The access card was cold to the touch.
Sleek, metallic, unmarked except for a small embedded chip and a single etched symbol—an infinity loop woven into a crown.
Zayn stared at it like it might explode.
The letter hadn't helped.
> Zayn,
If you're reading this, I am dead. I don't expect your grief—I never earned it. I won't pretend to have been a father. But I have given you something I was never allowed to claim for myself: freedom.
In this world, power is not given. It is taken. And you, Zayn, are the last son of a man who built a kingdom in shadows.
Project SOVEREIGN is now yours. Access the coordinates with the embedded code.
Once inside, decide for yourself what kind of king you wish to become.
—C.D.
Zayn reread the note three more times.
He didn't feel anything at first. No anger. No grief. Just... disbelief. How could a man he'd never met leave behind something that sounded like it came out of a spy novel?
Still, the card was real.
The letter was real.
And when he plugged the access chip into his ancient laptop and decrypted the string of code included, the screen blinked once—then displayed a map.
Coordinates.
A storage facility.
On the outskirts of Eastbrook.
He stared at the screen for a full minute before quietly whispering to himself:
> "This is insane."
But then he looked around the room—at the cracked walls, the leaking ceiling, the bare mattress. Insanity, he thought, was waking up here every day and pretending it would change.
So, at 2:13 a.m., with nothing but a worn-out hoodie, a backpack, and a half-charged phone, Zayn left his apartment and walked five miles in the freezing rain.
---
The facility was surrounded by chain-link fencing, topped with rusted barbed wire. A crooked sign read "BROOKSIDE STORAGE – UNITS 1-1000."
Zayn stood outside the locked gate, staring at the keypad. He didn't have a code.
But when he pulled the access card from his pocket and held it near the rusted scanner, the light blinked green.
Click.
The gate swung open.
What the hell…
The map had pointed him to Unit 709.
He walked in silence, boots slapping against puddles, the hum of broken security lights flickering overhead.
When he reached the door marked 709, he expected a regular roll-up garage. Maybe some boxes. An old car.
But what greeted him was something else entirely.
The metal door recognized the chip and hissed open like something out of a science fiction movie. Inside was a chamber of smooth black walls, lit from above by pale, blue-white lights that glowed without bulbs. There were no boxes. No furniture.
Just a single pedestal.
And on it—an object that looked like it didn't belong in this century.
It was a small black cube. Floating. Humming.
A voice—soft, feminine, and artificial—spoke as soon as Zayn stepped inside.
> "Identity confirmed. Welcome, Zayn Thorne.
You are now the Administrator of SOVEREIGN."
---
His breath caught.
"I don't understand."
> "You will."
He stepped closer. The cube's surface rippled like water, revealing flashes of code, diagrams, maps, and… faces. Names. CEOs. Government officials. Bank records. Surveillance grids. Every major system—financial, political, digital—seemed to be cataloged within this thing.
He reached out.
The moment his fingers touched the cube, a rush of data flooded his mind. Not just visuals. Experiences. Years of his father's encrypted records. Logins. Fail-safes. Blueprints. Prototypes. The architecture of something massive.
Zayn staggered backward.
> "SOVEREIGN is a legacy initiative," the voice explained calmly. "An autonomous intelligence and surveillance platform originally designed by Caspian Drake. Intended to monitor and influence the global structure through real-time predictive control."
"In English," Zayn gasped, "what is this thing?"
> "SOVEREIGN is power. Absolute power."
---
He spent hours inside the unit, scrolling through the system's capabilities.
Control over black market trading algorithms.
Access to global security footage.
AI-enhanced behavioral prediction.
Financial disruptions with a single keystroke.
Even dossiers on major players in the tech world—many of whom had no idea they were already compromised.
The cube—SOVEREIGN—wasn't just a weapon.
It was a throne.
And now he was sitting in it.
But the system wasn't finished. It needed a human interface. Someone who could activate the full protocol. Someone whose digital mind could fuse with the AI's neural net.
Zayn.
He sat in the sterile silence of the chamber, the weight of his new inheritance pressing on his chest.
He thought of every sleepless night.
Every job he never got.
Every smirk from a gatekeeper who told him he'd never be enough.
Every stolen code.
Every insult.
Every scar.
And slowly, something inside him shifted.
---
Zayn Thorne had spent his entire life apologizing for existing.
But not anymore.
He looked at the cube and whispered, not to it—but to the version of himself that had been broken, spat on, ignored.
> "They built the world to keep people like me out.
I'm going to burn it down from the inside."