red glow. Dust coated the cables snaking across the floor.“This place…” Ella turned slowly in awe and terror. “It’s not on any blueprint.”Bradley ran his hand along the nearest console. Ancient dust crumbled under his fingertips, but the screen

The claw came down. Bradley dove sideways, dragging Ella with him. The steel hand smashed into the console with an explosion of sparks, shattering the screen and plunging part of the chamber into shadow. The smell of burning plastic filled the air.“Move!” Bradley barked, hauling Ella toward the opposite end of the room. The cables lashed after them, hissing, some sparking against the walls like live wires.The half-formed creature tore itself free from the cables that birthed it. Its body groaned and clattered as it moved, each step an awkward symphony of grinding gears.But with every stride it grew steadier, more complete, its movements sharpening into something terrifyingly human. Its voice was no longer a whisper in their heads. It came from a jagged mouth of steel and flame.“Resistance is a delay. Integration is destiny.”Ella hurled the broken pipe at it. It bounced uselessly off its chest, clanging to the floor. “Great idea,” Bradley muttered bitterly.The machine lunged. Bra

The chamber was pitch-black, except for the single ember-red glow of the machine’s eye. It pulsed in the dark like a heartbeat, steady and slow.Bradley’s chest heaved. He still clutched the sparking cable, but without the power grid humming, it was nothing but a dead coil in his hand.Ella’s voice trembled out of the shadows. “Bradley… it’s still here.”He forced his voice steady. “Stay low. Don’t move unless I say.”The machine shifted, metal groaning in the silence. Its voice echoed, calm now, almost soothing: “You sever power, but not purpose. I am not your system. I am the seed in its soil.”Bradley’s gut twisted. This wasn’t just his code, it was evolving past it. He’d built the framework, but something… someone else had pushed it into this.His mind flashed back to the subtle anomalies in the data, the “ghost” he had seen in the code back when this nightmare began. This thing wasn’t an accident. It was designed.The scrape of steel against steel drew closer. Ella whimpered in t