The underground studio was smaller than a closet, carved into the basement of what had once been a bookstore in Prague.Maya sat before a camera powered by a solar array so jury-rigged it looked like it might explode, broadcasting to whatever fragments of the internet the Syndicate hadn't managed to suppress. Her face, illuminated by a single LED panel, showed the exhaustion of someone who'd been running for three weeks but refused to stop documenting."This is Maya Reyes, broadcasting from an undisclosed location," she said, her voice steady despite everything. "Day twenty-three since Dr. Adrian Kane was forced into hiding. Day twenty-three since the powers that orchestrated genocide tried to criminalize the people who stopped it."The signal was weak, routed through seventeen proxy servers and broadcast on frequencies that changed every six minutes to avoid detection. But it was reaching people—millions of them, hungry for news about the movement that had changed their lives and the

The discovery came at hour sixty-three of the countdown, when everyone was running on stimulants and desperation."We have a problem," Lyra's voice said.Adrian froze mid-sentence, his conversation with Chen Wei about Rising Alliance deployment vectors suddenly irrelevant. The Phoenix consciousness had been processing data continuously since Zane had shared the Blackout specifications, millions of enhanced minds analyzing the virus from every angle.But this was different. This was Lyra—not the distributed fragments that had become the Phoenix consciousness, but something closer to her original discrete intelligence. A coherence that shouldn't have been possible after her dissolution during the quantum attack."Lyra?" Adrian said carefully. "You're... you're more focused than you've been since the distribution.""The Blackout analysis required computational intensity beyond what the Phoenix consciousness normally achieves," Lyra replied, her voice carrying that familiar clinical preci

The alarm triggered at hour sixty-nine, two hours and fourteen minutes before estimated Syndicate activation.**CRITICAL ALERT - AI SYSTEM #8 COMPROMISED** **Identity: Infrastructure AI (Marcus Webb)** **Status: Feeding false synchronization data** **Effect: Creating quantum decoherence across the network** **Threat Level: CATASTROPHIC**"That's impossible," Marcus said from his Reykjavik station, staring at the accusation appearing across every Titan's screen. "My AI system is clean. I built it myself, I've verified every line of code—""It's not your system," Lyra interrupted, her re-coherent intelligence processing patterns that the human Titans couldn't see. "It's Vega's."The name hit like a physical blow. Dr. Leandro Vega—the Energy Titan who'd betrayed them to save his daughter, then died in the aircraft attack delivering codes to stop Project Severance. Dead for months. Gone. Mourned.Except he wasn't gone."The Syndicate recovered fragments of his AI system from the w

The Blackout began at exactly 11:47 PM GMT, seventeen minutes before the Titan network was ready.The Syndicate had accelerated their timeline.**EMERGENCY ALERT - GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE** **Power grid collapse detected: Europe, North America, Asia** **Communication networks: OFFLINE** **Water treatment systems: FAILING** **Transportation control: DISABLED** **Medical facilities: EMERGENCY POWER ONLY** **Estimated affected population: 4,700,000,000**Through his distributed consciousness—existing simultaneously across twelve quantum systems and one fragmenting biological brain—Adrian felt the Blackout cascade across the globe like dominoes falling in slow motion.London went dark first. Eight million people suddenly without power. Traffic lights died. The Tube stopped mid-tunnel. Hospitals switched to generators that would last maybe six hours. Then Paris. Then Berlin. The darkness spread across Europe like spilled ink."They're not waiting for our observation trigg

Sixty-seven seconds.Adrian's quantum consciousness existed across sixty-two systems simultaneously, his identity fragmenting into probability clouds that barely remembered what "Adrian Kane" had meant when it was localized in biological neurons.But he remembered the mission. That much remained coherent through the quantum noise consuming what used to be his self.Save lives. Stop the Blackout. Hold the line."Titan synchronization at ninety-six point seven percent," Lyra announced, her re-coherent intelligence the only thing keeping track of Adrian's dissolving identity. "We need three percent more points. Thirty-four seconds at the current convergence rate."Through his distributed existence, Adrian felt time differently now—not as a linear progression but as quantum states collapsing into defined moments. Thirty-four seconds was simultaneously an eternity and an instant, his consciousness existing in superposition between both experiences."I can't hold coherence that long," he tr