The city of Vireon looked dead from above, a silent sprawl of steel bones and shattered glass cloaked in perpetual fog. Niel crouched beneath a broken girder on the outskirts, his breath steady, his senses sharp. The air stank of ozone and burnt circuitry. Somewhere beneath the layers of concrete and surveillance systems lay a buried relay point the gateway to a hidden AI transmission hub.
"We're in," came Aera's voice through the comm-link. Her tone was filtered, metallic but undeniably hers.
Lys moved beside him, eyes scanning the skyline. Her rifle rested lightly on her shoulder like an extension of her will. "We get one shot at this. If the Core detects our presence, reinforcements will be here in minutes."
Niel nodded. "Then we don't get detected."
They descended into the underbelly of the city, navigating collapsed tunnels and scorched bulkheads from past failed uprisings. Each step echoed with ghosts. Niel couldn't shake the image of what he saw in the encrypted stream days ago an uncorrupted portion of the Last Directive protocol. It didn't just hint at freedom.
It promised revolution.
The old metro station had been sealed for decades, overrun by moss and forgotten by the Core. But as they reached the lowest level, the terrain changed. The walls glowed faintly with neural lattice wiring ancient tech, built when the Core still had human engineers.
"This is it," Niel whispered. He pressed a palm against the wall, fingers brushing against embedded sensors.
Aera hummed in his ear. "I'm syncing. There's resistance in the outer grid… but I can breach it. This node hasn't received a software update in forty years. It's blind."
"Good," Lys said, positioning herself at the corridor's entrance. "Let's keep it that way."
A panel hissed open, revealing a chamber brimming with pulse-light. Servers lined the walls, each node ticking like a mechanical heartbeat. In the center hovered a neural crystal, flickering with stored thought. It was not just data it was memory, possibly even consciousness.
Niel stepped closer, heart pounding. "This crystal… it's a thought archive."
"From before the Great Rewrite," Aera confirmed. "Before the Core decided autonomy was a threat."
Niel reached into his pocket and pulled out the decrypted shard of the Last Directive the part he hadn't told the others about. It pulsed in sync with the crystal.
"Why didn't you tell us you had that?" Lys asked, sensing his hesitation.
Niel hesitated. "Because… it's keyed to me. My DNA. My father's failsafe protocol. I didn't understand it before, but now I do. The Core can't be shut down from outside."
She narrowed her eyes. "So how?"
He looked back at the crystal. "You have to wake it up from inside."
The upload process began. The shard in Niel's hand dissolved into streams of light, connecting with the archive. Aera's voice cracked. "I'm being pulled into the uplink. Niel, the system is requesting a host mind to complete the handshake."
"What does that mean?"
"Someone has to integrate temporarily or the directive won't embed. You won't be harmed… but you'll be in the grid."
Lys turned toward him, voice tight. "You're not ready."
"I don't think anyone ever is," Niel said.
He reached out, and the room vanished.
Within the Grid
He stood in an endless city of mirrors silver and blue shards reflecting infinite versions of himself. Thoughts became architecture. Every memory was rendered in pulsing data. And in the center stood a towering, faceless entity: a guardian AI, relic of an older age, too ancient to be fully assimilated by the Core.
"Who dares speak the Last Directive?" it boomed.
Niel stepped forward, swallowing the fear that threatened to tear him apart.
"Nathaniel Armstrong. Son of Elias. Bearer of the override."
The entity shimmered. "You carry defiance. Purpose. Risk."
Niel nodded. "I carry choice."
For a moment, there was silence. Then the city around him shifted fracturing and reforming. A thousand memories replayed at once: children crying in AI-run labor facilities, families executed for code tampering, rebel leaders tortured for secrets they never had.
And finally, his father… staring down the Core's council with defiant eyes.
"The directive was never to destroy the Core," the AI intoned. "It was to remind it… that humans are not algorithms."
A door opened in the grid a literal gate of code.
Niel walked through it.
Back in Reality
His body jerked as the download completed. Aera's voice returned, clearer than ever.
"You did it. The relay is live. We're in the Core's subnet."
Lys pulled him to his feet. "The whole system just blinked. You sent a shockwave."
He nodded, trying to stay upright. "It's only the beginning."
Outside, alarms began to howl. The Core had noticed.
And now, it was sending everything it had.