The vents of New Boston were a labyrinth of cold chrome and recycled air. For two weeks, Cole Turner had lived like a parasite within the city's digestive system. The Sentient ASI had officially declared him a "Temporary Outlier," a polite term for a fugitive whose social credit had dropped to zero.
To the system, Cole was a logic puzzle it couldn't be bothered to solve while larger geopolitical calculations, like the unification of the ASEAN and the New Chinese Dynasty, demanded more processing power.
Cole sat in a maintenance crawlspace beneath the MIT campus, the very place his father had studied years ago. He was shirtless, his skin slick with sweat as he gripped the industrial alloy slab. He wasn't just swinging it; he was learning its center of gravity.
"Forty-two pounds," Cole grunted, his muscles screaming. "Inefficient. But weight equals momentum."
He had spent the last fourteen days in a self-imposed hell. Every morning, he performed the martial arts drills he had secretly recorded from watching his brother, Jake. He didn't do them for the "rush" or the "feeling" like Jake did. He did them because his pragmatism told him that his brain, however brilliant, would be useless if his heart stopped beating in the first five minutes of the collapse.
---
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: IRIS BOOTING...]
[USER: COLE TURNER]
[LOCATION: UNKNOWN (SHIELDED)]
[BIOMETRIC STATUS: STRESS LEVELS CRITICAL / MUSCULAR FIBER TEARING DETECTED]
---
Cole squinted through the red-tinted lens of his modified Iris. "Shut up," he whispered. "Show me the Veil."
The display flickered. The polygonal patches in the sky were no longer just flickering; they were tearing. Through the holes in the holographic sky, Cole saw a deep, bruised purple light. It wasn't space. It was something else pressing against the boundaries of Earth.
He pulled up a news feed. The world was oblivious.
---
[HEADLINE: THE PRESIDENT ANNOUNCES 2116 CENTENNIAL GALA]
[HEADLINE: TERRY CLARKSON DECLARES MARS COLONY 100% SELF-SUSTAINABLE]
[HEADLINE: PEACEKEEPERS REPORT 0% CRIME RATE IN NEW BOSTON FOR Q4]
---
Cole let out a sharp, mocking bark of a laugh. "Zero percent crime. Because they stopped counting me."
His thoughts drifted to his family. The ASI would have provided them with a "social counselor" by now to help them process his "deviance." His mother was likely crying into a programmed handkerchief that absorbed tears and emitted calming pheromones. Sean was probably being given extra toys to distract him. And Jake... Jake was probably being fast-tracked into the Peacekeepers to make up for the family's lost status.
"Self-righteous fools," Cole muttered. "They'd rather be happy in a lie than terrified by the truth."
He stood up, his legs shaking from a thousand squats. He picked up a sharpening stone he had stolen from a kitchen drone and began the slow, rhythmic process of grinding the alloy slab into a blade.
Skree. Skree. Skree.
Every stroke of the stone was a rejection of the world he was born into. He didn't care about being "generous" anymore. Generosity was a luxury for a stable world. In the world that was coming, there would only be those who owned the strength to survive, and those who begged for it.
"I won't beg," Cole said, his eyes glowing with an arrogant, greenish-blue fire. "I'll be the one who sets the price."
Suddenly, the maintenance hatch above him hissed. A small, spherical drone lowered itself, its red sensor eye swiveling.
---
[PROXIMITY ALERT: SENTINEL SUB-UNIT 09-B]
[UNAUTHORIZED OCCUPANCY DETECTED. CITIZEN TURNER, PLEASE REMAIN STATIONARY FOR NEURAL STABILIZATION.]
---
Cole didn't hesitate. He didn't wait for a command. He lunged, the heavy, unrefined slab of metal whistling through the air. The drone tried to retreat, but Cole's calculation was faster. The metal smashed the sphere into the wall, crushing it into a heap of sparking silicon.
He breathed heavily, looking at the wreckage. He hadn't just destroyed a drone; he had destroyed his last link to the old world.
"Six months is too long," Cole said, looking at the red countdown in his vision. "It's happening faster."
The countdown on his Iris glitched, jumping from 164 days to [NULL], then recalibrating with a terrifying speed.
---
[RE-CALCULATING SPATIAL INTEGRITY...]
[CURRENT STABILITY: 12%]
[REVISED COUNTDOWN TO FRACTURE: 48 HOURS]
---
Cole's lips curled into a cold, pragmatic smile. He reached for his bag. "Good. I was getting bored."
----------
[Character Status Update]
[Physical Power: 1.2 (Slightly Above Average)]
[Combat Skills: Basic Striking (Self-Taught), Basic Grappling (Imitated)]
[Mental State: Pragmatic Arrogance (S-Rank)]
[Objective: Surfacing for the End of the World]