There are a hundred ways to dismantle a system. Some are surgical, precise, clean, and undetectable. Others are chaotic—a smoke bomb in a server room, digital blood smeared across the screen. I've used them all. But the one I hate the most? Collaboration.
And yet here I was. Sitting across from Theo Lucenti, surrounded by open laptops, blueprints, energy drinks, and half-eaten biscotti.
The simulation project was already proving to be more than a university test run. The parameters had changed. Quietly. Subtly. Gallo didn't announce it, but I noticed. The firewall complexity, the behavioral models, even the sandboxed AI construct we were supposed to test vulnerabilities on—it was more advanced than anything we'd ever seen in class. Military-grade advanced. Government-tier.
And it wasn't just the tools that felt wrong.
Something deeper itched beneath my skin, like someone had spliced our academic challenge with a real-world payload. I couldn't prove it. Not yet. But instincts are why Nyx still exists. And my instincts were screaming.
Theo noticed, of course. He notices everything. He just doesn't ask directly. Instead, he circles.
"You've been quiet," he said, watching me over the rim of his espresso. Because, of course, an Italian is drinking his espresso while having a disgusted face at my caramel latte.
I didn't look up. "Thinking."
"Dangerous habit."
"Only for people with something to hide."
He grinned. "Aren't we all hiding something?"
Yes. I'm hiding the fact that I'm Nyx, and I've already poked a hole in the backend of this simulation server to install a cloaked monitoring node. I'm also hiding the fact that the code they gave us isn't just an AI sandbox — it's learning. Faster than it should.
But instead, I said nothing. Let him keep guessing.
It was after midnight when I noticed it.
Theo had gone out to take a call — probably some mafia-adjacent business he pretended didn't exist. I stayed in the lab, double-checking our intrusion points.
That's when I saw the anomaly.
At first, I thought it was a logging error. A recursive line in the AI's internal script. But recursion that deep only happens when something's feeding it conflicting parameters. Or...
When someone else is talking to it.
I froze.
There were messages hidden in the neural feedback loop. Someone had embedded a comms line inside the AI.
Encrypted, adaptive, intelligent.
This wasn't a university project. Not anymore.
I traced the relay path. It routed through an external proxy, bounced off a data haven in Iceland, then dead-ended in a Tor mirror labeled simply:
LUXNODE.
My heart stopped.
No.
It couldn't be.
Lux? Here? Embedded in our assignment?
I ripped through the layers of obfuscation, trying not to panic. Trying not to believe what I already knew.
The code was his. The signature was buried, fragmented, but I'd danced with it before. A million lines ago. It was him.
Lux was inside the simulation.
And that meant one of two things.
Either he'd found me, was taunting me.
Or he didn't know I was here, and I was about to walk into something much bigger than a petty rivalry.
Theo came back in, casual as ever, scrolling through something on his phone.
"You okay?" he asked.
I blinked. "Fine."
"You look like you just saw a ghost."
I closed the laptop. "I see them all the time."
He raised an eyebrow but didn't push.
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That night, in my dorm, I accessed my private terminal. Nyx's world. My real machine.
I plugged in the external drive I'd cloned from the lab system. Isolated it. Sandboxed it. And then I cracked the comms channel wide open.
A message blinked.
FROM: UNKNOWN"Sometimes the best way to test a weapon... is to hand it to the enemy and see who dies first."
I stared.
That wasn't just a threat.
That was an invitation.
And a warning.
Somewhere deep in the simulation server, the AI pinged awake. Its first word appeared on my screen, typed character by character.
NYX.
It knew me.
Which meant this AI wasn't just learning. It had memory.
And someone had told it who to watch.
I shut it down. Hard. Burned the port. Wiped the drive.
I sat back in my chair, staring at the blank screen.
This wasn't a university assignment.
This was a battlefield.
And the war had already started.