A Little Help and A New Ally
Aiden leaned back against the coolant pipes of his hidden workshop, the bitter aftertaste of burnt synth-coffee on his tongue. He replayed the chaotic sequence from the plaza for the umpteenth time. A Nexus Asset, an Alpha-Prime, deployed a high-level energy shield for them. It was an act so fundamentally contradictory to everything he knew about the Directive's elite that it stuck in his mind like a persistent, unpatchable bug. She had moved with instinct, not protocol, and she had asked for nothing in return.
Everything in him screamed to leave it alone. To let a random stranger handle their own business; that was how humans survived in 2635. They walked a well-defined tightrope and never deviated course.
But he couldn't do it.
He trusted very few people. Having watched Resistance fighters vanish into the Nexus Directive's assimilation programs for too many years to count, trust was a luxury he couldn't afford in his home, Cush City—Subaquilus One's second-largest hub. But her raw, defensive action had been genuine. He felt an obligation to repay that debt, not with credits, but with safety.
And he found himself wondering if she could be their way out.
His integrated forearm terminal flickered, displaying a live feed from the city's main broadcast towers. The Nexus Directive's corporate spokesperson—a man whose face was engineered for bland reassurance—was speaking over a scrolling text banner.
"Attention Citizens of Subaquilus One. We are aware of unauthorized cybernetic activity earlier today. The individual involved, designated Asset-74 (Jackie Cannon), is suffering from severe component corruption. We only wish to bring her in for immediate medical rectification. If you have any information, please contact the Nexus Help Line. Helping your fellow citizen is your duty."
Aiden spat on the floor. "Component corruption. They're selling her as a faulty toaster."
"It's effective propaganda, Aiden," came the reply from behind him. It was Kai, a scrawny, brilliant tech runner whose eyes constantly darted with the twitchy paranoia of someone who deals in illegal information packets. Kai was Aiden's shadow and his most trusted contact.
"It paints her as a virus, not a defector. Citizens won't protect a malfunction."
Aiden turned to Kai, his expression grim. "I sent her a ping. Untraceable, via the old military frequency buried in the core relays. She responded. Midnight at C-4-Delta. You're coming with me."
"C-4-Delta? That's outside the dome perimeter, near the lowest mine entrance. It's crawling with corporate security and… other things," Kai protested, running a quick diagnostic on his own low-grade neural chip.
"Exactly. It's where they don't expect a Nexus asset to hide. I need to know why she helped us, and she needs to know what's happening in the mines."
The mine was the nexus of the city's current instability. Workers were extracting the rare, unstable Subaquilus Ore, which powered the entire dome but caused increasing seismic and psychic feedback in the labor force. Aiden and his group believed the extraction was exceeding safe limits, driven by Nexus's bottom line. But what could they do? They protested and were killed anyway for their efforts. Nexus valued the mine but not the labor used to extract their precious ore. Everyone of them, cyborg hybrid and human, could die.
Nexus Directive had replacements.
Hours later, the two men stood at the C-4-Delta airlock, the heavy, corroded metal door groaning against the cold, pressurized air outside the dome. Jackie and Lyra materialized out of the shadows, Jackie's Scrambler system flickering offline as they met.
Aiden didn't waste time. "The propaganda is live. They're framing you as a rogue contagion. They want you back, not fixed. Why did you shield us?"
Jackie's expression was unreadable, her ocular implants stabilizing to a soft, neutral white. "I acted instinctively. I needed to protect life, not property. I am not property. Nexus doesn't own me; our government repaired me after my accident. If Nexus doesn't understand that." She simply shrugged, and Kai silently scoffed. Aiden stared into her brown eye, wanting to know if her words were truth or more propaganda.
Lyra, ever focused on the threat, interjected, "We need raw intel on the old sectors. Tally can hack almost anything, but the city's forgotten infrastructure is fragmented. We need schematics for the abandoned tunnels connecting the original dome to the mine network."
Aiden's face hardened. "The mine is where the real danger is. They're over-extracting the Subaquilus Ore. It's causing psychic feedback in the workers. We think they're trying to stabilize the ore with something… or someone."
Just as Kai started to nervously detail his theories about a hidden bio-stabilization unit, the city alarm system—a shrieking, dissonant siren—suddenly ripped through the cold air.
The airlock status panels flashed violently, turning from a calm green to a deep, panicked crimson.
"SECURITY ALERT: EXTERNAL BIOLOGICAL BREACH. SECTOR 4 WALL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED. DEPLOYING ALL ACTIVE SENTINEL UNITS."
Lyra's eyes snapped wide. "Tally is registering a massive, non-standard bioluminescent signature approaching the dome wall. It's massive—a Class 6 Deep-Ocean Organism, far larger than anything we've classified."
Jackie rushed to the small, reinforced viewport on the airlock door, her optical zoom maxing out. Outside, in the toxic, perpetual twilight of the deep sea where Subaquilus One rested, a sight of impossible scale filled her vision.
It was a creature of myth—a colossal, ethereal whale, its body laced with glowing, pulsing bioluminescent veins of electric blue and violet. It slammed against the heavy reinforced wall of the domed city with the force of a tectonic shift. The entire airlock shuddered violently.
"BDJ, analysis!" Jackie yelled over the alarm, her cybernetic body already tense.
"Analysis complete: Organism designation Leviathan Lux-Magna. Estimated mass: 450,000 kilograms. Impact force: 8.5 on the Richter Scale. City wall integrity… failing."
The creature slammed against the wall again, and a blinding, agonizing crack spread across the reinforced viewport. The attack was not random; it was a targeted breach. The battle for the soul of Subaquilus One had just gone from a political war to a fight for survival against a force no one expected.