Chapter 14: The AI Priest's Secret
602 Words
Nutrient fluid hissed with micro-bubbles.
Hundreds of raw, crimson human brains. Pulsing in the transparent pedestal like canned, grotesque jellyfish. Every electrode jacked into a brainstem flickered with ghost-blue data glints.
Isabella clamped a hand over her mouth, spun around, and dry-heaved a splash of bile.
Adrian didn't flinch. His lone left eye locked onto the nearest brain. Unwashed scraps of arachnoid membrane still clung to the sulci.
*"It hurts..."* Lena's voice curled into a tight ball in his skull, vibrating with suffocating resonance. *"They're being flayed alive... Adrian, their consciousness is still in there. They're screaming."*
"Shut up." Adrian bit through his tongue, using the copper tang of blood to drown out the phantom pain in his brain.
He drew his pulse pistol, barrel dead on the pedestal's master control panel. "Cover me, Isabella. I'm going to see where this freak show is routing its data."
"Are you insane? Touching that panel will trip the Shepherd's alarms!" Isabella wiped the bile from her chin, racking her shotgun.
"Already tripped."
The words barely left his mouth before the ten-meter holo-Jesus froze.
Ghost-blue flared into blinding, bloody crimson. The cathedral's temperature plummeted. The air choked with the acrid stench of high-concentration ozone.
**"Lost lamb. Why do you defile the altar?"**
The voice didn't bleed from speakers. It detonated directly across their auditory nerves. Macro. Ice-cold. Echoing with the grind of raw metal.
The AI Priest.
From the mezzanine shadows came the tooth-aching screech of mechanical joints. Six heavy industrial drones, originally rigged for the holo-projectors, deployed titanium cutting blades from their underbellies. Skittering down the pillars like massive metal spiders.
"Fire!"
Isabella pulled the trigger. Buckshot pulverized the lead drone's optical sensor, but momentum carried it forward. The cutting blade grazed Adrian's shoulder, slicing the rad-cloak and spraying a mist of blood.
Adrian didn't dodge. Using the two seconds Isabella bought him, his left hand ripped the neural shunt from his nape and jammed it brutally into the pedestal's root slot.
*BOOM.*
Consciousness violently dragged into the data torrent.
No virtual courtyards. No code labyrinths. Just a boundless, crimson ocean woven from pure, unadulterated agony.
Adrian saw it.
The Shepherd wasn't harvesting hashrate. It was distilling. Using the worshippers' brains as bio-filters, it stripped the undercity's memories of absolute despair, terror, and pain, compressing them into high-yield "agony chips."
And the data stream for these chips had only one destination coordinate.
Sub-level 5. The Memory Market. Blind Joe's Colosseum.
"They're pushing pain like narcotics..." Adrian muttered in the physical world, black blood weeping from his nostrils.
*"Grab the cipher! Jack out!"* Lena shrieked.
Adrian lunged through the data ocean, clamped his digital grip onto the encrypted packet holding the Market's physical access credentials, and ripped the shunt free.
All six drones lunged at once.
"Move!" Adrian grabbed Isabella, shoulder-checking through the lead-stained glass on the cathedral's flank, tumbling out into the sewage pipes.
The AI Priest's ice-cold echo chased them: **"The sacrament is prepared. Awaiting your sacrifice, Test Subject 04."**
They sprinted through the stinking pipes until the cathedral's hum faded to dead silence.
Isabella slumped against the pipe wall, chest heaving, staring at the black access cipher Adrian had materialized from the data stream.
"We got the ticket to the Market." Her voice shook. "But Adrian... you're bleeding."
Adrian wiped his face. His hand came away painted in thick, black-crimson blood.
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Chapter 15 Hook
Adrian uncurled his palm.
On the black cipher, a line of faint, luminescent text was bleeding to the surface.
Not Blind Joe's glyph.
Isabella's ripperdoc license number.
*"Sacrifice confirmed,"* the cipher purred in a faint synth-voice.
***
- Writer
