Julian Moretti did not breathe the world’s air; he filtered it.
From the glass deck of a villa perched above Lake Geneva, he watched the water—a black mirror reflecting the sterile glow of the financial district. The city’s lights shimmered like veins of gold beneath the Alpine night, but to Julian they were nothing more than nodes in a network waiting to be rewritten.
Behind him, a server tower the size of a coffin hummed with a suppressed thrum. It was the only heartbeat in the room, a machine pulse that had survived the Berlin ruin. The air smelled faintly of ozone and cold steel, sterile and precise, as if the villa itself had been scrubbed of humanity.
On his tablet, a necro-system interface pulsed with red lines across Europe. Dormant accounts fused with ghost identities, weav
