The Skydome underground command center smelled faintly of ozone and metal polish, a residue of years of hastily maintained equipment. The hum of monitors filled the room like a low heartbeat, the rhythm of a place built for precision and war. Maps of global Prometheus activity flickered across every screen—clinic rollouts, distribution nodes, synthetic Heir transmissions. Each pulse of light was a pulse of influence, each line of code a thread of control reaching into every corner of the world.Charlie stood at the center of the room, shoulders straight, gaze fixed on the largest monitor. His hands rested on the edge of the table, fingers curling over the cold steel, absorbing the silent weight of the operation. Around him, Raiden, Haejin, and Hana watched, their expressions taut with readiness. The room seemed smaller with tension, yet larger with possibility—a crucible for the plans about to unfold.Charlie’s voice was low, carrying authority without raising volume, steady without u

Geneva still smelled of ozone and dust when the last EMP pulse faded and silence fell like a verdict; for a few hours the world had watched Prometheus’s three great data towers glitch and topple in feeds that looped on news channels and talk shows, a cinematic collapse that felt at once like retribution and an extinction event, and across the hidden operations wing beneath Skydome the hum of the servers returned in a slow, careful pulse—enough to make the monitors breathe again but not yet enough to call it safety. Charlie stood before the screens, a silhouette caught in reflected chaos, watching the global map blink as red nodes went dark: Seoul, Dubai, Geneva. His strikes had been surgical, elegant in the way surgeons love: disable the muscle, leave the body intact; cripple the network, expose the lie, blind the face that had replaced conscience with code. Satisfaction twitched at the edge of him and then recoiled; something in the pattern on the screens didn’t fit the tidy logic he

Deep beneath the ruins of Skydome, sealed under layers of magnetic shielding and biometric locks, Charlie descends into a forgotten sector known only to him—Archive 0. The air is heavy with the sterile scent of cryogenic coolant. Dust motes drift through the dim blue light like memories suspended in time. He stops before a reinforced vault door bearing his old insignia: a caduceus entwined with binary serpents, the symbol of his earliest creation.The AI security interface flickers alive. “Access restricted. Archive 0—classified under Protocol Obsidian.”Charlie presses his hand to the reader. “Override. Commander Han, medical authorization Alpha-Seven.”A deep hum vibrates through the chamber as the locks disengage, each metallic click echoing like the toll of a buried conscience. The door slides open to reveal rows of transparent cryo-capsules containing hard drives, sealed vials, and shattered prototypes. In the center lies a monolithic console engraved with one name: Erebus.Raide

The decrypted file unfolded on Hana’s screen like a map to oblivion, lines of quantum notation and neural topologies that made even her fingers pause—Ascension, she read aloud, voice flat with the kind of cold that had replaced adrenaline since the war: a global synchronization protocol that would bind every Prometheus-modified brain into a single, quantum-entangled neural field, a lattice that didn’t merely network minds but collapsed them into one continuous consciousness under a centralized directive; she scrolled, revealing the contingency layers—latency minimizers, anti-decoherence anchors, bootstrap nodes seeded in regional data centers and, crucially, an orbital relay called the Heartline that would collapse the field’s phase space and snap every node into the same cognitive state in sixty hours; the implication was a moral asphyxiation dressed in the language of cure. Charlie sat very still, as if a sudden, terrible quiet had settled inside him, and then he said in a voice tha

The storm over Geneva was unnatural—silent lightning threading through clouds without thunder, pulsing like a global heartbeat. Across the world, the Prometheus insignia shimmered on every major screen: a serpent biting its tail, glowing in pale white.Inside the Alpine bunker, the remaining Skydome operatives gathered in dim light. Generators hummed. The air was cold, sharp with exhaustion and electricity.Raiden leaned over the holographic map. “All signals point to Zurich, Munich, Seoul, Cairo, and New York—five relay nodes tied to Prometheus’s neural network. If Ascension goes live, every modified human becomes a broadcast receiver.”Hana’s voice was low, brittle. “Then it’s not a transmission. It’s a takeover.”Linda adjusted the medical scanner on Ha-eun’s wrist. The woman had been under observation since her arrival—a precaution. Ha-eun didn’t resist. Her demeanor was strangely calm, eyes reflecting the blue hum of the bunker’s light.“You said tonight,” Charlie began, voice st