The tactical display was a diagram of a tomb. Dr. Oran Kennet watched from his monitoring outpost, a sterile grey box miles away, as the geometry of the trap resolved into its final, perfect state. Ten blue icons, the operators of Scrubber Team Delta, flowed with unnerving precision through the digital rendering of the subway tunnels. They had split into two fireteams, sealing both ends of a maintenance junction. In the center, caught in the crossfire, were two red icons, flickering like erratic heartbeats. Croft and Weil.
Kennet’s gloved hands rested on the cool ceramic of his console. He had seen this before. The clean, logical elegance of a kill box. He pulled up the comms log from Scrubber Team Delta’s back-channel, the one that bypassed Commissioner Holland and reported directly to Hasek. The order was logged with a simple, sterile timestamp. Hunt the asset. Use discretionary protocols. It was a kill order, laundered through the language of bureaucratic procedure. Hasek, the purist, was cleaning his house, and Croft was just a stain to be removed. Kennet’s objective was simple: break the geometry. The obstacle was Hasek’s absolute control over the system.
His fingers moved, not with the frantic energy of a hacker, but with the slow, deliberate precision of a surgeon. He didn’t try to breach Hasek’s command channel. He opened a local file on his own secure server. The file was old, encrypted, and tagged with a single, ugly name: ASHKELON_INCIDENT_REDACTED. He didn’t need to open it. He knew its contents by heart. He could still smell the cloying, antiseptic odor of the wide-spectrum neural sterilant. He could still see the two hundred vacant faces in the arcology’s common area, their Somatic Sigils faded to a uniform, placid grey. He had argued for a more delicate approach, for his Locus Scalpel, but command had cited protocol. The result was a massacre of minds, a quiet, orderly atrocity. He had followed the rules and two hundred people had been erased. That was the price of parasitic belief in the system.
The memory solidified his resolve. He would not let it happen again. He keyed a command, trading his career and his freedom for three minutes of chaos. He accessed the CI-Div’s Actuary AI, the predictive engine that modeled memetic threats. He didn’t attack it. He fed it a lie. He began to synthesize a data packet, weaving together strands of corrupted code and phantom bio-signatures. He was creating a ghost, a perfect simulation of a Class-Five memetic chimera—a creature of pure theory, a monster that could rewrite a host’s biology in seconds.
He placed the ghost in the sensor logs for a large service tunnel adjacent to the kill box. It was a subtle, elegant piece of sabotage. Not a crash, but a misdirection. A beautiful flaw.
A query box flashed on his screen, the system’s automated conscience. The text was a calm, institutional blue. 'Query: Unauthorized Threat Simulation Injected into Live Network. Confirm Intent.'
Kennet paused. His gloved finger hovered over the confirmation key. On a secondary screen, he pulled up a schematic of Croft’s unique neural architecture. It was a mess of contradictory pathways, a biological paradox. But at its center was the faint, flickering structure of the REM Diagram, a construct of pure, embattled reason. It was a fragile, beautiful thing, an island of sanity in a sea of biological noise. It was worth saving. Hasek saw a contamination. Kennet saw the only thing that mattered.
— Intent confirmed, — he whispered to the empty room. — Execute.
He pressed the key.
On the main tactical display, the effect was immediate. A new icon bloomed in the adjacent tunnel, a pulsing, angry crimson that dwarfed Croft’s small, flickering light. Alarms, silent on Kennet’s end, would be screaming in the helmets of the Scrubber team. The team leader’s voice, clipped and professional, crackled over the open channel.
— Command, we have a new priority target. Class-Five entity, confirmed. Repeat, Class-Five. We are diverting.
Five of the blue icons broke formation, peeling away from the kill box to intercept the phantom. The perfect geometry of the trap shattered. A three-minute window had been purchased. The price was his life as he knew it.
Now, the escape route. Kennet’s fingers flew across the console, accessing a deep-level system override he had built into the network years ago, a secret door for a day just like this one. He reactivated Croft’s old comm-link, the one Julian was supposed to have destroyed. He knew Croft wouldn’t have. Julian never threw away a tool.
He typed a short, coded message, his own small act of rebellion. 'Third rail maintenance shaft. Go. Be a rebel.' He hit send. The message was a betrayal of everything the CI-Div stood for. It was an affirmation of the individual over the system. It was the most honest thing he had done since Ashkelon. A strange, unburdened calm settled over him. The move was made. The axis had shifted.
The system, of course, was already biting back. A small, red flag appeared in the corner of his console, almost polite in its indictment. 'AUDIT_FAIL: UNAUTHORIZED_COMMAND_OVERRIDE. USER: KENNET, O.' A second line appeared a moment later. 'ALERT_PACKET_SENT_TO: DIRECTOR_HASEK.'
It was done. He had bought them their chance. He had also handed Hasek a signed confession.
Kennet leaned back in his chair, his work finished. He closed the Ashkelon file, silencing the ghost that had haunted him for a decade. On the screen, Croft’s red icon was moving, heading for the maintenance shaft.
The air in the small, dark outpost was cold and tasted of recycled oxygen. The low, steady hum of the server racks was the only sound.
Hasek watched the data stream, a predator who now knew exactly where his prey was running.
