Mark entered the room, his steps quick and purposeful. "We've detected an anomaly in the network perimeter—a possible breach attempt."
Damien Vance stood before a bank of live security feeds, his gaze fixed on the shifting data streams. The room was cold, lit only by the blue-white glow of tactical displays reflecting off the polished obsidian floor. He didn't turn, his voice a low baritone that seemed to vibrate in the chilled air. "Details."
"An unauthorized probe targeting the Oracle core's biometric protocols. It was blocked, but the origin is masked." Mark placed a slate on the desk, and a holographic projection of the core room's defenses materialized—a shimmering web of retinal scans, vocal signatures, and haptic-pressure sensors.
Damien expanded the hologram with a flick of his wrist, his eyes narrowing as he traced the intrusion points. The probe hadn't been a brute-force assault; it had been surgical, a needle looking for a specific, pre-existing crack. "Every point of access is a failure waiting to happen. Every person granted clearance is a potential breach."
Mark's shoulders tightened. He was Head of Internal Response, but Damien was Head of Security, and Vance's authority was absolute, granted by the Aethelred board itself. "The executive team is still pushing for higher clearance levels. They argue it would speed up development on the Prometheus build."
"Loyalty can be bought with a better offer. I've seen it." Damien's jaw tightened briefly, his attention never leaving the feeds. The probe had tested the vocal-signature lock for Tier-Zero access. Only five people in the company had that. "Faith is a superstition, and trust is a liability I can't afford."
He turned his back, the movement final, his focus returning to the relentless flow of data. Mark stood for a moment longer, a ghost in the command center, then retreated without a word.
The heavy door hissed shut, sealing Damien in his sanctum. The silence that fell was absolute, broken only by the whisper of the high-velocity air filtration and the low thrum of the quantum server bank beneath his feet. He stared at his own reflection superimposed over the data streams—a pale, unmoving mask.
Mark was a good analyst, but he saw the world in binary: secure or breached. He didn't see the shades of gray, the intent behind the attack.
Damien sat in his interface chair, the cold metal conforming to his spine. He ran a gloved hand over the console, and the main hologram refocused. The "Oracle Core" wasn't just a server. It was the sentient heart of Aethelred Corporation, an adaptive AI that managed everything from global logistics to the predictive modeling for their most secret R&D. The Prometheus Project was just a cover story; the real work was something else entirely.
And this probe had known exactly where to knock.
"Engage full diagnostic," Damien said to the room.
A synthesized voice, calm and genderless, replied. Acknowledged. Running Level-One diagnostic. All systems green.
"No. Initiate 'Scythe' protocol."
There was a half-second pause. Scythe protocol requires Board authorization.
"Authorization: Vance, Damien. Override code Epsilon-Niner-Zero."
...Acknowledged. Engaging Scythe. Network integrity lockdown initiated.
The feeds on the wall flickered as the system diverted massive power. Non-essential sectors of the building went dark. The 'Scythe' protocol was Damien's private creation—a deep-level scan that didn't just check for intruders, but for the shadows they left behind. It scanned for residual memory fragments, for the heat-bleed of data that had been accessed, for the faint, quantum-entangled echoes of a query.
While the scan ran, a new alert flashed on his private console. INCOMING_CALL: DIR_THORNE.
Damien muted the alert. She could wait.
He traced the probe's origin. A dead-drop server in a Kowloon data haven, routed through a decommissioned satellite, then bounced off a dozen public terminals in Neo-Kyoto. It was clean. Too clean. The attacker was a professional, or a state-level actor.
The alert flashed again, more insistent. This time, it was accompanied by an override on his door controls. Damien's eyes narrowed. Only two people besides him had that override.
The door hissed open, revealing Director Evelyn Thorne. She stood silhouetted against the bright, sterile light of the outer corridor, impeccably dressed in a razor-sharp corporate suit, her silver hair pulled back so tightly it seemed to pull at her skin.
"Damien. You have thirty seconds to explain why my entire R&D division just went dark."
"A necessary precaution, Director." He didn't turn, his gaze locked on the diagnostic progress bar.
"I read Mark's flash report. 'Blocked.' That's a synonym for 'handled.' You've just frozen the Prometheus simulations. We are losing half a million credits every hour this subnet is down."
"A launch window is irrelevant if our core IP is being auctioned on the darknet."
Evelyn stepped fully into the room, the door sliding shut behind her. The cold and dark didn't seem to affect her. "This is your paranoia again. You see ghosts in every line of code. You treat every employee as a potential traitor."
"And you treat them as assets," Damien retorted, finally swiveling his chair to face her. The blue light carved shadows under his cheekbones. "Assets can be flipped. Assets can be bought. The probe wasn't random, Evelyn. It was educated. It targeted the vocal-signature authentication for Tier-Zero access. That's you, me, the CEO, and the two founders."
Evelyn's composure didn't crack, but a new stillness came over her. "Are you accusing one of us?"
"I'm stating a fact. The attacker knew our internal architecture. They knew who has access. This wasn't an attack from outside. This was facilitated from within."
"You have proof?"
"Not yet."
"Then you are hamstringing this company based on a feeling." She stepped closer, leaning over his desk. "The board is already nervous about your budget, Damien. This 'Scythe' protocol of yours... it's a drain. You have twelve hours. Get my labs back online. Or I'll have the board get them online for you."
"And if I find the breach?"
"Then you'll be a hero," she said, her voice dripping with cynicism. "If not, you'll be the architect of the most expensive fire drill in Aethelred history. Twelve hours."
She turned and left. The door sealed, plunging the room back into its pressurized silence.
Damien stared at the door, his jaw working. "Loyalty... faith..." He'd learned the hard way. He still remembered his last post, at Titan Cyber-Defense. Remembered his partner, Silas, smiling at him across the console just before the data-vault doors blew open. The smell of burning ozone and the sight of Silas's dead eyes as the corporate strike team poured in.
"They made me a better offer, D," Silas had whispered, his last words choked on blood.
Damien had been the only survivor. He'd built his career, and his new security philosophy, on that single, bloody memory. Trust is a liability.
He turned back to the console. The Scythe diagnostic was at 98%. He watched the data scroll, a cascade of green 'CLEARED' markers. The system was clean. The probe had been blocked. Mark was right. Evelyn was right.
He felt a cold spike of unease. It couldn't be that simple.
"System," he said. "The probe was blocked at 04:17:22.14. Show me the logs for the microsecond before that. All network traffic."
Querying...
The screen filled with data. Thousands of lines.
"Filter for non-standard packets. Anything that failed a handshake protocol but wasn't flagged as malignant."
The list shrank. A few dozen lines of data static, digital noise from the city's background radiation. And one other. A single, 12-kilobyte packet. It hadn't been blocked by the firewall because it hadn't tried to do anything. It was a 'null' packet, designed to look like a data-transfer error.
But it had originated from the same proxy chain as the probe.
"Isolate that packet," Damien whispered. "Quarantine grid. Decompile it."
Working... Warning. Packet is fragmented. Appears to be a corrupted remnant.
"Reconstruct it."
The hologram in the center of the room dissolved its defensive web and reformed into a swirling vortex of fractured code. Damien watched, his heart beating a slow, heavy drum. The pieces began to align.
It wasn't a virus. It wasn't an exploit. It was a query.
The probe had been a diversion. A loud, flashy attempt on the biometric protocols to draw all eyes. While the system's active defenses were focused on that, this tiny, quiet packet had slipped in, piggybacking on the probe's entry vector. It hadn't tried to steal anything. It had simply asked the Oracle core a question.
The Scythe scan, designed to hunt for active intruders, had missed it entirely. The packet had dissolved nanoseconds after getting its reply. But a fragment, a 'ghost,' was left behind.
Damien re-compiled the query. His blood ran cold.
QUERY::STATUS::PROJECT_CHIMERA
He stared at the words. He had Tier-Zero clearance. He had access to every project, every file, every dark secret Aethelred held.
He had never heard of Project Chimera.
He quickly opened his own terminal. He typed in the project name.
ACCESS DENIED. UNKNOWN PROJECT.
He used his Tier-Zero key.
ACCESS DENIED. UNKNOWN PROJECT. ALL QUERIES LOGGED.
Damien leaned back, the pieces clicking into place with sickening clarity. The probe wasn't an external attack. The leak wasn't just facilitated from within. The entire operation—the probe, the null packet—had been run by someone inside the company with clearance higher than his own.
Someone was using an outside agent to ask their own AI a question they weren't supposed to ask, about a project that didn't officially exist.
He looked at the bank of feeds. The night-shift employees typing at their desks. The security guards patrolling empty halls. The polished gleam of the executive level. It was no longer a fortress to be defended.
It was a maze. And the monster was already inside.
Damien opened a private, encrypted channel. "Mark. Get back here. Now. And bring the black-kit. We're going offline."