《Dinner with Death》

Chapter 24: The Living Autopsy

The Gene-Vault sat within the jagged ribcage of the Eiger glacier, a cathedral of glass and white carbon fiber that pulsed with a soft, blue luminescence. As the heavy blast doors cycled open, the air that hit my face was minus forty degrees—pure, sharp, and terrifyingly silent. It was the smell of stasis. The smell of a world that refused to rot.

I walked across the floating bridge of frosted glass, the heels of my boots clicking like a countdown. I had shed my blood-stained silk blouse for a clinical, bone-white dress that Julian Vane had sent to the helipad. It felt like wearing a shroud. Beneath the fabric, the bandage on my thigh—the one Anchor had clamped with such brutal care—was a hidden fire, a reminder that I was more than the data points dancing on their monitors.

“Welcome home, Nian,” Julian Vane said. He stood at the center of the atrium, surrounded by a semi-circle of men and women who looked less like board members and more like taxidermists. They were all over eighty, yet their skin had the unnerving, waxen glow of a century’s worth of Aether-Protocol treatments. They were the world’s elite, the gods who lived on the interest of stolen time.

Julian didn't look like a monster. He had the gentle face of a man who spent his weekends gardening, not harvesting children. But in his eyes, I saw the same mathematical hunger I had seen in my father’s.

“You look pale,” Julian murmured, reaching out to brush a stray lock of hair from my forehead. I didn't flinch. I let his cold, dry fingers touch me. I needed him to believe the specimen was broken. “The altitude is difficult without your stabilization treatments. But don't worry. We’ve prepared the primary chamber. We’re going to fix the glitch, Nian. We’re going to make you perfect again.”

“Like my father wanted?” I asked, my voice a hollow echo in the vast, sterile space.

Julian smiled, a thin, paper-cut of a grin. “Your father was a visionary, but he was sentimental. He tried to hide the master key in your heart. He thought love could act as an encryption. He didn't realize that in the L-Network, love is just another variable to be optimized.”

[The Cinema of the Damned]

He led me toward a massive, curved screen that dominated the far wall. Behind us, Anchor followed, his presence a silent, heavy pressure. The board members watched him with disdain; to them, he was just an upgraded shovel, a tool to be discarded once the digging was done.

“Before we begin the recalibration,” Julian said, clicking a button on his tablet. “I think you deserve to see why we do this. Your father’s final testimony.”

The screen flickered to life. The video was grainy, shot in a dark, humid basement—the cupboard in Jalan TK 3/14. My father was there, his face gaunt, his eyes bloodshot. He was holding a younger version of me—perhaps I was four. I was sleeping, my chest rattling with the familiar, labored wheeze of an asthma attack.

“She is the one,” my father’s voice whispered from the speakers, trembling with a mix of awe and terror. “The Protocol has integrated. It’s not just healing her lungs; it’s rewriting her mortality. But it’s too powerful, Julian. If the board gets their hands on the full sequence, they won't just live forever—they’ll turn the rest of humanity into spare parts. I have to lock it. I have to make her the only lock and the only key.”

The video cut to my father looking directly into the camera. “Forgive me, Nian. I didn't give you a life. I gave you a prison. But if you're watching this, it means you've survived long enough to burn it down.”

The screen went black. The silence that followed was suffocating.

“He was a traitor to the future,” Julian sighed, turning back to me. “He locked the immortality sequence behind a biological wall of trauma. We’ve spent nineteen years waiting for you to mature, for your blood to stabilize the code. And now, Nian, we’re going to take it back.”

[The Anatomy of the Kill]

“Lay down, Nian,” Julian said, pointing to a white, levitating table in the center of the room. It was surrounded by robotic arms tipped with diamond-edged needles. “It will be painless. We’re just going to perform a deep-marrow extraction. By morning, you’ll be the savior of the human race.”

I looked at Anchor. He was standing by the main server pillar, his hand resting near the emergency override. He gave me a barely perceptible nod.

I didn't lie down. Instead, I reached into the hidden pocket of my dress and pulled out the black syringe Anchor had given me on the plane—the one filled with my own ‘glitched’ blood and a high-load digital virus.

“I’m not a savior, Julian,” I said, my voice dropping to a lethal, resonant frequency. “And I’m definitely not your specimen.”

Before the security guards could react, I slammed the needle not into myself, but into the primary data-port of the levitating table.

“Anchor! Now!”

The atrium exploded into a cacophony of violence. Anchor didn't draw a gun; he became a storm. In one fluid motion, he ripped the carbon-fiber rib from a security droid and used it to decapitate the nearest guard. The sound was sickening—a wet, metallic crunch that signaled the end of the clinical era.

I didn't run. I stepped toward Julian Vane, who was staring in horror at his tablet as the Aether-Protocol data began to turn red. My virus was eating through their nineteen years of research, fueled by the rage of a girl who had spent a lifetime in a cupboard.

“What have you done?” Julian shrieked, his waxen face contorting into something truly ancient and hideous. “That data is worth trillions! It’s the secret to eternity!”

“Eternity is a long time to spend as a monster,” I hissed. I grabbed the diamond-tipped scalpel from one of the robotic arms.

I didn't kill him instantly. I wanted him to feel the air. I pressed the blade against his throat—the same spot where I used to feel the suffocation.

“Breathe, Julian,” I whispered as the alarms began to wail, a high-pitched scream of a dying god. “Tell me... does the air feel expensive now?”

[The Crimson Thaw]

The Gene-Vault began to shudder. Anchor had triggered the incendiary charges on the cooling systems. The glacier was going to reclaim its own.

Outside the glass walls, the white teeth of the Alps seemed to be closing in. Inside, the board members were screaming—gods reduced to prey, their ageless skin melting under the heat of the impending explosion.

Anchor appeared at my side, his tactical suit covered in the dark, proprietary blood of the L-Network’s elite. He didn't say a word. He just grabbed my hand and began to pull me toward the helipad.

As we ran through the collapsing cathedral of glass, I looked back one last time. The Gene-Vault was a furnace. Nineteen years of my life, my father’s sins, and the L-Network’s greed were all being reduced to ash and steam.

We reached the helipad just as the first glacier fissure opened up beneath the atrium. The roar was deafening—the sound of a world finally, mercifully, ending.

The cold Alpine air hit my lungs, but this time, there was no rattle. No wheeze. No transaction.

“You okay?” Anchor asked as he hauled me into the chopper, his eyes searching mine for the girl he’d found in Kuala Lumpur.

I looked at my hands. They were stained with Julian’s blood and my own. I looked at the burning mountain behind us.

“I’m not okay, Anchor,” I said, as the helicopter lifted off into the freezing, midnight sky. “I’m free. And that’s much, much worse for the rest of them.”