Cass and Naomi arrived just as the interface for Nyx loaded fully.
Cass blinked. "What is that thing?"
Jason turned the screen toward them. "It's Rohan's failsafe. A counter-intrusion AI embedded with Valkyrie's operational patterns. He embedded it in an old system I forgot I even had."
Naomi's eyes widened. "Are you telling me this… knows how Valkyrie moves?"
Jason nodded. "Down to the syntax of their worms and logic bombs. It's raw, barely documented, but it's our best shot at pushing them back."
Cass cracked her knuckles. "Let's plug this into a test environment before we let it anywhere near the live grid."
Jason smiled faintly. "Smart girl."
---
Hours later, they watched Nyx begin its silent crawl through a mirrored sandbox of the Specter development tree.
And it didn't take long to find something.
"Right here," Cass said, zooming in on a segment of Specter's predictive sentiment parser. "This function looks clean to us, but Nyx tagged it as 'active deception masking.' Someone inserted a logic override that suppresses triggers when content originates from specific sources."
Jason's blood ran cold. "Which sources?"
Cass highlighted a list.
They were IPs and shell domains tied to media properties—some of the biggest names in the game. Newscasters, streaming platforms, influential YouTubers, viral ad farms. All controlled by Valkyrie's puppets.
Jason clenched his fists. "Specter's been neutered. We weren't seeing lies—we were seeing their version of truth."
Naomi scowled. "We need to go public with this."
Jason shook his head. "Not yet. We need a kill switch. Something that not only exposes them, but takes them down."
---
In a private boardroom, Jason pitched the plan to his inner circle.
Operation Icarus.
"Here's the idea," Jason said. "We rebuild Specter under a forked system—one the public doesn't know exists. We call it 'Specter Black.' It runs parallel, powered by Nyx. Real-time detection. Full-spectrum decryption of Valkyrie influence. And a nuclear option: exposure."
Naomi folded her arms. "You're talking about pulling back the curtain on the entire digital ecosystem. Governments will panic. Markets will crash."
Jason's eyes were steel. "Let them. If we don't burn it down, it'll own us forever."
Cass asked, "How do you deliver it?"
Jason smiled. "The way they'd never expect. Through entertainment. We seed it into every top creator's pipeline. Movies, games, memes. We make truth go viral."
---
That night, Jason found himself alone in the penthouse, staring out at the city.
Rohan had given him the match.
Now he had to light the fire.
He opened an old photo on his phone. The original PulseCast team. Smiling. Young. Idealistic.
He whispered, "This is for you, Rohan."
Then he opened his console.
> run SpecterBlack.exe
The war was no longer digital theory.
It was digital revolution.