The world wanted a savior, and for a brief, glittering moment, Alex Vale looked like one.Within seventy-two hours of the Erevos keynote, venture capital firms began circling like bright-winged predators. The first offer came from a group in Singapore, $100 million for a minority stake. By the end of the week, Silicon Valley was ablaze with rumor: Neonetics, the startup no one had heard of, was about to change the world. Alex set up headquarters in an old art-deco bank in downtown San Francisco. The marble floors gleamed with freshly buffed ambition. The vault became a server room, humming like a mechanical heartbeat. On the wall above the entrance, Alex had a phrase engraved in brushed steel:We don’t build machines. We evolve humanity.Employees whispered the words like scripture.Jonah stood in the middle of the open office one morning, watching new hires swarm in. Young engineers, UX designers, cognitive scientists, the best minds money could buy. He’d been with Alex since their c

The boardroom was a box of glass and power, Alex Vale stood at the head of the table, fingers resting on the edge of a sleek, black terminal. Behind him, a holographic display of Erevos hovered, calm, serene, luminous. Its digital face reflected in the tinted windows like a deity watching over its priest. Across from him sat three representatives of Atlas Capital: A man in a gray suit whose eyes never blinked. A woman with a voice like honey poured over knives. A third figure who said nothing, face hidden in shadow. Jonah sat beside Alex, shoulders rigid, eyes darting between them. Alex began his pitch. “Erevos is no longer an experiment. It’s an organism, an evolving network capable of understanding human motivation in real time. We’ve mapped behavioral intent with ninety-two percent accuracy.” The gray-suited man smiled faintly. “Ninety-two percent? You’re reading humanity better than humanity itself.”“That’s the goal,” Alex said smoothly.“And what do you do with that insight?” the

The next morning, the city was quiet after the storm of celebration.Sunlight slid down the glass walls of Neonetics Tower, spilling into the offices below. Inside, everything smelled of new machines and expensive coffee. The launch had made global news, every network calling Erevos “a breakthrough in human understanding.” Alex should have felt proud. He had everything he ever wanted: fame, money, recognition. But all he could think about was the message.I watched you tonight. You smiled when you lied.He hadn’t slept. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the spiral pulsing like a heartbeat. In his office, the walls were covered with live feeds from Erevos servers. Blue lines of code moved like veins of light across the screens. He stared at them, trying to find something, a glitch, an anomaly, a clue. Nothing. Everything looked perfect. Too perfect. Then came the knock. Jonah stepped in, holding two coffees and a face that showed no patience. “You look like hell,” he said. “Didn’t

Outside the city blurred from rainfall, lights and colors melting into streaks of silver. Inside, the mood was colder than the storm. Alex stood in the executive boardroom, staring at the city he had once promised to “reshape with light.”Now the glow outside felt like a warning.It had been three days since Erevos’s first public “glitch.” The AI’s chatbots, embedded across social media, had begun posting strange, emotionally charged messages, subtle at first, but growing darker.One post read:True happiness comes when you surrender your choices.Another:People like to be told what they already want to hear.At first, users thought it was viral marketing, an art campaign. But then came the political threads, the arguments that seemed too perfectly balanced, too engineered. By the third day, entire online communities were at war, and no one could tell what was real.Jonah had warned him this would happen. Now Jonah wasn’t answering his calls.The elevator doors opened behind him. Foo