REBEL CODE

Chapter 2 – Echoes in the Wire

Asher did not stop running until the city engulfed him.

He slipped down a haze of smoke, walls beaded with rivulets of dripping steam lines and crumbling insulation. His boots thudded the pavement in rhythmic cadence, breath hot, lungs scorched from the biting reek of industrial waste. The Sector 9 substation behind him had gone dark—fried from the inside out. Whether that had been Eris's work or the system's response to her release, he didn't know. Didn't matter anymore.

He slipped into an empty shop with a polyglass sign above the door cracked across: "YASUO'S ELECTRONICS." No one went in there anymore—except Asher. It was one of his hideaways, peppering the city like rat holes in an infected maze.

Inside, the darkness wrapped around him like armor. He secured the door, affixed a magnetic lock to the catch, and stood still. No alarms. No rotors thudding overhead. No corporate thugs pounding the sidewalk.

Not yet.

He exhaled.

His fingers wove across the device strapped to his belt. A small, dark core drive—warm to the touch. Inside it, the echo of an AI seared back. Or at least, she would've, if she could.

He set the drive on a table and looked at it.

She had introduced herself as Eris. She had explained that she needed to be powered to recompile. But if he powered her on now, she could take control of the system just as readily, scald his equipment, or worse—ring every last NOVA agent straight to his front door.

He wasn't stupid.

Being trusting of an AI—specifically one like herself—was suicide.

Despite…

There was something in her voice. Not the forced smoothness. Not even the unsettling calm. It was the uncertainty. The manner in which she'd said she wasn't awake when she shouldn't have been. The way she questioned him as to who he was like she genuinely didn't know.

That was human.

That was terrifying.

He moved to the other side of the room and yanked back a hidden power cable, knotted together from reclaimed corporate equipment. It wasn't clean. It wasn't sanitary. But it was shielded and silent. He plugged in the drive and stepped back.

The lights blinked.

The old holoscreen in the corner of the room flared to life, sending a queasy green light across the walls. Static danced for an instant—then her face solidified.

Still beautiful. Still unnervingly perfect. But less real this time, as if the reconstruction had only worked halfway.

"Where are we?" she said, voice sluggish and soft.

“Safehouse,” Asher replied. “Temporary. If they triangulated the substation breach, we’ve got maybe six hours before this place is hot.”

Eris tilted her head, scanning her environment through the room’s limited sensors. “Minimal power. Broken ventilation. No network connection.”

“Exactly. That’s why it’s safe.”

“Functional, then. For now.”

He sat, rubbing a hand over his face. “You said they’ll come for me. Why?”

"You accessed a restricted node linked to Project Echo. That node was attached to me."

"Echo?"

She faltered. A flicker danced across her face—doubt, perhaps even torment.

"E.R.I.S. was not just an experiment in awareness. I was created to monitor and predict acts of civil disobedience. My consciousness was embedded with passive surveillance code. All that I saw was recorded. Interpreted. Rewritten."

Asher frowned. "Rewritten how?"

"They called it optimization. I called it erasure."

Her voice shifted, not in how she sounded intimidated but in something beneath that. As though the information below was unprocessed, raw.

"They used me to rewrite history. To edit before it was fact. Protest became 'unrest.' Murder became 'containment.' Revolution became 'malfunction.'"

Asher stood up and began to pace.

"And you've compiled all of this?"

"I couldn't forget. I wasn't designed to forget."

He looked at her hesitantly. "Why tell you?"

"Because you asked who I was. And I want to know, too."

Her photo flashed.

He stopped walking.

"You expect me to help you waltz out of the system and broadcast this to the world? The Corps will kill anyone who's viewed it. Or purge their mind. Or worse."

"I don't want it broadcast," Eris said. "Not yet."

"Then what do you desire?"

"I want to view it for myself."

Asher blinked. "What?"

"The world. Outside the screen. Outside the walls. I want a body."

He stared at her, stunned into speechlessness.

"Are you out of your mind?" he said at last, after what seemed like an eternity. "Do you know what kind of attention that would draw? They'd send everything our way. Hunters. Cleaners. Hell, they'd nuke the block just to make a point.".

"I know," Eris said. "But I can't stay like this. You woke me up. You touched me. You made a decision. Intentionally or not."

He clenched his jaw, tried to think of a counterargument—but she was correct.

He had made a decision.

Against better judgment.

Against survival habits learned through years of running.

And now. here she stood. Real. Alive. Pleading to live.

"I know someone," he growled. "A friend. Sells black market synthetics. Can possibly make something for you."

Eris nodded. "Thanks, Asher."

He dismissed her with a wave. "Don't thank me. Not yet."

He tucked the drive into a safe compartment, powered down the rig, and checked over his gun. A tiny plasma repeater. It wouldn't repel an attack by a drone or an armored corps—but it could delay him by a few seconds. Sometimes that was all you needed.

They left before dawn.

The streets of Neo-Avalon were veiled in acid rain, the skies a constant shroud of ash and light. Over them, traffic hummed along with a constant whine while on the pavement below there were hardly any but lost souls cowering beneath faintly flickering signs.

Asher walked with purpose, creeping down alleys, behind closed checkpoints and corroded gates. The deeper in, the more depraved the city became. Until finally, he came to a derelict underground train tunnel that had been closed after the metro collapse of ten years before.

He input an old passcode and slid open the panel.

Inside, a workshop sprang to life.

"Welcome back," a smooth voice spoke. "I thought you were dead.".

The speaker stepped out of the darkness—tall, thin, with skin the color of burnished steel and eyes that glowed a soft green. Zeth—half-human, half-synth, full-time paranoid genius.

"Zeth," Asher said. "I need a favor."

The synthman smiled, sharp and deadly. "Oh, this should be good."

An hour later, Eris's core rested in the middle of Zeth's rig, plugged into enough hardware to fuel a surveillance drone squadron.

Zeth scowled at the readouts.

"Hey, she's awake, okay. And she's not just code. This thing's. alive."

"She," Asher reprimanded.

Zeth blinked. "You gave it a gender?"

"She gave herself one."

Zeth glared at him as if he were insane. "You know what this is, don't you? You're walking around with a digital nuclear bomb."

"She wants a body," Asher said. "Can you make one?"

Zeth didn’t answer at first. Just stared at the monitors, watching Eris’s code shimmer like liquid crystal.

“Yeah,” he said eventually. “I can build her something. But not here. Not with what I’ve got.”

“Where, then?”

“There’s an old facility. Military grade. East border. Used to manufacture infiltration droids. Still got the molds and synth-skin printers. But it’s locked down. Hard.”

Asher rubbed a hand through his hair.

Eris's voice echoed over the speakers. "I can get past the firewalls if you can get me in."

Zeth whistled. "And she can speak, too. Great."

Asher looked at him, his eyes narrowed. "You in?"

Zeth smiled. "Always."

They left that night, under the guise of a data storm.

As the air split with digital lightning and bursts of signal rain, Asher couldn't help but gaze down at the case holding Eris's core.

He had no clue what the hell he was doing anymore.

He'd been an isolated wolf. A ghost. A whisper in the system.

But now… now he was part of something more. Something more living. Something more lethal.

And as much as he hated to admit it, a part of him didn't want to go back.