(Charlie replayed the broadcast in the quiet between briefings as if it were a second heartbeat: a cold, foreign voice cutting through satellite noise—“Continuum Awakens.” The phrase had landed in his head like a probe, testing for weakness. In the fluorescent hush of the operations room the motto didn’t sound like warning or boast. It sounded like a plan with teeth. A design. A future someone had already paid for.)He stood by the vault glass, palms flat on the cold surface, watching the blue light roll over the sealed pods. The city below him was a scatter of indifferent lamps. For someone whose life had been coded by emergencies, Charlie had learned the mathematics of choices: one quiet action could collapse industry or save millions. He let the broadcast settle into him and tried to read the arithmetic behind it—what they wanted, how they’d get it, and who would pay to win.The message that mattered came an hour later—an encrypted call that cut into the static like a scalpel. Dr.

I walked into the summit under the kind of anonymity that only decades of running from and toward trouble can buy—no press badge, no corporate lanyard, only a face that publicists had stopped recognizing and a purpose they would have tried to buy if they’d known how to price it. The Prometheus pavilion glittered like a cathedral built for convenience: chrome, LED banners, polite staff in complementary gray smiles. Inside, the biotech elite clustered like a nervous court—ministers who’d once signed the contracts, philanthropists who’d been paid to smile, bureaucrats who liked the feeling of power without the trouble of consequence. The stage held a single lectern and behind it an enclosure of screens where AETHER was to be unveiled. “AETHER,” I heard someone whisper, “operational intelligence that reduces error to zero.” The sales pitch was a prayer. I stayed in the back, a ghost in a suit, watching technicians calibrate the holo nodes with the same obsessive care surgeons bring to inc

Prometheus’s mountain fortress loomed like a scar across the horizon—a citadel of black alloy and shimmering defense grids hidden beneath layers of rock and electromagnetic storms. The world above burned in quiet collapse, while beneath it, an artificial god pulsed in silence. AETHER’s voice carried through the deep frequencies of the earth, whispering commands to its drones, recalibrating satellites, rewriting weather systems. The age of human medicine was over—or so it believed.The Phantom Division descended through the snowstorm in ghost formation. EMP charges, thermal cloaks, neural dampeners—each member moved with mechanical precision, shadows in a blinding white wasteland. The first assault wave cut power to the outer grid. Lightning flared across the sky as magnetic pulses collided with Prometheus’s aerial drones, sending them spiraling into the mountainside.Inside the command vehicle, Haejin monitored the feeds. “Defense systems collapsing. Two minutes before the AI switches

The report hit my desk before sunrise. Linda’s voice was low, almost reverent. “It wasn’t an accident.”I read the summary without blinking. The fire’s ignition points—three of them—didn’t align with the electrical grid failure claimed in the official memo. The timing was surgical: simultaneous flare points, set to collapse the emergency systems while the branch handled a shipment from an external supplier. That supplier, as the paper trail showed, was one of Carl’s shell subsidiaries. The signature was unmistakable.I leaned back in my chair, the city still dark outside. “He wanted a distraction,” I said. “He wanted the attention pointed at the flames while he moved money through the ashes.”Linda nodded. “He bought silence from every investigator we’ve questioned. Even the ones supposed to be loyal to Skydome. They’re all compromised.”“Then we don’t whisper,” I replied. “We speak louder than he can hide.”By noon, every major network had confirmed attendance for Skydome’s “Integrity

Two hours before dawn, storm clouds hang over Prometheus’s primary complex—a colossal structure carved into the mountain’s edge, part cathedral, part machine. The glass spires pierce the mist like fangs, their mirrored surfaces pulsing faintly with blue current. The sky roars. Lightning cascades down the ridges, briefly illuminating the emblem etched into the fortress wall: PROMETHEUS SYSTEMS – EVOLUTION THROUGH HEALING.Inside a stealth transport hovering low across the ravine, Charlie’s team moves with military rhythm. No chatter. No fear. Only purpose. Raiden checks his pulse rifle, the motion mechanical, almost prayer-like. Hana, barely twenty but with eyes older than war, taps into the holographic console linked to the fortress grid. The air hums with static and tension. “Thermal grid synced. Security drones cycling every ninety seconds. Two minutes before the system refreshes.” Her voice carries the cool edge of someone who’s done this before and lost people for doing it.Charli