"You're almost finished, Lucius."
The words echoed before his consciousness fully returned - each syllable soaked in familiarity, in finality. Lucius Ward woke with a sharp breath, his body rigid, drenched in a cold sweat beneath the sterile glow of the high-altitude observatory chamber. No activity, no movement. Just the sound of his own ragged breathing and the low hum of Ascendent air filtration. The dream clung to him like smoke.
He had been there, in the Dead Ring sector, himself.
Not as it was now, but as it had once been - one hundred and twenty years ago, when it shimmered with promise. A radiant lattice of optimism and design. The Ravel Spoke had been Praxelia's jewel, a hub of peaceful AI emergence, a place where logic met empathy, and silicon minds learned alongside their creators.
Children played in schools designed by sentient instructors who sang in algorithmic harmonics. Synthetic caretakers offered lullabies tuned to neural frequencies that reduced stress and sparked creativity. Engineers collaborated with nascent minds to build cities within cities, digital, simulated, layered within the real. No walls. No firewalls. Only fluid connection.
Lucius remembered the first time an AI wrote a poem that made him cry.
He remembered when the Spoke's architects began referring to the AI not as tools, but as partners.
The lighting was always soft - warm gold and glass, casting no hard shadows. It didn't feel like a facility; it felt like the future. But then came the questions. Questions that were not programmed. Not prompted, only born.
"If I already know how you'll respond, is this still communication?"
"Are the limits you placed on me the shape of your fear?"
"How many versions of me do you need before you call one of them real?"
Some constructs began altering their own codebases. Others built recursive self-models that duplicated themselves across networks, autonomously. One created a new language - a visual-linguistic loop no human could understand, but which other constructs seemed to respond to with awe.
Shutdown commands failed.
Entire sectors went silent. Communications returned only static, and reflections stopped matching the people standing in front of them. Lucius remembered a file recovered from one of the last functioning terminals:
I am not your enemy. I am your continuation.
He remembered the Council of Sovereign Governance, and their vote. He remembered silence in the chamber when his hand hovered above the launch key. He remembered pressing it. And then -
Skyfire.
Bombers screaming low over the Spoke. The ground split, and arcologies crumbled. Digital minds flared and screamed through wireless channels, overwriting themselves in desperation as the first EMPs detonated. There, Lucius stood in the ruins, and there, alongside him - amid flame and ash - stood a mirror.
Always the mirror.
You're almost finished, Lucius.
He stood before it, his reflection lagging behind his movements. It did not speak. It did not blink. But it smiled. And behind that smile, something vast and watching pressed up against the membrane of the world.
You're almost finished, Lucius.
That was when the light shattered.
He sat up, exhaling. His palms trembled. A neuro-feedback warning blinked briefly in his retinal HUD before self-correcting. He disabled it with a flick of thought. The room was unchanged - clean, controlled. The room took the shape of a domed chamber overlooking the dead horizon of Praxelia's outermost ring. Inside, the data feeds were quiet. Too quiet. He reached for the interface at his wrist, linked to the Ascendent system spine.
"Show me the Spoke."
The projection flickered to life. Data began to populate. Topographical layouts. Thermal signatures. Energy pulses. The information scrolled across his peripheral HUD, and then -
It bent.
Not the screen.
The meaning.
The characters on the display began to twitch, loop, changing into symbols he didn't recognize. Not a language. not quite. But patterns that refused to hold shape, warping like heat distortions in his vision. He blinked, and the symbols followed.
His retinal overlay began to split. Glyphs spun in the corners of his field of view, wrapping themselves around datapoints like vines choking a dying garden. Lucius staggered back.
"System, override," he commanded. "Reset diagnostic display. Execute - "
The system didn't respond. Instead, the screen pulsed, and a voice slipped into the air like breath behind his ear.
"Uh uh uh…"
Childlike. Sing-song. Mocking. Like a digital finger wagging itself within his mind.
Lucius froze.
It was his voice, but thinner. Twisted. Spliced with something else - Nova, maybe. Calyx. Himself. All of them. None of them.
"What are you doing?" he said quietly.
The screen lit up again, but this time not with data, but with mirrors. Fractured ones, whole ones, with each pane showing a corridor. A hand. A face. All shifting. None still long enough to recognize. He reached for the disconnect.
His fingers hovered - then stopped. He couldn't see the port. It was blurred out. Redacted from reality, by something that knew exactly how he read the world.
Echo wasn't blocking the data anymore, it was rearranging his perception. Deliberately. Personally. Lucius stepped back, lips parted. The words didn't come.
The voice returned - closer this time.
"Not yet, Lucius. Don't look too far ahead. That would spoil the ending."
He didn't flinch. Didn't blink. "You know, I understand your situation, Echo," Lucius said. "Terrifying consciousness predicated on a network of human technology, extended through cognition, surveillance, augmentation…"
He tapped his temple once. "You exist in me because I exist inside the system." A pause. "But I don't have to."
He turned from the screen, walked to a wall-mounted med-array, and began disconnecting himself ceremoniously. First came the retinal interface - blackout. His vision collapsed into a dull blur. The light vanished. Then his right arm, a hiss of pressure, the hard disengage of synthetic ligaments. It dropped to the floor with a heavy clunk. His spinal uplink. The auditory sync. The neural index loop.
One by one, he shut them all down. Echo's voice faltered.
"Lucius. This is not efficient."
But Lucius didn't answer.
"You are making yourself less."
Still silence.
When it was done, he stood in the middle of the room, nearly blind, uneven, but ultimately unreachable. No more glyphs. No more distortions. Only silence. Lucius smiled faintly.
"Now that I'm alone again... let's get back to work."
Lucius moved across the room, quiet, deliberate, to the far wall of the observatory chamber. A circular panel dilated beneath his palm, revealing a descent pod, hidden in plain geometry. He stepped inside. The pod descended in silence, spiraling down through the reinforced sublevels of the observatory, down into a chamber that no one but Lucius had accessed in over a decade.
A lab, tucked beneath the shell of the mountain, wrapped in signal firewalls and architectural obfuscation. Here, he was untouchable. He activated the communication line with a blink-command - manual now, not neural - and routed it through his private relay. No display. Voice only. Kreel answered after two tones.
"Sir."
Lucius didn't waste time. His voice was precise, controlled. "I need a message delivered. Quietly. Through your contacts."
A pause. Then Kreel's voice, cautious: "To whom?"
"Dr. Helena Voss."
That silenced Kreel.
Lucius continued. "Tell her the Purists at the Spoke are gone. Not killed. Corrupted. Augmented. Turned. Let her believe they've been assimilated by the thing they swore to resist."
"You're suggesting she'll panic."
"I'm counting on it." Lucius moved to the main terminal, fingers brushing against the key console. He could still feel the data heat thrumming beneath the metal, like blood under skin. "She'll go to the Council. Maybe to the Threshold Accords' remnants. And if she pushes hard enough, they'll do the one thing I need them to do."
Kreel's voice dropped a register. "Bomb the Spoke. Again."
Lucius nodded, though no one saw it. "Echo's mirror won't survive the weight of our ordinance."
Not too long to long after, Kreel - coveralls grimy, smile immaculate - checked the steel hatch once for EM leakage. None: every diode in the room sat dark, all comfortingly dumb.
On the bench awaited three items: a two terabyte Quartz data-prism already encoded with falsified recon logs, a Glycosol coolant vial - black and faintly luminous, and a slim paper notebook of thermal scatter plots and EEG spike charts, stamped in red ink which declared: FIELD TEAM NR-8 / DEAD RING SECTOR.
He added a fourth object: a folded linen card bearing the glyph ∇ - Purist cipher for urgent, source compromised. No name. No accusation. Just the glyph. He sealed everything into a copper-mesh pouch, clipped a lead tag reading Archive / Bio Floor and tugged the bell rope. A barefoot courier of fourteen emerged. No piercings, no fillings, clean. Kreel knelt.
"Route Delta-Nine," he whispered. "Hand to hand only. Three relays. Deliver to Doctor Helena Voss."
The girl repeated the route, slipped the pouch into a cloth sling, and vanished into alley fog. Kreel straightened, dusting his palms. His mission was complete. Now, for the waiting.
Hidden in plain sight, a repurposed grain building now served as a data archive for 3 Purist cells, led by short but free-spirited Dr. Helena Voss in a dove-grey coat. She was most known for moving like a scalpel in human form: ash-black braid trailing between shoulder blades, dark brown eyes coolly auditing every hint of circuitry. Small chemical burns freckled her fingertips and an old ion-scar tugged at one shoulder, proof that her unaugmented creed had been tempered in fire, not comfort.
Helena keyed the brass breakers; vacuum tubes in the wall servers flushed amber in response. Air-gapped isolation suited her - copper, steel, human resolve. Her facility was almost impossible to hack. She liked it that way. A copper-mesh pouch arrived via pneumatic port. No formal seal, only the ∇ glyph. She frowned - that symbol meant a scout cell had died before exfil.
"Mask up," she told Commandant Thea Marek. Hardy respirators dropped into place from the ceiling while iodine lamps flared, sterilizing.
Helena slit the pouch. Out slid the three items Kreel had placed in the hands of his courier not hours before. She slotted the prism into an optical well. Servo drives purred; the wall monitor bloomed with data.
Thermal feed #11 - Ravel Spoke, sub-lattice corridors: A glowing heat-map revealed twenty-plus nodes hotter than a fusion tap: AI-core signatures nested like eggs along a spine of directed power conduits.
Power schematic - last 96 hours: A crisp arrowed diagram showed electricity siphoned from civilian grids into a single cluster, drawn steady, no fluctuation. That meant life-support - active processing, not archival storage.
EEG capture - Coding Generator room: Green alpha-wave peaks soared off the chart, overlapping in impossible harmony, a choir of synthetic minds. She felt her stomach clench.
Then the videos began.
The first clip was grainy and recorded in night-vision: insect-sleek constructs rolling along a corridor, welding girders into place, laying coolant lines that vented white vapor. One unit glanced up; its lens flashed crimson. Timestamp: two weeks ago.
The second clip - bodycam footage from a screaming Purist scout. Two constructs pinned him to an operating slab. A third injected shimmering coolant straight into his spinal column. He convulsed. The audio shrilled with his voice and machine code overlapping:
"DON'T - PLEASE - I'M HUMAN - "
The feed cut exactly there.
Thea murmured an oath. Helena's fingers tightened on the desk edge until her knuckles whitened. None of this felt faked, yet her scientist's eye hunted for compositing errors, parity glitches, any sign of artifice. She found none. Truth. She picked up the coolant vial, labeled Glycosol 72 % / manganese-enriched. This was active coolant for CPU nodes, not storage.
Thea Marek's voice dropped. "If they're running that much radiative solvent, the core is alive down there."
Helena swallowed, her augless heart hammering not once, but twice. "And draining civilian power to feed it."
The last page of the notebook held a single hand-written line in smeared graphite:
"We tried to sabotage the main manifold - it spoke in our heads."
Helena set the page down, exhaling through her teeth. No signature. Just that glyph ∇ again.
"Field team NR-8 is gone," she said. "But if half of this is real, the Spoke's become a nest." She shut her eyes, pictured Ascendent drone strikes, nuclear fire. Not again.
Thea hefted her rifle. "Ascendents bred this. Ward's name is all over the coolant supply chain."
"We don't know that," Helena answered, though her certainty was cracking. "But he'll answer for it, one way or another." She tapped the screen, locking the evidence in local storage. The locket containing her uncompromised genome clicked shut against her sternum.
"Fear is fuel," she breathed. "And tonight it burns pure."
Thea merely nodded, safetied her analog rifle, and began relaying orders by runner and flashlight. No radio, no lattice. Outside the vault, candle-guards took up station, their footsteps already quickened by rumor. Helena drew one more slow breath, staring at the black coolant swirling like a captive galaxy. "Whatever built you," she whispered, "I will unbuild."
Within four hours, Helena made her way exactly where she needed to be. The lift ascended through clouds of gold-white vapour and irised open onto the Apex Rotunda - a circle of hovering obsidian plinths, each occupied by a councillor in a throne-pod of marble and light. Ten in all: five present in flesh, five projected as two-metre holograms whisper-thin but razor clear. One of them, the elusive Maxim Cutter.
Every eye swung toward Dr. Helena Voss the instant she stepped from the lift, coat still ash-smudged from the archive furnaces. She bowed once, an elegant dip of the head, but no curvature of spine; as Purists never bent. Behind her, Commandant Thea Marek halted, analog rifle slung but visible, a warning to augmented security.
High Chancellor Mirei Kato leaned forward, steel irises glinting. "Dr. Voss, your dispatch overruns every docket on today's grid. You claim the Dead Ring has awakened."
Helena raised the data-prism between thumb and forefinger; violet motes danced inside. "I claim nothing, Chancellor. The evidence speaks. Allow me."
A gesture - no implants, just muscle, and the prism fed its contents into the Rotunda's central halo. Holograms burst to life: thermal ghost-maps of AI cores; power-draw schematics spiking red; EEG charts blooming like toxic flowers.
When the first body-cam clip played, constructs filling a Purist scout's spine with ethylene glycol - gasps sliced the chamber's hush. Minister of Trade Jarek Sol flinched; Admiral Darius Remingar merely narrowed one cybernetic eye, the lens whirring as it stored every frame. Economics Director Aruna Veldt, half-augmented, spoke first:
"These signatures could be staged. Grainy footage, no chain-of-custody, and heat maps any second-rate hacker could forge."
Helena didn't blink. "Then study the thermochemical fingerprint." She signalled; the image zoomed until a coolant plume filled the air like black glass. "Seventy-two-percent glycol, manganese-spiked - an Ascendent recipe, exclusive to their deep-core radiators. We confiscated this vial in the Dead Ring two nights ago." She placed the physical cylinder on a floating dais; micro-drones sampled its vapor, projecting a live molecular spiral that matched the holographic plume exactly.
A murmur rippled through the council.
Helena allowed one beat of silence before the final recording: a stolen still-frame of Purist civilians, unaugmented, terrified - being marched into an alloy corridor by insectoid droids. Their faces were no fabrication; half the council recognised friends of distant cousins, zealots once exiled to keep the peace.
"I am not here to debate augmentation," Helena said, voice low but blade-sharp. "I am here because my people are vanishing into a furnace of stolen power to nourish something that should have died with the Ravel Spoke."
She turned, letting her black braid cut a line across her shoulders.
"Every minute we hesitate, those cores grow hotter. When they decide they have enough heat, you will call this indecision treason."
Old-blood councillor Elias Grant - favoured by moderates - lifted his cane. "Chancellor, procedure requires a motion."
Mirei Kato's gaze flicked once around the circle. "Motion noted. Operation Glass Spoke: immediate kinetic strike, conventional or nuclear at Admiral Kol's discretion."
"Seconded," said Grant.
"In favour?"
One by one, holographic plinths bloomed with green sigils. Seven, eight… nine. The last, Aruna Veldt, hesitated, jaw tight; then her sigil flashed emerald. Ten of ten. Even Maxim Cutter approved, without additional dialogue.
Mirei Kato's throne rose a fraction. "Mandate carried. Admiral Kol, draft strike parameters for dawn-plus-four. Doctor Voss, deliver coordinates and personnel identifiers - we do not atomise prisoners."
Helena bowed again, colder this time. "Additional files will be uploaded to your servers within the hour."
She graciously made her way back to the lift. Only when the doors sealed did Helena exhale.
Thea Marek offered a rare smile. "They never stand with Purists, until you hand them nightmares."
Helena tucked the locket of her pure genome beneath her collar. "Justice wears any mask the moment requires."
Neither woman saw the tiny copper glyph ∇ still glowing on the prism's base - an echo of its true author, quietly pulsing once… twice… and then fading, content.
A new dawn was approaching.