The rain didn't stop that night. It never did in Glitch City. It was as if the sky itself was corroded — weeping acid tears over a world that forgot what purity felt like.
Anya followed Mr. K through narrow corridors behind Broken Code. The neon lights faded as they descended deeper underground, into a place where signals twisted and shadows seemed to breathe.
They entered a hidden chamber lined with servers humming like the heartbeat of some mechanical beast. Holographic screens floated in midair, filled with encrypted data and scrolling code.
"This is my safehouse," Mr. K said, his voice calm, almost too calm. "No corporate trace, no surveillance. You can work here without being found."
Anya scanned the room, eyes flickering with a faint glow as her neural implants synced to the local network. "Impressive setup. You must have paid a fortune for this."
"I did," he said simply. "And I expect a return on that investment."
She turned to face him. "Tell me what exactly you want from OmniCorp."
Mr. K hesitated for a second — a flicker of doubt, quickly buried. "A data core. Project Helix. It's stored deep inside their primary server vault. I need you to extract it and deliver it to me."
Anya frowned. "Helix… I've heard rumors. Some kind of bio-digital experiment?"
He didn't answer.
That silence told her everything she needed to know.
"Let me guess," she said. "Not just data. Something alive. Or something that used to be."
Mr. K's gaze hardened. "You don't need to know what it is. Just get it."
Anya smirked. "That's what everyone says before things go to hell."
She connected her neural link to one of the terminals, a thin filament of light extending from the port behind her ear. "Fine. I'll need twenty-four hours to breach their perimeter firewall. Their ICE systems are adaptive — smart, hungry. I'll have to rewrite my own code to get past them."
Mr. K nodded. "Whatever it takes."
She paused. "And my conditions?"
He crossed his arms. "I'm listening."
"One — I work alone. No interference, no trackers, no questions. Two — if this job goes south, I walk. No pursuit, no debts. And three…" She leaned closer, her violet eyes glowing brighter. "If you lie to me, I'll find you — no matter where you hide."
Mr. K's lips curled into a faint smile. "You remind me of someone I used to know."
"Lucky them," Anya replied coldly.
When she turned back to the console, the room was silent except for the hum of machines. Her fingers moved in a blur, dancing across projected keyboards, weaving through layers of encrypted code. Symbols and data streams reflected off her eyes — a digital symphony of light and danger.
Hours passed like seconds. The deeper she went, the more she felt something wrong — an echo within the system. A presence watching her from the other side of the network.
Then — a whisper. Not through her ears, but directly into her neural interface.
"Who are you?"
Anya froze. No one should've been able to detect her link. Not this early.
"Identify yourself," the voice said again, cold and synthetic — yet almost human.
Her hands moved faster. "Not today," she muttered, initiating a forced disconnect. But before the link broke, she caught a glimpse of a logo flashing across her screen — a spiraling double helix wrapped in fire.
Project Helix.
And beneath it, a line of corrupted text that made her blood run cold:
> SUBJECT 07: REAWAKENED.
She ripped the neural cable out, gasping for breath. Her heart pounded as the last fragments of code faded from her vision.
Mr. K was watching her silently. "You found something."
"Yeah," she said slowly, wiping the sweat from her brow. "Something that wasn't supposed to be awake."
Outside, thunder rumbled across the skyline, the rain hissing as it struck the chrome rooftops. Somewhere inside the digital depths of OmniCorp, something had opened its eyes — and it was looking right back at her.