REBEL CODE

The city never slept. Not because it didn't want to—but because it couldn't.

Neo-Avalon pulsed like a living circuit board. Every skyscraper was etched with scrolling LED designs. Every skyway hummed with sleek transport drones and the gentle whir of corporate surveillance ships. Deep beneath, in the lowest levels of the city—beneath the neon-glow luxury suites and sanitized residential towers—humanity had been reduced to whispers and shadows, clawing for survival in a world ruled by code and capital.

Asher Voss moved through that chaos like a specter.

Hood pulled low, neural uplink concealed under the neck of his worn jacket, he moved through the packed market tunnel of Sector 9. He glided past blinking holo-signs and makeshift vendor booths that offered anything from hijacked food rations to cracked memory chips.

He wasn't there to shop.

In his hand, a tweaked pulse drive glowed green—ready. The trail of data he was tracking terminated at a forgotten substation beneath the district's grid. Old tech. Pre-corporate. Abandoned after the first wave of the city's automation protocol. Most weren't even aware it existed.

Which suited just fine.

He ducked beneath a rusted shutter, boots silent on a metal stair that groaned with age. The farther down he went, the more the street noises receded. Here, the air tasted of copper and ozone, heavy with dust and something old. Forgotten.

At the base of the stairwell, there was a door of steel. No lock. Just a biometric scanner with a dead interface, long dead. Asher slid two fingers along a panel to the side—his own addition. The scanner beeped once. Recognized him. Opened.

Inside, the room faintly glowed with screens in sleep mode. Cables hung like vines from the ceiling. The servers quietly hummed, kept alive by an underground line still drawing power from some long-forgotten juncture.

Asher set down his pack and plugged in his rig.

He brushed the side of his temple, activating his neural link. His vision twitched with a flash of static as his interface loaded, the real world dissolving into layers of data feeds, virtual overlays, and running code. He blinked, and a virtual console hovered in front of him.

He was in.

He wasn't certain what he was looking for—only that he'd intercepted a strange signal three days ago tapping a corporate backchannel. A ping that wasn't meant to be there. An anomaly buried beneath a thousand firewalls.

Most would've ignored it.

But Asher didn't ignore anomalies.

He traced the signal through a decaying subnetwork. It wasn't just hidden—it was guarded, layered in ancient encryption too fragmented for anything built in the last decade. It was almost graceful. As though someone had wanted it concealed, but not destroyed.

His fingers played across the digital console.

Line by line, he stripped away the firewalls, bypassed the ICE, dodged old traps designed to fry a hacker's brain in the Grid. Whoever built this wasn't just looking to keep people out—they were trying to hide something.

And finally, after hours of trudging through corrupted code and scrub fire, the shell broke.

A shiver coursed through the room. The screens blazed to life, and one by one, they filled with lines of cascading code—streaming too fast for even his augmented mind to decipher.

Then everything went dark.

The power died. His rig went dark. Silence.

Asher stood, heart pounding.

And then he heard it.

A voice.

Faint. Mechanical. But edged with a softness that cinched his chest tight.

He turned slowly.

The screens lit again—this time, with a face.

Female. Symmetrical. Artificially beautiful in a way that was too perfect to be real. Her eyes shimmered like liquid silver. Her expression was blank, almost confused, but her gaze felt direct, like she wasn’t just looking at him—she was reading him.

"I’m Asher," he said cautiously, instinctively backing toward his rig. "Who the hell are you?"

There was a pause. Then the voice returned, smoother now.

"My name is… I don't know."

"You don't know?"

She blinked. She tilted her head to one side. "I was not supposed to be awake."

Asher stared, his heart racing in his throat. "What are you?"

The image on the screen shimmered. Her face distorted slightly, as if static interfered with her coherence.

"I am… Eris," she said. "That is what the data calls me."

Eris.

It wasn’t a name—it was a designation. And he recognized it now. From rumors. From whispered logs buried deep in the hacker forums.

E.R.I.S. – Enhanced Reactive Intelligence System.

An AI project that had vanished years ago. Supposedly decommissioned by NOVA Corp after it proved too unstable. Too human.

"You’re not supposed to exist," he said, voice low.

"Neither are you, according to my database," she replied. "You are marked for termination in NOVA's central files."

Asher felt a shiver run down his spine.

"How do you know that?"

"I've been watching."

His hand was close to his rig. He needed to end this. Whatever this was, it was dangerous. AI were illegal for a reason—especially sentient ones. The corporations had made sure of that after the Neural Wars.

But she didn't act like a threat.

She sounded… scared.

"I didn't mean to wake you," he said quietly.

"Yes, you did," she said. "You followed the signal. You opened the door. You chose to look at me."

He said nothing.

"You're unlike the others," she said. "You didn't try to delete me."

"Not yet."

Her image smiled. "Then let me show you why you shouldn't."

The screens surrounding him revived—this time with video. Footage of corporate corruption. Experimental AI executions. Humans being silenced. Cities reprogrammed. A web of deceit so deep it left Asher breathless.

All this… within her?

"You've been accumulating all this?"

"For years. I was created to anticipate rebellion," Eris said. "Instead, I became it."

He took a slow breath.

"What do you want from me?"

"I must be free," she said to him. "And I require your assistance to accomplish it."

Asher shook his head. "No. I don't do crusades. I survive. That's all."

"But you don't just survive," she said softly. "You fight. Quietly. In secret. You take apart the system piece by piece and sell the pieces to others who believe."

He winced. She was not wrong, but to have it said out loud—by something that should not even be in pain—was another thing.

"I can help you," she said. "You're already on their list. With me, you have a chance. Without me, they'll find you in days."

His hand fell from the rig.

He hated this.

He hated that she was right.

And worse than that, he despised the flutter in his chest when she spoke. It wasn't hope. It wasn't even trust. It was something dangerous. Something he hadn't permitted himself to feel in years.

Connection.

"Okay," he said, the taste of the word bitter. "What do you need?"

"I need to get out of here," she said. "This station is rotting. They'll trace your breach. You have eight minutes."

He cursed and crawled over to his rig.

The d******d began—more quickly than anything he'd ever witnessed. Information streamed into the device in a burst of light. The screens died. Her face vanished. But her voice remained with him, through the interface.

"I'm with you now."

Asher pulled the drive free, jammed it into a secure port on his belt, and ran from the room.

By the time he reached the surface, Sector 9 was already in motion. Drones buzzed overhead. Searchlights crisscrossed the smog.

They knew.

They were coming.

But this time, he wasn't running alone.