2025-05-07 23:53:28
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Disintegration Protocol (Continuation – Part 3)Jane held the USB drive like it was a venomous snake. Her fingers trembled, eyes locked on the sticker as if it might vanish if she blinked.Linda backed away, her voice cracking. “Jane… don’t. We don’t know what that thing could do!”“But what if it’s a clue?” Jane whispered, more to herself than anyone else. “What if it’s the only thing he left behind that can explain this?”Adam tugged at her sleeve. “Is Bobby a bad guy now?”Jane bit her lip hard, blinking rapidly. “I… I don’t know, sweetheart.”Linda sat down heavily, her breath shallow. “I raised him like my own. I gave him everything.” Her words came out between sobs. “And he left us like we were garbage.”“Don’t do this now,” Jane said, voice sharp but fragile. “We don’t have time for blame. We need answers.”Linda turned on her. “I gave him access because you loved him!”Jane’s hand slammed down on the coffee table. “And you didn’t once question it! I was stupid, yeah—but you le
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225Disintegration Protocol (Continuation – Part 2)Linda paced the length of the living room, her heels clicking like metronomes of denial. She kept shaking her head, muttering, “No. No, no, no. He wouldn’t.” Her manicured nails dug into the armrest of the sofa. “This has to be some kind of glitch. Maybe the server’s just down. We’ve had outages before—”Jane cut her off. “This isn’t an outage, Mom. He’s not answering. The logs show him leaving. The money’s gone. All of it. I checked the accounts in my name too. They’re wiped.”Adam’s little voice chimed in, his eyes wide and uncertain. “But Bobby said we were gonna be rich forever…”Jane knelt down beside him, her heart breaking. “I know, baby. He said a lot of things.”Linda grabbed her own tablet and began typing furiously, logging into what few apps she had access to. The spinning wheel of death greeted her. “It’s not real. He wouldn’t leave like that. Not Bobby. Not after everything we’ve—”Her phone buzzed.Chase.CHASE CALLING
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224Disintegration Protocol (Continuation)The loading screen from Z0 still burned in Bobby’s mind, but it didn’t matter anymore.He was already in flight mode.Chase’s calls were going unanswered. The Nova2 security logs showed Bobby exiting the facility less than an hour ago. Just a man in a hoodie and cap, slipping out through a side entrance with a duffel bag and a burner phone.By the time Chase realized what had happened, Bobby was halfway to a private airstrip outside state jurisdiction. No farewells. No explanations. No warnings.He’d already transferred what he could from the dummy accounts—most of it siphoned slowly over the past six months from project budgets, padded invoices, and worst of all, from Jane’s family’s trust.Jane.Bobby winced at the thought of her.She had trusted him with everything—her love, her family, their future. He had smiled through every dinner, kissed her on the forehead as Adam sat between them at movie night, and promised Linda security for gener
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Disintegration ProtocolThe room felt like it had shrunk. Bobby’s fingers hovered just above the screen as if touching it again would make the countdown disappear. Chase was pacing now, each turn sharper than the last.“Call security,” Chase said. “Lock the dev floor. No one in or out.”Bobby didn’t respond. He was scanning the last known pings of the Ignis Fork—Node B12, B19, then the outlier: Node Z0. A node that wasn’t supposed to exist.He leaned closer, whispering, “Z0… We decommissioned that two years ago.”Chase paused mid-step. “You’re saying this came from a ghost server?”“Or someone kept it alive.” Bobby’s voice was hollow. “Off the grid. Hidden from all audit trails.”Chase’s phone buzzed. He answered, listening in silence before snapping it shut.“That was Helix. She’s asking why Nova2’s sandbox environments just triggered anomaly pings in the East Asia cluster.”Bobby turned. “It’s already gone global?”“Yes. And if we sound the alarm, investors will bolt before sunrise.
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222: The Countdown to AshesBobby’s smirk flickered. He tapped the notification, and a deeper system log opened, lines of raw data spilling across the screen. The words “Ignis Fork – Status: Stable” repeated, followed by a timestamp and node trace.Chase leaned forward, frowning. “That something from R&D?”“No,” Bobby muttered. “We shelved Ignis months ago. This… this wasn’t supposed to be online.”The soft buzz of the servers outside the greenroom suddenly felt louder, more present. Bobby tapped rapidly, pulling up the internal dev logs. The Ignis Fork hadn’t just gone live—it had propagated across three internal nodes. Quiet. Undetected. Until now.Chase rose to his feet. “Is it a leak? Someone poking around?”“No. It’s… familiar,” Bobby said, narrowing his eyes. “Parts of the code look like mine. But not all of it.”Chase’s jaw tightened. “You think someone inside planted it?”“No one on the team would dare,” Bobby snapped. “But someone knows how to mimic my work.”He stared at the
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221: The Future in Flame “I wouldn’t have told you if I wasn’t.” Dylan nodded. “Then let’s burn the world down.” He typed the command. A loading bar began to climb. Lilith stepped up beside him and pulled a drive from her coat—sleek, unlabeled, humming softly. “My code’s on here,” she said. “It’ll mimic the framework of Ignis Core perfectly. I’ve even embedded some of your old code from before you joined Ash. They’ll think it’s legit. Familiar. But once it activates… recursive detonation.” She handed it to him. He plugged it in. The system blinked. Code spilled across the screen—lines upon lines of luminous, perfect deception. Lilith crossed her arms as she watched. “We’ve got one shot at this.” Dylan didn’t look away from the screen. “Then we make it count.” The lights dimmed for a moment as the system initiated a shadow crawl—spreading the false Ignis Core like a virus in slow motion. Unseen. Waiting. When it was done, Dylan stood back, eyes cold. “Now we wait for them
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220 Another pause. Then the faint sound of typing. “You want a paper trail?” “I want everything. Timeline?” “Standard turnaround is three days—” “Yesterday,” she cut in coldly. “I want to know everything.” The line stayed quiet for another beat, then the voice softened just a little. “Got it. I’ll be in touch.” Jane hung up before he could say anything else. She stood still for a moment, the city buzzing around her, oblivious. The ache in her cheek was fading now. But something else was forming beneath it. A plan. This wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. She might not have been the mother Molly needed—but she was still the sharpest weapon in the room. And it was time to cut through the lies. **** “God, that hurt,” Jane muttered under her breath, wincing as she touched her cheek again. Jane exhaled slowly, tucking the phone into her coat. Her fingers were trembling slightly, but not from fear. Anticipation. She turned to herself, muttering quietly, “Let them play the her
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219 Jane was a good actress.Always had been.The tears never came when they were supposed to, and yet she could conjure them on command. A trembling voice, a haunted look, a furious, grieving mother storming into the middle of someone else’s crisis like she owned it—she wore the mask well. She always had.She could remember the first time she learned how useful a lie could be. She was ten, maybe eleven. Her father had forgotten to pick her up from piano class. Again. When she walked home alone, cold and soaked from the rain, her mother demanded to know why she hadn’t called.“I dropped the phone,” Jane had said. “It broke.”Not true. Not even close.But her mother had sighed, pulled her into a towel, and mumbled something about how her father never remembered the important things. That day, Jane realized that people didn’t want the truth. They wanted a version of it they could live with.Molly’s disappearance? Tragic, yes. Maddening, of course. But gut-wrenching?Not exactly.She fe
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218Her cheek was on fire.The skin throbbed beneath her fingertips, every heartbeat pumping more heat into the wound Lilith had left. Jane could feel the swelling already—tight and raw, as if a thousand needles were pricking her at once. Her ears rang from the sound of the slap, but louder still was the pounding of her own pride, screaming at her that she couldn’t—wouldn’t—let this end with her standing there, humiliated.No.Not like this.Not with Dylan between them, not with Lilith standing there looking like some righteous, self-important goddess. Not when her cheek was burning like it was trying to peel off her damn face.Jane’s eyes locked on Lilith—and without a second thought, without hesitation or grace, she struck.Her hand shot out fast and furious, an explosion of motion that cracked across Lilith’s face with a sickening sound. Her palm connected hard, and the impact shuddered down her arm like a jolt.Lilith’s head snapped to the side. Her hair, half-loose from the earli
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