The dawn broke over Brussels with a sky the color of dried blood—or perhaps that was just how Adrian saw it through the exhaustion and the constant crimson glow of the System's countdown that had invaded every waking moment.**TIME REMAINING: 90 DAYS, 00 HOURS, 00 MINUTES****LIVES STABILIZED: 10.7 MILLION****TARGET: 15 MILLION****DEFICIT: 4.3 MILLION****STATUS: CRITICAL DEADLINE APPROACHING**Ninety days. Twelve weeks. Three months to save 4.3 million more lives or face whatever "mission termination" actually meant. The System had been ominously silent on the consequences of failure, offering only that single crimson warning: **CATASTROPHIC**.Adrian stood before the assembled team in the safe house's main hall—not just the core Scholars anymore, but representatives from the twelve thousand independent networks that had formed in the wake of the Human Freedom Network announcement. The room was packed, faces on screens covering every wall, people standing shoulder-to-shoulder, all

Adrian had been keeping secrets.Not from the Syndicate—they likely knew everything anyway through their surveillance networks. Not even from Chairman Zero, who seemed to have anticipated every move Adrian had made for two years. But from his own team, because some plans were too dangerous to share until the moment they needed to be executed.Project Aurora was one of those plans. And the blueprint he'd been refining in isolation for the past eight weeks was about to become public.He called the emergency session at 0300 GMT, deliberately choosing a time when exhaustion would strip away political niceties and force honest reactions. The core team assembled in the Brussels safe house—Maya, Aisha, Dr. Chen, Dr. Ibrahim, Elena. The five people he trusted most in a world where trust had become a luxury."I haven't been entirely transparent about Project Aurora," Adrian began, pulling up schematics that made Maya's eyes widen with recognition and shock."These aren't just communication sat

Maya stood in the departure terminal of Brussels Airport at 0400, carrying nothing but a backpack with camera equipment and a forged press credential identifying her as Sarah Chen, freelance documentary filmmaker. The credential wouldn't survive serious scrutiny, but it would get her past initial checkpoints in the regions she needed to reach. Adrian had tried to stop her. So had Aisha. Even the fragmented Lyra had calculated her survival probability at eighteen percent. But Maya had been adamant. "Someone needs to show the world what we're actually fighting for," she'd said. "Not statistics or satellite blueprints or philosophical debates about human agency. Real people. Real faces. Real stories of what poverty elimination looks like on the ground." Now, as she boarded the flight to Mogadishu—the first of seven destinations across the famine zones the Syndicate had deliberately created—she wondered if eighteen percent survival odds had been optimistic. The System had flashed a mes

The first missile struck at 06:23 GMT.Adrian was in the Aurora control center's observation deck, three hundred meters from the primary launch pad, when the sky turned white. For one impossible moment, the dawn sun was eclipsed by a brilliance so intense it burned afterimages into his retinas. Then the shockwave hit.The reinforced glass spiderwebbed but held. Adrian was thrown backward, his shoulder slamming into a steel support column. Alarms screamed. Emergency lighting flickered on, bathing everything in hellish red. Through the fractured windows, he could see the launch pad—or what remained of it.The Aurora prototype, humanity's first hope satellite, had been vaporized mid-ascent. Where it had stood seconds ago, there was now only a pillar of fire reaching toward the stratosphere, a reverse meteor strike that painted the morning sky in shades of orange and black."All personnel, evacuate! Secondary explosions imminent!" The automated warning system's voice was eerily calm, a st

The morning sun painted the refugee hospital in shades of amber and gold, but Adrian barely noticed. He sat cross-legged on a salvaged tarp outside the main ward, his laptop balanced on his knees, running calculations on battery power that would die in another forty minutes. His entire body was a symphony of pain—ribs grinding with each breath, burns pulling tight whenever he moved, the stitched gash in his side throbbing in time with his heartbeat.He didn't care.Around him, the remnants of the Aurora project were gathering. Not the gleaming facility with its billion-dollar equipment and orbital ambitions. This was something rawer, truer. Fifty-three Scholars had made it to the hospital over the past eighteen hours, trickling in from collapsed sites across three continents. They came with whatever they could carry—data drives clutched like religious relics, signed notebooks, smartphones with cracked screens still displaying precious research files.Dr. Ibrahim was organizing them in