PART 01
[NEURAL_NETWORK_SGT_TOMAS GRAVES // ENCRYPTED_TRAUMA_LOG: 14.02.2058 // WATER CONFLICT ZONE - SOUTH SECTOR]
The loneliest and most terrifying sound in a war zone isn't the scream of a man with pierced lungs. It isn't the roar of heavy artillery grinding concrete, nor the high-pitched whistle of a suicide drone cutting through the fog.
It is the methodical, rhythmic fade-out of the propellers of an extraction transport.
That heavy beating, thump-thump-thump, representing the unbreakable promise of military salvation, getting lower and lower. Further away. Until it is completely swallowed by the hiss of acid rain and the terminal static in your unit's communication channel.
I was slumped against a ruined containment barrier, the femoral artery of my right leg strangled by a makeshift tourniquet made of fiber optic cables torn from a dead server. Three thousand kilometers from home. All around me, sinking into the oily mud that was a nauseating mixture of infertile soil, industrial coolant, and synthetic blood, what remained of my Securitas Global platoon were nothing but motionless, silent shapes. We were hired to protect the Pumping Station from the invasion. We were massacred.
My tactical HUD—the augmented reality interface projected directly onto my retina by the ocular implant—blinked intermittently, bathing my peripheral vision with my corporation's final, non-negotiable sentence:
ASSET: GRAVES, TOMAS (SGT. CLASS B)
VITAL STATUS: CRITICAL (Class 4 Hemorrhage / Imminent Multiple Organ Failure).
EXTRACTION COST (VTOL + JP-8 FUEL): 45,200 CREDITS.
NET FUTURE ASSET VALUE: 11,400 CREDITS (Depreciating).
RISK ALGORITHM DECISION: ON-SITE LIQUIDATION. ABANDONMENT STATUS CONFIRMED.
I watched the dark silhouette of the VTOL rise above the toxic cloud line, rotate its thrusters, and disappear. The mathematics of biocapitalism were brutally simple: the kerosene needed to pull me out of that trench was worth more than the years of service my broken body could still offer. The company had written off my social registry.
I leaned my head against the concrete wall, feeling the cold seep through my tactical armor. Beyond the trenches, the sound of the horde was approaching. The Dehydrated. They weren't an army. They were a tide of desperate civilians, driven mad by the Council's order, which had diverted 80% of the drinking water to cool corporate servers. Their Mycelium, in total collapse from lack of electrolytes, had shut down their rational cortex and activated the inhuman brain. They crawled through no man's land, drinking the mud, licking blood from the ground, their skin stretched over their bones like dry parchment. They were going to eat me alive searching for the moisture in my organs. Human despair reaches absurd levels, transforming them into animals.
It was exactly in that abyss, on the exact boundary between life and nothingness, that I saw her.
The thick cordite smoke parted for an instant. A woman was walking through the killing field. The scenery around her was absolute hell, but she was... a mathematical anomaly. She was completely naked. Her skin was an iridescent pallor, too perfect, with no visible pores, scars, or the gray stains of pollution that marked all of us. The acid rain and black mud splashed on her, but ran off immediately, repelled by a hydrophobic surface that refused to absorb the filth of the human world.
A man wearing a dirty engineering jumpsuit was pulling her by the wrist, limping, his eyes wide with terror. But she didn't look scared. She walked with a silent fluidity, her biology operating with the efficiency of an apex predator.
She passed no more than three meters from where I was bleeding, behind a burned-out car. The man tried to quicken his pace, muttering something inaudible to her, but she turned her face. Her gaze met mine, through the shattered rearview mirrors of that car which was still warm.
I expected to see the horror that, by then, I was already used to. I expected to feel pity, and for her to feel the same for me. But her eyes were cold abysses, biological cameras recording data. Her internal algorithm looked at my torn body, calculated my chances of survival, classified me as an irrelevant element to her escape route, and discarded me. She didn't deviate her path for me. She just kept walking, immaculate, disappearing into the shadows of the industrial rubble like a silicon angel cast out of heaven.
I closed my eyes, certain that death finally had a face.
A few minutes later, the sharp, metallic buzzing began. Unlike the heavy propellers of the rescue, this sound was subtle, expensive, clean. A financial arbitration drone, white and polished, with a hidden corporate logo, descended from the skies cutting through the rain. It hovered a meter away from me and its emitters projected a blueish light hologram into the middle of the trench.
The projected image was of a young man in a tailored dark suit. He was no more than twenty-something, but his posture carried the ancient arrogance of someone who had never felt hunger. Valerian Kross appeared signed in the lower corner of the hologram.
He looked at me. He didn't ask if I needed a paramedic. He didn't look at my destroyed leg. He turned his virtual face to the exact direction where the woman and the technician had vanished into the darkness.
"Your corporation just zeroed out your shares, Sergeant," his voice sounded through the drone's speakers. It was controlled, monotonous, without the slightest inflection of empathy. "Their risk algorithm has amortized your existence. To the market, you are already a written-off liability."
I tried to raise my rifle, but my fingers were numb. I spat out a clot of black blood. "Go... to he—" I couldn't finish the sentence.
The hologram smiled. It was the smile of a shark that had just found a flaw in the system. "They saw a broken soldier. I see a brutally undervalued asset." Valerian took a virtual step, his artificial shoes not even touching the mud. "You held this position for six hours. Your tactical retention capacity under extreme stress is formidable. Your visual cortex, right at this moment, is the most valuable piece of hardware in this quadrant. You saw things that shouldn't exist, Graves. I am offering a hostile takeover of your remaining biological functions."
"What... do you want?" my voice was a dying whisper.
"The exclusivity of your eyes. I'm buying your debt. I'm paying for the reconstruction of your leg with military-grade titanium. I'll wipe your record at Securitas. But, in exchange, you become a line in my portfolio. You will be my property, until the dividends of this acquisition return five hundred percent." He looked at the invisible chronometer on his wrist. "You have forty seconds before necrosis makes the investment unviable. Sell yourself to me, or die for free in the mud."
I didn't hesitate. I signed the blood contract with my mind. The drone fired a stabilizer dart into my neck, flooding my system with morphine and coagulant nanobots. Valerian bought me at rock bottom. And he never told me why. Not until today.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
[END OF MEMORY LOG]
[NEURAL_NETWORK_ECHO_PRESENT - THE CRADLE // SECTOR 4]
The air inside the "Cradle" was oppressive. It was the breath of a billionaire ghost bottled up for almost a decade. That gigantic place smelled of cooled silicon, degraded polymers, and stagnant ozone. It was the smell of an empire that crumbled before it was inaugurated.
Graves stood by the heavy solid steel circular door that separated the inner vault from the decompression hangar. His finger nervously stroked his assault rifle's trigger guard. Both cars had managed to get in, but only one was intact. He turned to his team, and with his raspy voice breaking the religious silence of the underground factory, he said:
"Maintain the extraction perimeter. Target one's car no longer exists." Graves paused, his eyes half-closed. I remembered well the terrifying sound of Valerian's luxury car melting. The aggressive spores and hyper-acidic moisture of Sector 4 had devoured the limousine's armor in minutes, dissolving biological metal and biodegradable rubber like plastic bags thrown into a vat of hydrochloric acid. We had to run for the bunker doors before the car floor gave way.
Graves continued, his tone relentless: "Circular defense pattern. Maintain high alert and fire on my command." The three soldiers raised their rifles and began to walk slowly around us, forming a circular defense pattern.
He lowered his hand, returning his attention to the vastness of the complex.
In an abyss carved into the bedrock and cemented with brushed steel, the assembly line pit stretched as far as our flashlights could reach, an infinite, semi-curved corridor. Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of perfect female bodies floated in the gloom. They were lined up against the walls, contained in massive thick glass cylinders, suspended in an amber-colored nutrient gel, like divine insects paralyzed in fossilized sap. They were identical copies, empty shells awaiting the spark of the commercial soul.
We walked for about 30 minutes with our ears alert and lips sealed, inside that cemetery of biological mannequins. We only heard the tinkling of drops that managed to leak through the thick concrete and metal walls of the bunker. At the end of the corridor was the control platform. It was an island of grated metal, suspended by steel cables. There, surrounded by CRT monitors covered by a thick layer of gray dust and consoles full of lever switches, I, Echo, tried to control the trembling of my hands.
I placed the black containment box in the center of the main bench. I opened the latches and pulled out the severed head of the Faceless Girl. I positioned the severed neck on the cold metallic surface. Her empty eyes stared at the bunker ceiling with a terrifying indifference.
I ran my dry-blood-stained fingers over the base of her polymer nape. I pushed aside the strands of synthetic hair. There it was. A surgical slit, millimetrically carved into what would be the spinal cord: a female USB-C port, gold-plated, perfectly integrated into the artificial flesh. A data communication relic from an era when humanity still trusted physical hardware before handing their souls over to the Mycelium's wireless network.
I heard the sound of Italian shoes stepping on the metal grating behind me. Valerian Kross.
His suit was a rag, stained with forest fluids and soot from the melted car. The tie was gone, the shirt was torn, but the posture of the Kross Holdings heir was the same as a monarch on his throne. His presence cast a heavy shadow over the inactive consoles.
I opened my metallic Auditor's kit and pulled out a highly conductive carbon fiber cable.
"The system recognized her earlier," I murmured, my voice sounding small in the immensity of the hangar. I looked at the red standby lights that blinked lethargically on the console in front of me. "When the outer doors opened for us. There are no firewalls, Valerian. This factory isn't trying to keep us out. She isn't an invading virus. She is the operating system itself. She's the lady of the house."
I plugged one end of the cable into the terminal. There was an opening perfectly designed for it, with a logo: OmniCorp. Then, I brought the Type-C end to the girl's nape and pressed. There was a soft, wet click, the data pins locking into the cold flesh. Graves and his team held their defensive position.
The Auditor's Seal on my left temple—the polymer implant that allowed my profession to read residual memories in corpses without frying my own neurons—lit up and throbbed with the ferocity of a shattering migraine.
I closed my eyes. I let the monumental flow of data invade my cortex through the neural bridge. The air in my lungs seemed to freeze. I wasn't just going to read a text report, or watch a video in two dimensions. The atypical virus running in my blood, absorbed that night in the morgue, grabbed the raw information. It pulled me violently, dragging my consciousness into the dead eyes of the machine itself.
[HIGH-LEVEL QUANTUM FILE: UNIT_07 // VISUAL AND SENSORY MEMORY ACCESS: 14.02.2058]
The memory was entirely hers. I saw the world through Unit 07's liquid crystal optical sensors. And it was a terrifyingly focused world, full of metadata, temperature metrics, and facial recognition.
The reality simulated by the file was so dense that my real skin got goosebumps, the terminal must boost that effect. I was in this very bunker, in the past. I could feel the body temperature dropping as the nutrient gel drained from my confinement tank. The Cradle's emergency lights spun in a hysterical, threatening red. The intermittent alarm of the Scorched Earth Protocol tore through the speakers with deafening urgency.
In front of me—in front of her—was Silas. Much younger than the corpse I audited. His face lacked the scars of cheap booze or the pallor of Sector 4 malnutrition. But his eyes were wide with terror, shining with sweat. He held a heavy portable terminal, with thick cables that were plugged directly into my naked chest.
"They're going to try to wipe us out of existence, Seven," Silas's voice trembled uncontrollably. OmniCorp had turned him into an Air-Gapped engineer. Without the Mycelium injecting chemical suppressants into his brain, Silas was bombarded by a raw, painful empathy that no modern human was used to enduring. He was crying for me. For a machine. "Whether it's the Executive Council or the Alliance rebels... if any of them get their hands on the Master Ledger, slavery will be eternal. The rights to every drop of water. The patents for the flesh. The trillions in credits of human lives off the books... It's all here. Inside your brain's architecture."
I (Seven) looked at him. My cognitive interface didn't process his panic. I replied with the neutrality of a flight attendant.
"What is our action directive, Silas? What are we going to do?"
"We're going to break the fucking key," he said, his voice choking as his grease-stained fingers flew over the portable terminal's keyboard. His screen displayed blocks of colossal cryptography spinning and reconfiguring. "I'm going to initiate a Multisig Protocol. Shared Security Custody. I'm going to crack the core of OmniCorp's treasure in half."
His screen glowed with a pulsing orange progress bar. The data transfer made my cybernetic body heat up.
"I'll keep the Will with me," Silas continued, panting heavily, wiping the tears streaming down his nose. "I'll take the Authority Key... your Admin. The execution control. And you, you keep the Map. You keep the Vault... the data, the raw Asset. As long as one of us lives and is far from the other, the Council will never, ever be able to access the accounts and take the power back. We are the new lock on the world, girl."
The memory hit 100% on Silas's terminal and, suddenly, the file suffered a chaotic, violent time jump. The data ripped me out of 2058 with a jolt that caused virtual nausea, hurling my consciousness across the years, until I violently landed in that dirty, dark alley, days ago, in 2066.
Still trapped behind the Faceless Girl's eyes, I witnessed my creator's last breath. I looked into a puddle on the asphalt and saw myself faceless. I saw old Silas sprawled on the wet asphalt. The Narcissus skin, the luxury graft he used to hide my face from the city's surveillance, had failed. The product's DRM found a defect, activated the biology's deep learning, panicked, and emitted a ping of distress to the network.
That attracted the Black Ops, who executed him mercilessly.
When the old man's heart stopped beating, the system detected the death of 'User A'. Desperate, it tried to protect the data.
I saw, in a visualization of a glowing golden code matrix, his Authority Key—the corporation's Admin—frantically trying to jump to the Girl's network, seeking refuge in the only compatible hardware. But the system rejected it immediately, raising an impenetrable firewall, accompanied by a ruthless red message:
[CRITICAL PROTOCOL COMPATIBILITY ERROR: UNIT 07 IS EXCLUSIVELY DESIGNATED AS VAULT. IMPOSSIBLE TO ASSIGN DUAL TIER-1 STATUS TO A SINGLE VECTOR. TRANSFER ABORTED.]
Silas's Admin was orphaned. Rejected by the vault, the Authority Key had nowhere to go. It lodged itself in the wireless network layers of the very synthetic Narcissus skin the Girl wore. It stayed there. Latent. Dormant and silent, like a digital tick waiting for the warmth of a new host.
And then, the last flash of memory filled my vision with fire and smoke. The night of the accident.
[continue to part 2]