The official announcement came via a mandatory, Academy-wide broadcast. Director Thorne's face appeared on every screen, his expression a mask of grim satisfaction.
"The internal security threat has been neutralized," he stated, his voice a cold, flat baritone. "Through a rigorous and swift investigation, the traitor has been identified and apprehended. Let this serve as a warning. The work we do here is paramount to global security. Betrayal will not be tolerated."
The broadcast then showed the "traitor." It was a junior data analyst from the archives department, a terrified-looking young man with glasses, flanked by two imposing security officers. He looked utterly bewildered, a lamb being led to a slaughter it couldn't comprehend. A scapegoat.
In his lab, Jack Wilson watched the broadcast, a chill running down his spine. He felt a moment of cold relief, followed immediately by a wave of profound disgust. Thorne hadn't found the real traitor; he had simply needed a traitor to restore order and project an aura of control. It was a brutal, efficient, and utterly predictable move.
But Jack knew Thorne. The man was a predator. He would not be satisfied with a scapegoat. The real hunt would now move from the open into the shadows.
For two days, Jack was a model scientist. He attended briefings, ran diagnostics, and submitted flawless reports. He was trying to be invisible, to let the heat die down. But every night, before he slept, he ran a deep-level diagnostic on his own hidden network of backdoors and tripwires within the Academy's system. It was his personal, invisible security grid.
On the third night, his blood ran cold.
On a hidden corner of his private interface, a single, tiny icon, a file he had named "Canary," began to blink. It was a silent alarm, a digital tripwire he had placed on the deepest, most heavily encrypted access point to the raw data files for Project Sentinel. No one should have been able to get near it without him knowing. No one should have even known it existed.
The blinking was slow, steady. It wasn't a brute-force attack. It was the digital equivalent of a master locksmith slowly, carefully, picking a lock. They hadn't just stumbled upon it. They had followed his trail. The scapegoat had been a smokescreen, a diversion to make him feel safe while the real hunters closed in on his scent.
They knew. They might not have his name yet, but they had found his digital lair. It was a matter of hours, maybe minutes, before they broke through the final layer of his defenses and the name 'Jack Wilson' flashed across Thorne's desk.
Panic, cold and sharp, seized him. But his mind, overclocked and enhanced, channeled the panic into pure, cold logic. His espionage was over. His survival was now the only mission.
He slammed his palm down on a hidden panel beneath his desk. "Activate Protocol Zero," he said, his voice a low, steady command.
The lab's ambient lighting shifted from a calm white to a stark, urgent red. On his main screen, a cascade of deletion protocols initiated, a digital firestorm designed to scour his every research file, every private log, every last bit of his life's work from the Academy's servers. He had to destroy his own genius to keep it from their hands.
Simultaneously, across the Academy in a non-critical cryogenics lab three sectors away, a series of coolant valves intentionally malfunctioned, triggering a Level Three containment alarm. A perfect, non-lethal diversion.
DATA WIPE: 45% COMPLETE. SECTOR OMEGA: CONTAINMENT ALARM TRIGGERED.
He grabbed a small, hardened data drive from a hidden compartment—the only physical copy of the Titan's fatal flaw and Thorne's complicity—and shoved it into his pocket. He kicked open a floor-level ventilation grate, the escape route he had planned on his second day here.
The sound of alarms began to blare throughout the facility, not for him, but for his phantom emergency. The hunt was over. The chase had just begun.