The air in the abandoned maintenance access hatch was stagnant, heavy with the scent of recycled ozone and damp metallic decay. Zeta sat hunched over his portable terminal, the blue luminescence casting sharp, angular shadows across his face. He had spent the last several hours scrubbing the data he recovered from the encrypted floppy disk, compartmentalizing the schematics for Project Singularity into secure, fragmented nodes within his own neural memory. He was no longer just protecting information; he was building a weapon.
His gaze drifted to the pair of glasses he had salvaged from a bin in the lower sector. They were standard issue, bulky and utilitarian, designed for sight correction and basic augmented reality displays used by library clerks. To anyone else, they were obsolete j
