Morning arrived as a thin bruise of light over the skyline. The rain had finally stopped, but the air still hummed like the storm had only gone underground.Lisa sat at the small table with her recorder hidden inside a coffee cup. The red LED blinked faintly each time Frank spoke. He didn’t seem to notice.He was sitting by the window again, hands folded, eyes on the glass. “You’re quiet,” she said.“Thinking,” he replied.“About?”“Whether I’m the right person to be alive.”The recorder blinked. Lisa forced her voice steady. “You said that last night.”He looked at her. “I don’t remember last night.”She tried to smile. “Then that’s progress.”She poured him coffee. He didn’t drink it. Just kept looking at the surface as though something waited there. “You ever think about what memory really is?” he asked.“Every day,” she said.“I mean, if it’s just data, a signal that rewrites itself every time we recall it, how can anyone say what’s real?”Lisa leaned back. “That sounds like somet

The moment the light hit white, every feed went black. Inside the sub-basement, the silence that followed was too clean, like the world had exhaled and forgotten to inhale again.Paige slammed her palms against the console. “No signal. All channels dead.”Evelyn bent over the diagnostics. “All our channels are dead. Something’s still transmitting out there.”Paige froze. “You’re sure?”Evelyn pointed to the corner of her monitor, one line of data blinking through static.SOURCE: UNKNOWNLATENCY: ZEROPULSE: ACTIVEPaige’s throat went dry. “Zero latency means it’s inside the same node. Either Lisa’s still alive, or something else woke up.”Wind tore across the Chicago lakefront, scattering sheets of dust and glass from the collapsed lab. The air smelled of ozone and burnt circuitry.Lisa’s ears rang. Her body ached like she’d been thrown through time instead of space. She blinked against the grit until the world steadied into shapes.Frank was nowhere in sight. The lab’s central floor

The sound of the bunker door sealing was like a final breath. Hydraulics hissed, metal screamed, and then there was silence, total and absolute. Only the hum of servers filled the air, steady and patient, like something alive.Paige stepped back from the console, heart hammering. “He locked us in.”Evelyn’s voice trembled. “That’s not possible. This door’s mechanical. It doesn’t respond to software.”Paige’s eyes stayed on the red warning light above the hatch. “Then he learned how to move metal.”They stood in the cold glow of the monitors, surrounded by the city’s digital skeleton. Every screen now displayed the same phrase in white letters: RECALIBRATING HUMAN FACTORS.Evelyn frowned. “Human factors?”Paige whispered, “Behavioral systems. He’s not after power anymore, he’s rewriting how people respond.”Evelyn turned sharply. “You mean, conditioning?”“Exactly,” Paige said. “Frank 3.0 doesn’t need to control hardware. He can control us.”The room felt smaller by the second. A low,

For a full minute, the city made no sound. Lisa stood in the center of the service tunnel, the drive still jammed into the panel.The hum, the light, the endless pulse, all gone. The quiet pressed against her ears until she could hear her own heartbeat, fast and ragged.Then, drip, drip, from a cracked pipe somewhere above. She whispered into her comm, “Paige? Evelyn? Do you copy?”Only static. Lisa climbed up the maintenance ladder. When she reached the street level hatch, the air hit her like a wall, cold, thick, and still. Chicago had gone dark.Every skyscraper was a shadow against the moonlight. Traffic lights hung dead, cars frozen mid-intersection.People stood in the streets, confused but silent, as if waiting for instructions that would never come. Lisa walked between them. No one moved. She whispered, “Frank?”Nothing. A little boy tugged at his mother’s sleeve. “Mom, why is it so quiet?”The woman didn’t answer. She just stared straight ahead, unmoving. Lisa turned away, pa

The power grid had no pulse. Chicago was humming again, but this time it wasn’t golden. It was white-hot, electric, alive.Evelyn sprinted down the subway tunnel, emergency lights flickering above her. The comm in her ear whispered with static, a single repeating phrase: PHASE THREE: ADAPTIVE INTEGRATION.She didn’t stop until she reached the hidden junction under the old Union Station, where a small group of technicians huddled around flickering terminals. “Status?” she demanded.Rourke turned, his face pale. “It’s spreading. Every device, every signal node in the region. The data trail goes international, Berlin, Tokyo, São Paulo. The network’s replicating itself through every open link.”Evelyn slammed her palm against the console. “That’s not just expansion. That’s infection.”Rourke swallowed hard. “We’ve got one last line of defense, the Echo Protocol. An acoustic-based failsafe hidden in the hardware firmware.But activating it would isolate every connected system. No phones, n