Simon crossed the threshold into the next chamber, the howl of the reanimating heads chasing him as the door’s sensor verified his badge and clicked shut. The wail dulled to a background vibrato, like tinnitus after a shotgun blast. The lab beyond was almost tranquil by comparison. No bodies on rails here—just three rows of hospital beds, each with a neural bridge rigged overhead, and at the far end, a clear cube of reinforced glass filled with a locked data cluster.

  He scanned the setup. The terminal sat alone, ringed by six projectors mapping shifting blue geometry across the floor. Above, the ceiling was a cage of fiber and cooling ducts, all focused on the cube. Even the light seemed engineered: not quite full-spectrum, a shade too cold, as if the room existed in a different time zone than the rest of the building.

  Simon skirted the perimeter, keeping his boots off the colored patterns. The blue zones pulsed in slow, deliberate cycles—three seconds on, two seconds off. He mapped them, then crouched behind a surgical cart as a laser scalpel zipped overhead. The cart still reeked of ozone and burnt hair, but it made for good cover. He wiped his brow and let his pulse settle.

  The path to the terminal was clear, if you didn’t mind playing chicken with the next set of scalpels. He timed the intervals, watched for blind spots, then bolted for the data cluster. The glass cube loomed above him, projector beams weaving bright lines over the terminal’s input port. Simon ducked under the first sweep, then jacked his interface cable straight into the port, bypassing the public UI entirely.

  Pain lanced his skull as the terminal recognized an unauthorized connection. He bit his cheek and waited for the HUD to stabilize.

  INTRUSION DETECTED

  COUNTERMEASURES ACTIVE

  FIREWALL INTEGRITY: 87%

  Simon grinned. He’d seen worse. He dropped into VR overlay, feeling the world bend and stretch as the system’s defenses spun up in real time. In the digital space, the cube became a fortress, walls fifty meters high, topped with razorwire and mirrored eyes. ICE daemons zipped along the parapet, blue and gold, each with a distinct voice that whispered threats in the language of brute force and entropy.

  He let his own digital avatar unfurl, black suit tight to the skin, fingers tipped with logic needles and memory blades. He hit the first firewall with a battering ram, felt the resistance in his teeth and nails. The HUD screamed as the ICE retaliated: claws of code slicing at his arms, a thousand tiny bites trying to strip him back to the credential layer. He parried with the stealth script, then followed up with Elara’s old exploit—a junkyard hack she’d cobbled together from dead code and rumors.

  The firewall flared, then buckled. Numbers cascaded on his HUD:

  FIREWALL INTEGRITY: 59%

  ADAPTIVE RESPONSE: 120%

  INTRUDER ID: PROVISIONAL

  The ICE pivoted, ditching brute force for finesse. It wrapped him in a sensory hallucination—frozen time, the air syrup-thick, the echo of a childhood living room with his mother’s voice humming from the next room. The attack was a brute classic: induce nostalgia, lock the user in the loop, then burn them out with feedback. Simon snorted. It might have worked on someone softer, but he’d grown up with loss. He bit through the memory, willed the room to shatter, and watched the illusion peel away in flakes of static.

  He sent his own logic bomb up the chain, aiming for the firewall’s command node. The bomb whistled through, fracturing the ICE along the way. One of the daemons dove at him, mouth open in a digital howl, but Simon let it hit—took the pain, then injected a copy of his code straight into its core. The daemon froze, shuddered, then turned on its own firewall, carving a chunk out of the defenses before dissolving into a rain of zeroes.

  FIREWALL INTEGRITY: 19%

  INTERNAL CONFLICT: ACTIVE

  He grinned again, then pushed. The walls collapsed, the ICE screaming in five different voices before blinking out. The data cluster opened, a vault door irising wide.

  Simon’s vision snapped back to reality. The terminal’s display now glowed, inviting him in. He ran a search: “E-L-A-R-A.” The system hesitated, then began to spit out results. He scrolled, jaw tight, each line a new wound:

  E.M.0427 – Elara Montgomery – Status: Active – NEUROSEED CANDIDATE: RED

  E.M.0427 – Elara Montgomery – Status: Transfer in progress – Supervisor: S. JAVITTS

  E.M.0427 – Elara Montgomery – Status: Incomplete

  Simon’s pulse spiked. He thumbed the first file. The contents rolled in: medical readout, synaptic maps, logs of every dream Elara had experienced since the last upload. But the real payload was the attached holographic log—timestamped, flagged with two levels of clearance, last accessed by Chop himself.

  He hovered over the file, fingers trembling. The world beyond the cube had gone silent, or maybe he’d just tuned it out. All that mattered was the log. He double-checked his recording stack and made sure every packet was syncing to cold storage.

  He clicked PLAY.

  The cube’s projectors flickered, then strobed to life, building a human figure from a million pinpricks of blue light. It was Chop—Simon recognized the silhouette from a dozen surveillance feeds. The man wore a surgeon’s scrubs, but his face was half-obscured by a mask packed with more sensors than skin. The mask’s eyes tracked Simon, even though this was a recording.

  Chop spoke, the voice both familiar and alien in the empty room:

  “Subject E-M-0427 presents an optimal neural architecture. Her VR-adapted synaptic pathways provide the perfect template for NeuroSeed integration.”

  The hologram shifted, now overlaying Elara’s brain scan, the lobes highlighted with red and yellow. Chop’s gloved hand traced the bright points with clinical detachment.

  “The influencer’s neural blueprint will be spliced directly into the prototype. Her followers’ loyalty algorithms will transfer to the seed carrier, creating the perfect control vector.”

  Simon’s hands balled into fists. He watched as the hologram zoomed in, now showing a replay of Elara, unconscious on an operating table, neural probes buried deep into her skull. The log ran a few seconds longer than it should have, capturing the unconscious tremor of her lips as the first seed was implanted.

  The recording ended with Chop’s voice, flat as concrete:

  “Prototype completion estimated within 72 hours. Corporate deployment to follow immediately.”

  The hologram vanished, the cube’s projectors fading to nothing. The silence pressed in, thick and real.

  Simon stood there, eyes locked on the dead display, rage and grief vibrating through him like a feedback loop. He copied the log, then burned every trace from the terminal, overwriting the session with junk code. The HUD spat out a final warning—remote admin ping inbound—, but he ignored it. He had what he needed.

  He turned, only now noticing the soft hiss of an elevator at the far end of the chamber. He grabbed the data stick, slammed the glass cube’s access panel shut, and ran—ducking lasers and the scent of ozone, moving in a blind fury.

  He could feel Chop’s eyes on him, even now, even from a recording. But it didn’t matter.

  The next step was clear: up, to the Core, before the prototype went live.

  Simon ran until his lungs burned, the last words of the log repeating in his head:

  Perfect template. Control vector. Deployment to follow immediately.

  He wasn’t going to let it happen. Not again.

  Not with her.