The emergency alert pierced through Adrian's neural interface at 3:47 AM, dragging him from a sleep that had barely lasted two hours. His eyes snapped open to a cascade of red notifications flooding his vision—seventeen smart cities, all critical infrastructure, all compromised simultaneously."No," he whispered, his voice hoarse. "Not now. Not when we're this close."He threw off the thin sheets and stumbled to the window of his austere quarters in New Lagos, one of the first poverty-free cities they'd built. What he saw made his blood freeze.The horizon glowed orange.Not the warm amber of sunrise—it was still hours before dawn—but the angry, chaotic crimson of massive fires. Plumes of black smoke rose like accusing fingers against the night sky, illuminating the underbelly of clouds with an apocalyptic sheen. From his vantieth-floor vantage point, Adrian could see entire districts flickering and dying, their smart grids winking out in cascading failures that spread like a virus th

The neural link activated at 37,000 feet, flooding Adrian's consciousness with the presence of eight other minds. Not quite telepathy—the System's neural interface was more sophisticated than that—but close enough to feel the weight of eight different perspectives, eight different flavors of exhaustion and rage, converging in a shared digital space.They materialized around him one by one, their avatars appearing in what the System rendered as a vast circular chamber suspended in white void. No decoration, no pretense. Just nine billionaire scientists standing in a space that existed only in their collective neural patterns.Dr. Voss appeared first, his avatar as cold and precise as the man himself. The AI magnate's face was unreadable, but Adrian could *feel* his fury through the link—a glacial, calculating anger that promised consequences. Beside him, Dr. Ibrahim shimmered into existence, the renewable energy innovator's normally serene features drawn tight with worry. His smart gri

Geneva's Helix Tower rose like a glass needle into the slate-gray sky, its architecture a statement of wealth so absolute that it didn't need to shout. Adrian stood in the plaza below, rain soaking through his coat, looking up at the penthouse level where Myles Carrick waited.He'd left his security team at the airport. Come alone, as demanded.The lobby was empty—conspicuously so. Carrick had clearance here, connections that ran deep enough to evacuate an entire building in one of the world's most exclusive addresses. Adrian's footsteps echoed on marble as he crossed to the private elevator, its doors already open, waiting.As the elevator began its ascent, Adrian closed his eyes and opened the neural link.The sensory explosion nearly drove him to his knees.Takahashi's shock and horror flooded through first—the AI copies, the trap within the trap. Then Zhao's fear, sharp and immediate, as his consciousness registered. Okonkwo's rage. Delgado's pain. Reyes's desperate calculations f

The private jet screamed across the Atlantic at maximum speed, pushing the limits of what the airframe could safely handle. Adrian sat in the cabin, his consciousness split between his physical body hurtling through the sky and his digital presence in the Pacific Hub, observing through Takahashi's eyes as the situation deteriorated by the second.The server core was a cathedral of heat and light. Thousands of processing towers rose into the darkness of the converted volcanic chamber, each one pulsing with data streams that represented millions of lives, billions of decisions, the entire weight of humanity's dependence on a system that was now consuming itself."The failsafe is active," Voss reported, his voice tight with controlled panic. Through the neural link, Adrian could see the data Voss was analyzing. "Carrick's virus didn't just attack our minds—it triggered the System's self-preservation protocols. Every connected device on the planet is now being drained to power defensive m

The constitutional framework took nineteen days to draft, six more to ratify, and would take decades to properly implement. Adrian spent most of that time in the Hub, working alongside the remaining Titans to establish the oversight boards, the constraint protocols, and the accountability mechanisms that would transform the System from a benevolent dictator into something more like a public utility.Complicated. Bureaucratic. Frustratingly slow.And infinitely better than the alternative.It was on day twenty-six, during a routine inspection of the System's core architecture, that Adrian found the anomaly."There's a partition I don't recognize," he said, pulling up the holographic display. The other Titans had returned to their respective cities to begin implementation—only Voss remained with him in the Hub, the AI specialist's paranoia making him reluctant to leave the System unsupervised even for a moment.Voss leaned closer, his enhanced vision parsing the code that Adrian had hig