Chapter 8: Trojan Horse
664 Words
No alarms. Just a bone-rattling, high-frequency whine vibrating from Zero's head-rack, humming right through Adrian's jawbone and into his teeth.
"They're in." Zero's synth-voice stayed dead flat, but the cooling fans inside his chassis redlined, screaming like a dying jet turbine. The heavy metal plating of his rig actually began to shake.
Omega's cyber-hounds. Following the digital breadcrumb trail Lena had deliberately broadcasted, tearing through Zero's physical firewalls with brute-force algorithms.
"What did you do?!" Isabella racked her shotgun with a heavy, metallic clack. Useless against a digital strike, but the cold steel was her only anchor in the room.
"I gave them a lure." Lena's voice echoed in his skull, laced with a manic, glitching glee. "How else do you see who's knocking at the door?"
Thick smoke curled from the dampening patch over Adrian's right eye. The stink of cooking meat filled the tight space. Agony drove deep into his orbit like a rusted ice pick.
"She's back-tracing the hounds' IPs!" Zero's lone mechanical arm blurred over a haptic keyboard, servos whining in protest. "The crazy b***h is using our node as a springboard! She's trying to crack the Advisor's root logic!"
"She'll fry all our brains!" Isabella yelled over the deafening fan noise.
"No. She's hunting the core's true location." Zero froze. The rack's indicator lights snapped from a sickly green to a blinding, angry crimson. "Sector 4 is empty. A decoy. The core isn't there."
"Where?" Adrian ground his teeth, fighting the searing, blinding heat in his eye.
"The memory black market. Blind Joe's deep-storage vault." Zero spun his motorized chair, his faceless rack locking dead onto Adrian. "Lena encrypted the physical coordinates and smuggled them back in the hounds' data stream. But to decrypt it, you need to deep-dive the market's intranet. And your brain is a live grenade right now."
Zero glided to the corner and yanked off a heavy, grease-stained tarp. Beneath it sat a rusted dive chair, choked with thick, pulsing tubes and filled with murky, slimy coolant that smelled like ozone and old copper. Looked like an Inquisition rack wired to a mainframe.
"Strap in," Zero said. "I'll physically sever your motor nerves. Consciousness only. If you get lost in the drift, or the Advisor's Black ICE catches you..."
"You pull my stem." Adrian cut him off.
"Deal."
Adrian didn't hesitate. He shed his jacket and sank into the freezing, viscous coolant. It clung to his skin like oil. Crude neural probes bit into his spine like mechanical leeches, locking onto his vertebrae with a sickening crunch.
"Twelve minutes." Isabella gripped his shoulder, her good eye webbed with red veins. "Past twelve, your spinal fluid boils. I'll watch the monitors."
Adrian nodded. Fished out the brass Zippo. Pressed it hard into her palm, closing her fingers over it.
"If I don't come back, torch it."
Zero threw the heavy main breaker.
Probes punched deep into his nape.
No transition. No buffer.
Reality stripped away. Gravity died. Adrian plummeted into a boundless, freezing data abyss. Cascades of raw, emerald code and warped neon streaks rushed past him in a deafening roar of static.
*"Hold tight, darling."* Lena's voice materialized as a ghost-blue fiber-optic cable, wrapping tight around his consciousness, pulling him down into the dark.
They smashed through the memory market's outer firewall.
---
Chapter 9 Hook
At the absolute bottom of the data abyss, Adrian didn't find code. Didn't find a vault.
He found a door. The chipped, peeling wooden door of the apartment he and Lena had shared three years ago.
Ajar. Muffled sobbing leaked out into the digital void. Lena's crying. And Victoria's ice-cold voice.
"You think you're saving him?" Victoria said. "Look at what's actually inside his head."
Adrian pushed the door open, his virtual hands trembling.
He saw "himself" standing in the center of the dusty living room. An EMP pistol in his hand, the barrel pressed dead against Lena's forehead.
And wearing "his" face... Victoria's flawless mask of indifference.
***
- Writer
