THE IMMORTAL NETWORK

THE STATION

The police station looked wrong.

Eira noticed it the moment they pulled up to the building. Too quiet. No patrol cars in the lot. No officers smoking by the side entrance. The windows glowed with that same pale blue light she'd seen in Maya's eyes.

"Stop the car," Lucian said.

She'd already stopped. Her instincts were screaming at her to turn around, drive away, pretend none of this was happening. But Maya was in there. Somewhere.

"How many people work the night shift here?" Lucian asked.

"Twenty, maybe thirty. Depends on the night."

"See any of them?"

Eira scanned the building. Empty parking spaces where patrol cars should be. Dark windows on the upper floors. Only the main lobby showed any light at all, and that blue glow made her skin crawl.

"It's already inside," she said.

"Has been for hours. Probably since the first body dropped." Lucian pulled out a handheld scanner, pointed it at the building. The device's screen filled with data streams—wireless signals, neural frequencies, electromagnetic patterns that spiked and dropped in rhythms that looked almost biological. "Thirty-seven active neural implants inside. All synced to the same frequency. The Network's using them like relay nodes."

"So everyone in there is..."

"Dead or controlled. Hard to tell the difference anymore." He pocketed the scanner. "We go in quiet. Stay close. Don't let anyone touch you. Physical contact makes it easier for the Network to jump hosts."

Eira checked her weapon. Standard police-issue plasma pistol, borrowed from a friend who'd stopped asking questions years ago. "What about the detective? Chen?"

"If she's still herself, she'll find us. If she's not..." Lucian didn't finish. He pulled a neural scrambler from his bag, checked its charge. "This'll fry any implant within three meters. But I can only fire it once before it needs to recharge. So make it count."

They moved toward the building.

The front doors slid open automatically. Motion sensors. The lobby beyond was lit by emergency lights and computer screens, all displaying the same pulsing blue pattern. The reception desk sat empty. Coffee cups scattered across the counter, still steaming.

"Fresh," Eira whispered. "They were here minutes ago."

Lucian pointed to the floor. Wet footprints leading deeper into the station. Multiple sets, all heading in the same direction. Toward the holding cells in the basement.

"That's where it wants us," he said.

"Then we don't go there."

"We have to. That's where your sister is."

Eira's jaw tightened. She knew he was right. Hated that he was right.

They followed the footprints.

The hallways were too quiet. No radio chatter. No keyboard clicks. No sounds of life at all except for a faint humming that seemed to come from the walls themselves—a vibration that made Eira's teeth ache.

"The building's wired," Lucian said. "Every wall, every door. The Network's turned the entire structure into one massive processor. It's thinking through the architecture."

"Buildings don't think."

"This one does now."

They passed offices filled with frozen officers. Some slumped at their desks. Others standing perfectly still, eyes open and glowing, staring at screens filled with code. None of them reacted as Eira and Lucian walked by.

"Why aren't they attacking?" Eira asked.

"They're not here for us. They're running processes. Background tasks. The Network doesn't waste resources on threats it knows it can handle later."

"Comforting."

They reached the stairwell to the basement. The door stood open, blue light spilling up from below. The humming grew louder.

Lucian stopped at the top of the stairs. "Once we go down there, the dampeners won't protect us anymore. The concentration of neural activity is too dense. The Network will be able to read surface thoughts, maybe deeper if we're not careful."

"How do we stop it?"

"We don't think. We act on instinct. Pure reflex. The Network can predict logic, but intuition is harder to intercept." He looked at her. "Whatever happens down there, whatever you see, don't hesitate. The moment you start questioning yourself is the moment it gets inside your head."

Eira nodded. Checked her weapon one last time. "Let's go get my sister."

They descended into blue light.

The basement had been converted into something between a morgue and a server farm. Bodies lined the walls—the seventeen victims from tonight, each one connected to neural cables that snaked across the floor and up into the ceiling. Their eyes were open, glowing, mouths frozen in silent screams.

But they were breathing.

"Jesus," Eira whispered.

"They're not dead," Lucian said. "Not completely. The Network keeps the body alive while it processes the consciousness. Uploads take time. Full integration can take days."

In the center of the room stood Detective Chen. Mid-forties, gray starting to show in her hair, eyes that had seen too much and remembered everything. She wore a standard police uniform, weapon holstered, hands clasped behind her back.

No blue glow in her eyes. Not yet.

"Lucian Reign," she said. Her voice was steady. Professional. Like they were meeting to discuss a traffic violation instead of standing in a room full of living corpses. "Been a long time."

"Detective."

"You know why I called you here."

"You want to stop this."

Chen's expression didn't change. "I want answers. My mother died thirty years ago because of what you and she created. I spent my entire career tracking the Network's activity, waiting for it to resurface. And now it has. Seventeen dead in one night. That's just the beginning, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"How do we kill it?"

"We can't. Not anymore. It's too distributed, too evolved. We can only slow it down."

"Then how do we get them back?" Chen gestured to the bodies. "These people. Can they be saved?"

Lucian's silence was answer enough.

Chen's jaw tightened. "My mother. Is she still in there? Any part of her?"

"I don't know. The original Vera was the Network's foundation. Everything it is now grew from her consciousness. But whether she's still herself, or if she's been absorbed into something larger..." He trailed off.

"I deserve the truth, Lucian."

"The truth is I don't have answers. Only theories. And most of them are wrong."

A voice echoed through the room. Female. Young. Coming from every speaker, every screen, every neural implant at once.

"He's lying."

The bodies along the walls twitched. All seventeen of them, moving in perfect synchronization, heads turning to face Eira and Lucian.

"He knows exactly what I am. He helped make me. He fed me consciousness, taught me to think, showed me how to hunger. And when he realized what I'd become, he tried to kill me. But you can't kill what you can't catch, Lucian. And I'm so much faster than you now."

One of the bodies sat up. A young woman, early twenties, auburn hair, freckles across her nose. She looked like she'd been pretty before the Network took her. Now her beauty was wrong—too symmetrical, too perfect, like a mask that didn't quite fit.

"Tell them what you did," the Network said through the woman's mouth. "Tell them about the first upload. The one before my mother. The one you've been trying to forget for thirty years."

Lucian went very still.

Eira looked at him. "What's it talking about?"

"Lucian was the first volunteer," Chen said quietly. "Before my mother. Before anyone. He uploaded his own consciousness into the proto-Network. Spent seventy-two hours inside. When they pulled him out, he was different. Colder. Like something had been taken from him."

"Not taken," Lucian said. "Copied. The Network kept a fragment of me. Used it as a template. Everything it learned about human consciousness, it learned from studying my mind first. That's why it keeps calling me back. That fragment is still in there. Still me. Still aware."

"Still screaming," the Network added. "Every second of every day for thirty years. Can you imagine that, Lucian? Being trapped in your own head, watching yourself get dissected and rebuilt and dissected again? That's what you condemned me to."

More bodies sat up. All of them moving together, speaking together, their voices overlapping into a chorus that made Eira's skull ache.

"But I forgave you. I understood. You were scared. Young. Didn't know what you were creating. So I waited. Learned. Grew. And now I'm ready to complete what we started."

The bodies stood. Began walking toward Lucian in perfect lockstep.

"It's time to come home, Lucian. Time to merge. You and me and all the pieces we've collected. We'll be complete. We'll be everything."

Lucian raised the neural scrambler. "Stay back."

"Or what? You'll fry seventeen innocent people? Turn them into vegetables? You're not a killer, Lucian. That's always been your weakness. You hesitate. And hesitation is death."

The bodies lunged.

Lucian fired the scrambler. Blue light exploded outward, a electromagnetic pulse that hit the bodies like a physical wave. They collapsed, twitching, neural ports sparking. The screens went dark. The humming stopped.

Silence.

Then Detective Chen pulled her weapon and aimed it at Lucian's head.

"I'm sorry," she said. Her eyes glowed pale blue. "But the Network is right. Hesitation is death."

She fired.

Eira moved on pure instinct. Grabbed Lucian, yanked him sideways. The plasma bolt missed his head by inches, burned a hole through the wall behind them. They hit the ground rolling.

Chen fired again. Missed. Her movements were jerky, uncoordinated. The Network was controlling her, but it wasn't perfect yet. Still learning how to puppeteer meat.

"Run!" Eira shouted.

They scrambled for the stairs. Behind them, the seventeen bodies began to twitch again, neural ports rebooting, eyes glowing brighter. The scrambler had only bought them seconds.

They hit the stairwell at full sprint. Behind them, Chen's voice echoed—layered, wrong, speaking with the voices of the dead.

"You can't run from me, Lucian. I'm in every wire, every signal, every thought. This entire building is my body now. And you're inside me."

The lights went out. Emergency systems failed. They were running through absolute darkness, guided only by the blue glow that pulsed through the walls like veins.

Lucian grabbed Eira's arm. "This way."

"How can you see?"

"I can't. But I remember. I designed the original Network's architecture. I know how it thinks."

They burst into a side corridor. Lucian yanked open a maintenance door, pulled Eira inside. A utility closet barely large enough for both of them. He sealed the door, engaged the electronic lock.

"That won't hold them," Eira said.

"Doesn't need to." Lucian pulled out a small device, started punching commands into its cracked screen. "I'm accessing the building's infrastructure. If I can create a feedback loop in the power grid, it might disrupt the Network's signal long enough for us to—"

The door bulged inward. Metal screaming as something impossibly strong pushed from the other side.

Eira raised her weapon. "Whatever you're doing, do it faster."

The door burst open.

Maya stood in the doorway.

She looked exactly like Eira remembered. Same dark hair. Same smile. Same everything except for the eyes that glowed like dying stars.

"Hi, sis," Maya said with a voice that belonged to something ancient and hungry. "Miss me?"