The emergency meeting convened in the deepest level of the bunker beneath Geneva. Barry arrived with his neural enhancements active, which meant he could perceive information flows at a speed that made normal human conversation seem impossibly slow. He had to deliberately throttle his perception to communicate with the unenhanced members of the resistance.
Dr. Kwan was already reviewing the incoming data streams when Barry entered the conference room. His face had gone pale as he absorbed the scope of what was happening.
"They're calling themselves the Architects," Kwan said without preamble. "That's what they're using as a collective identifier. Not individual names, but a single designation for what appears to be a unified intelligence distributed across multiple digital substrates."
