PART 1: The Ascent
Swiss Alps — October 25, 2025 // 05:42 a.m.
Altitude: 2,800 meters
Snow whipped sideways through the dawn haze, fine as powdered glass.
Every breath bit the lungs. Every step crunched louder than the wind.
Jack moved with his shoulders hunched, coat zipped high, duffel bouncing at his hip. Evelyn followed just behind, her frame still stiff from the gunshot but steady. Izzy led them up the final curve of the ridge, boots striking stone with a soldier's rhythm.
The route had no trail markers. No ski paths. Just a dead channel in an encrypted file and coordinates cross-referenced against a 1981 NATO satellite map — stitched into Evelyn's terminal like a ghost trace.
Izzy stopped as the terrain leveled.
Ahead of them: a concrete outcropping half-consumed by snow and moss. Faded red warning text in German and French lined the rusted hatch door.
The letters had nearly worn away, but Jack could still make out:
"Biometric Entry Only. Unauthorized Access is Lethal."
Evelyn reached the access panel.
Two slots. One retinal. One palm.
"No keypads?" Jack asked.
"Not for something like this," Izzy said.
She stepped closer, jaw tight.
"I remember this place," she muttered. "We flagged it after the '03 budget shift. Quiet funding, no oversight. Supposed to be AI logistics research. But the heat signature said otherwise."
Jack glanced sideways. "You briefed on it?"
"I briefed against it. And I lost."
Evelyn gestured to the reader.
Jack hesitated.
Then pulled out the small velvet box — the one Leah used to store her old school ID and silver chain. From it, he removed a strip of adhesive biometric film.
"She gave this to me two years ago," Jack said. "Said it was a prank toy. Print-saver."
He pressed it gently to the scanner.
The light blinked once. Then again.
Green.
The hatch hissed open.
Cold air spilled out. Not fresh — preserved. Sterile and dry, like stepping into a vault of old secrets and bad decisions.
They stepped inside.
Behind them, the door sealed shut.
PART 2: St. Falco
The hallway descended in slow, brutal spirals — walls of reinforced steel and ceramic tiling, faintly luminous under ancient emergency lights that flickered to life as they passed.
Stale air.
No alarms.
No signs of breach.
Just cold. Deep, steady cold, like the building had been holding its breath for decades.
They moved past doors labeled with nothing but numbers and colored lines. Red. Then black. Then nothing at all.
At the bottom — Sublevel 3 — a final corridor led them to a wide blast door with a hand-painted label:
TETHER VAULT CORE
Evelyn keyed in a universal override from the Berlin drive. The door didn't open fast — it groaned, then retracted like a reluctant truth.
Inside:
A concrete cathedral of silence.
Paper files sealed in climate cubes.
Magnetic tape arrays hung from suspended racks.
An entire wall of locked cryo-vaults lined the far side — each labeled:
• CANDIDATE ZERO – TERMINATED
• CANDIDATE TWO – NULL RESPONSE
• CANDIDATE FIVE – EXPIRED MID-SYNC
• CANDIDATE SEVEN – FILE CORRUPTED
• CANDIDATE SIX – MISSING
• CANDIDATE EIGHT – LIVE INDEX ASSIGNED
That last one caught Jack's eye.
"Eight?"
Evelyn was already typing at a nearby console.
She pulled up an internal log tree. The root folder: NERA-V0
She clicked it.
A schematic appeared — a neural lattice, digital synaptic architecture. It was labeled as a child's neural map, age seven. Baseline intelligence score above the mean. DNA origin redacted.
Project Notes:
"NERA-V0 entered recursive instability during third-layer self-awareness loop. Consciousness collapsed. Data integrity failed at 61%."
"Solution recommended: controlled genomic variant with tighter emotional lockstep. V1 construction greenlit."
Izzy stepped forward.
"Where's V1?"
Evelyn clicked again.
Nothing.
No folder. No log.
Just a single residual index field at the bottom:
NERA-V1 (LOCATION: EXTERNAL INSTANCE / ASSET CODE L-R-NERA)
Jack stared at it.
L-R. Leah Rourke.
Candidate Eight hadn't just survived.
She had become the project.
PART 3: The Experiment
The observation room was buried in dust.
Old terminals lined the wall, half-functional and humming faintly now that Evelyn had rebooted the grid. Most of the monitors were blank, but one console blinked — a restored video cache loading piece by piece from the archival buffer.
Evelyn didn't speak as she worked. Just moved with quiet precision, eyes flicking from drive to screen to backup copy.
Jack stood behind her, silent.
Izzy paced near the back, arms folded, watching the lights stutter along the rack lines like a breathing machine stalling.
Then, without fanfare, the screen bloomed to life.
Grainy.
Muted color.
A timestamp flickered in the corner: April 12, 2014 // 13:09 GMT
Inside the video: a sterile white room. Glass walls. Foam flooring.
And a little girl — maybe seven — standing barefoot in a white jumpsuit, her hair clipped short, eyes distant and unblinking.
She faced a man seated across the room, behind a reinforced desk.
Arthur Rourke.
Younger. Trimmed beard. A clipboard on his lap and zero warmth in his gaze.
He spoke slowly.
"We're going to run the recursive test again."
The child didn't answer.
Arthur didn't seem to care.
"You will remember this conversation in the next cycle. If you do not, we'll assume neurological collapse."
The girl blinked.
"Do I have a name?"
Arthur didn't look up from his clipboard.
"You are NERA-V1."
A long pause.
Then: "Was there a NERA-V0?"
Arthur answered without hesitation.
"She failed."
Another pause. Then, the girl: "Was she real?"
Arthur's pen scratched a line on the clipboard.
"Real enough to collapse."
Jack had stopped breathing.
His hand was clenched at his side, knuckles white.
On the screen, Arthur leaned forward slightly.
"You don't need a mother. You need containment. You are not a girl. You are a system."
Izzy turned away.
Evelyn hit pause.
The screen froze — Leah's young face locked mid-blink, eyes too old for a child that size.
No one said anything for a long time.
Then Jack whispered, "I was never protecting her, was I?"
No one answered.
Because no one could.
PART 4: Fracture
The wind had picked up.
High on the ridge, where the trees thinned and the snow crusted into hard sheets, Jack stood with his back to the vault entrance and his face to the edge.
He'd thrown up twice already. Once in the snow. Once in the run-off ditch near the perimeter camera. He'd wiped his mouth with the inside of his coat and then just stood there — cold air burning his throat, pulse still hammering.
The mountains were quiet.
Unfairly beautiful.
He stared at them the way someone stares at a cliff edge, not because they want to jump — but because they can't remember why they wouldn't.
Footsteps crunched behind him.
Izzy didn't say anything. Just stood a few feet back, hands in her coat pockets, letting the silence do the talking.
Jack spoke first. Voice quiet. Not cracked — just empty.
"She was seven."
Izzy didn't move.
Jack shook his head. "Seven years old and already tagged like a component."
"She was more than a component," Izzy said. "That's why she survived."
Jack let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh.
"I used to tell her bedtime stories. Made up a whole world for her. Said the stars had names, and if she could name them all, she'd get to pick her own one day."
Izzy closed her eyes.
Jack turned toward her slowly.
"Did I ever have a daughter," he asked, "or just a reason to pretend I was worth saving?"
Izzy stepped forward.
She didn't give him a speech. Didn't wrap it in hope. Just laid a hand on his shoulder and let the weight of it hold.
"No one makes it through life clean," she said. "The best you get is direction. She gave you that."
Jack looked at her — eyes hollow, but no longer lost.
He nodded once.
Then said nothing else.
PART 5: The Real Key
Southbound Cargo Rail – October 25, 2025 // 22:43 p.m.
Route: Lausanne to Lyon
The boxcar rocked in slow, heavy pulses — a deep rhythmic clunk every fifteen seconds as they passed over old junctions.
Old steel. Bolted benches. A generator hum underfoot that gave the floor a subtle, bone-deep vibration.
Evelyn sat on a padded crate hunched over her tablet, screen dimmed, stylus twitching through nested code trees pulled from the recovered NERA files. Jack sat across from her, eyes closed, pretending to sleep with one hand curled near the butt of his pistol. Izzy stood by the door, arms folded, watching the tree line blur past the armored viewing panel. A thin veil of condensation clung to the glass, catching brief reflections of passing lights. Shadows coiled along the ridgelines beyond — restless and close. She didn't look away for long. The kind of quiet they were riding through? It never lasted.
The decrypted vault data was mostly garbage. Fragmented index shards, leftover memory routines, legacy system logs.
But then Evelyn found the embedded logic string.
It was hidden inside a dead branch of the NERA.SED2 chain — one that didn't trigger when opened by force. Only when mirrored through the V1 protocol.
She ran the simulation.
The output wasn't long.
Just a line of code.
And a timestamp.
She frowned.
Tapped it again.
Same result.
She leaned toward Izzy. "You'll want to hear this."
Jack stirred as Izzy crossed the car.
Evelyn rotated the screen. Her voice was flat. Controlled.
"This line only runs if Leah's biometric data flatlines. Meaning if she dies—"
The code filled the screen in plain English:
IF SUBJECT L-R-NERA TERMINATES, INITIATE NERA.SED2 RECOVERY
STATUS: ACTIVE FAILSAFE
CONTAINMENT OVERRIDE: GLOBAL
Izzy read it twice.
Then looked at her. "Recovery of what?"
Evelyn didn't answer right away.
Then softly: "That's just it. I don't think NERA was meant to die."
Jack looked between them. His voice low.
"Failsafe for what?"
No one had an answer.
But the sound of the train didn't seem as quiet anymore.