2025-09-16 20:26:41
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Mirror
EZREN’S POVThe test chamber smells like antiseptic and bad choices. White tiles that never learned to be anything but bright, fluorescent lights that hum like a distant generator, the air thick with the metallic aftertaste of recirculated stress. Devon’s chair is colder than it looks; the leather squeaks when I sit. He tapes electrodes to my temples with the same awkward tenderness he uses when he apologizes… fingers lingering like he’s trying to patch something that can’t be seen.“You sure about this?” he asks again, the words soft enough that Kira can’t hear through the observation glass, but loud enough that they thrum in my skull.“No,” I say. “But we need to know how far it reaches.”Devon presses a palm to the activation panel as if it’s a mousetrap, and he keeps waiting to hear the snap. “Beginning test sequence,” he tells the room and the recording array. “Subject voluntarily interfacing with suspected neural synthesis network. Time: 14:30.”Kira stands pressed to the glass,
Training Set
The lab smells like burnt coffee and tired silicon. Fans sigh in the ceiling, a constant, patient noise that keeps the servers from melting and keeps me from sleeping. Blue light paints my knuckles the color of bruises. My eyes sting until the world is only lines of code and jagged lists of filenames—each one a person, compressed down to a tag.I haven’t blinked in hours. My throat tastes like metal. Still, I keep going, because there is a moment when the pattern unravels and everything becomes clear, and I am stubborn enough to wait for it.The harvester logs spill across the monitors like open organs—timestamps, token hashes, grief coefficients, microexpression maps. Little boxes that say: Grandmother_57, Child_12, Volunteer_023. People were reduced to shorthand, then to rules, and ultimately to something a machine can read and repeat.“Talk to me,” I tell the screen, because talking makes it less lonely. My fingers run over keys the way other people pray.The compression pipeline
The Lawyer
ZARA’S POVThe files on my desk look like a morgue’s catalog: clean white paper, sterile diagrams, margins full of numbers that mean death—schematics of something that blooms inside a skull like a metallic flower. Client lists with names I used to respect. Shipping manifests that read like itineraries to erasure. My coffee—once hot enough to bribe sleep away—has gone lukewarm and bitter while I stitch together Sora’s raid logs and Aveline’s platform captures. Every hyperlink, every checksum, points in the same direction: Synthesis.My secure line buzzes. Mitchell’s voice sounds small through the speaker, the way it does at three a.m. after a long day. “You awake?”“Barely,” I say. My fingers are already typing an emergency motion into the template I keep for nightmares. “Draft injunctive relief. Freeze Synthesis operations worldwide. Classify proto-harvesters as contraband under an international treaty. Pull in every ally — political, legal, and moral. We need unanimous optics.”“Tim
Harvester
SORA’S POVThe moon hangs over the salvage yard like a spy satellite, its light cold and pitiless, silvering the skeletal heaps of scrap into something that feels less like wreckage and more like a graveyard. Every shadow is a trick, every glint of metal a possible scope reflection. I can taste iron on my tongue—the stock of my rifle pressed against my cheek, yes, but also adrenaline, metallic and bitter, bleeding through my nerves.Behind us, the van idles in the dark with a soft tick-tick-tick as its engine cools. Its bulk feels like a tether, a promise of escape we may never reach.“Perimeter’s clear,” Torres whispers. He’s the youngest on the team, still clinging to bravado like it’s armor, but I can hear the tremor in his voice. “Motion sensors cycle every twelve seconds. If we time it right…”“Copy,” I cut him off. My eyes flick to the luminous face of my watch. Midnight plus seventeen minutes. The moment Mitchell dreaded has already arrived: the harvest has begun. And we’re no
The Old Platform
AVELINE’S POVThe briefing room tastes like stale adrenaline. Coffee and recycled air and the metallic aftertaste of too many bad decisions. Mitchell presides at the head of the table like a tired statue: shoulders drawn in, eyes rimmed red. Devon’s lattice blooms across every screen—an ugly, exact geometry overlaying the whole planet. Twenty-four hours until harvest, maybe less. The number sits between us like a live wire.“Small recon only,” Mitchell says. Her voice is thin, but it cuts through the low hum of nervous conversation. “In, scan, out. No heroics.”“Who’s leading?” Morrison asks. His fingers drum the table like a warning.“I am,” I say before anyone else can. It’s automatic—muscle memory from more nights than I can count in server rooms and dusty archives. Heads turn: relief, skepticism, the kind of look that measures whether you’ve got a death wish or the right stubbornness.“I’ve spent more time with their tech than anyone except Devon,” I add. “I know what to look for.
The Lattice
DEVON’S POVI’ve been staring at screens so long they blur into one pale, humming thing; the glow burns the back of my eyes, and somehow I keep feeding it more. Not now, not when a single keystroke might split the world open.Ezren’s manifest is a beautiful kind of rot across my displays…archival tags stitched into modern orbital telemetry like old scars beneath fresh skin. Each encryption layer I peel back smells worse: dust, antiseptic, the iron tang of something that should’ve stayed buried.“Come on,” I tell the file, because talking to machines is how you keep from talking to your head. I run the third decrypt filter. Fingers tap, filters cascade. The first layer is boring…manufacture dates, contractor codes, predictably bureaucratic. A warm, safe nothing.The second layer knots my stomach. Geosync windows that don’t match any of our launches. Orbital clusters lay out not randomly but with the cold patience of a blueprint. Perfect, like someone drew them with a ruler and a grudge
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