The air in the Ghost Level changed after Damian's trip into the machine. Before, there had been a desperate, flickering hope. Now, it was a forge—hot, focused, and dangerous. They had a name. SR-ZERO. The Origin Server. A physical place they could break.
The problem was, breaking in was a suicide mission.
Kael gathered everyone around a crude map etched onto a salvaged sheet of metal. It was a patchwork of stolen data and guesses, but the new information from Elara—just thinking her name sent a fresh wave of pain and wonder through Damian—had filled in a crucial blank. A secret elevator shaft, not on any public schematic, running like a spine from Thorne's private lab straight down to SR-ZERO.
"It's a needle's eye," Kael said, her finger tracing the route. "Heavily shielded. Biometric locks, motion sensors, the works. We can't blast our way in. We have to slip through."
"So how do we do that?" a woman named Lin asked, her arms crossed. "Send a polite request?"
"We use their own system against them," Damian heard himself say. The idea formed even as he spoke. All eyes turned to him. "My identity signature. The Archivist—the part that's still Elara—recognized me. It's a flaw in their security. Thorne uses that elevator. If we can spoof her biometrics, and use my neural signature as a backdoor passkey… the system might just let us in."
Jax let out a low whistle. "Spoof Thorne's biometrics? Kid, that's not picking a lock. That's asking the warden for the keys and a map to the armory."
"We have to try," Damian said, his voice harder than he expected. "I'm not spending the rest of my life, however short it is, down here in the dark. And I'm not letting her spend eternity as a ghost in that machine."
The plan was simple in its insanity. A small team—Kael, Jax, and Damian—would navigate the treacherous under-levels to the base of the secret shaft. Jax, their miracle worker, had been hoarding a treasure: a portable biometric scanner he'd rebuilt from scrap, designed to copy and replicate print, retinal, and voice data. They just needed a recent sample from Aris Thorne.
Getting it meant going back up into the light. Back into the lion's den.
---
The climb out of the Ghost Level was worse than the descent. Every rung of the ladder felt like a step towards his own execution. Damian's new body, for all its perfection, was trembling with a fatigue that was purely human. When they finally slipped through a loose vent cover into a silent, clean service corridor on a mid-level, the sterile air felt alien and threatening.
They moved like shadows, Kael leading with a predator's grace, Jax huffing slightly behind Damian. Their target was Thorne's private lab, one level below her official office. According to the fragmented data, she spent her most sensitive hours there, communing with her creation.
They found a maintenance closet with a conduit that ran directly behind the lab's main terminal. Jax went to work, his fingers a blur as he spliced wires and tapped into the internal feed. A small screen flickered to life, showing a live, fish-eye view of the lab.
And there she was.
Aris Thorne stood before a large holographic display, her back to them. The display showed a shimmering, double-helix structure that Damian knew, with a sickening certainty, was a visual representation of a human consciousness. His consciousness. She was studying it, her head tilted, like a sculptor assessing a block of marble.
"That's her," Damian whispered, his throat tight.
"We need her to use the terminal," Jax murmured, his eyes glued to the screen. "The scanner needs a direct input. A voice command, a retinal scan, something."
They watched, barely breathing. Minutes stretched into an eternity. She paced, she manipulated the hologram, she made notes on a data-slate. But she didn't go near the main console.
Come on, Damian thought, desperation curdling in his gut. Just turn around. Just touch the screen.
And then, as if she'd heard him, she did. She turned and walked directly towards the terminal. Damian's heart hammered against his ribs. This was it.
But her face… it was wrong. Her usual mask of calm control was gone. She looked agitated. Angry. She slammed her hand on the console, and her voice, sharp and clear, came through the audio feed Jax had patched.
"Archivist. Run predictive analysis on Subject Grey, Version 3.1. Probability of successful re-integration following a Level Five neural scrub."
The androgynous voice of the Archivist filled the lab. "Analysis complete. Probability is less than 2%. Significant cognitive fragmentation is predicted. Risk of catastrophic engramatic collapse."
Thorne's shoulders slumped. "And the alternative?"
"The only stable alternative is full decommissioning. The subject represents an unacceptable systemic risk."
She was done trying to fix him. She was going to have him wiped. Deleted. The cold finality of it should have terrified Damian, but all he felt was a hot, clean rage. It was the same rage V2.0 must have felt. The same rage that had gotten him killed.
"Jax, now!" Kael hissed.
Jax was already working, his scanner humming as it recorded Thorne's retinal pattern from the console's login, her voice print from the command, the unique electrical signature of her hand on the interface plate. The light on his device blinked from red to a steady, solid green.
"Got it," he breathed. "We have her key."
At that exact moment, Thorne turned her head slightly, her eyes glancing towards a secondary security monitor. A monitor that, they realized with a jolt of pure horror, must have shown the unauthorized data access from the conduit they were in.
Her eyes widened. She knew.
"Go!" Kael barked.
They didn't wait. They scrambled out of the closet and ran, not caring about stealth anymore, only speed. Alarms began to blare behind them, but they were the old, claxon-style alarms of the service levels, slow and ponderous. They had a head start.
They plunged back into the maze of lower levels, their footsteps echoing in the metal corridors. The route to the secret elevator shaft was a nightmare of narrow ledges and precarious climbs, but fear was a powerful fuel. Finally, they stood before it: a seamless, brushed-metal door, indistinguishable from the wall around it except for a single, nearly invisible keypad and a biometric plate.
"This is it," Jax said, his hands shaking as he connected his scanner to the plate. He initiated the sequence. A light on the panel scanned the fabricated print, a laser flickered for the retinal data.
For a heart-stopping second, nothing happened.
Then, with a soft, hydraulic sigh, the door slid open, revealing a small, pristine elevator car.
They piled in. There were no buttons. The second the door closed, it simply began to descend, smooth and silent. The three of them stood there, panting, surrounded by their own reflection in the polished walls. They had done it. They were going to the heart of the beast.
The elevator stopped. The door opened.
The room beyond was small, cold, and dark. The only light came from a single, central column of glowing processing units, stacked from floor to ceiling, pulsing with a soft, blue light. The Origin Server. Wires and cables snaked from it like veins, connecting to a single, high-backed chair.
And sitting in that chair, waiting for them, was Aris Thorne.
She stood up slowly, turning to face them. She didn't look surprised. She looked disappointed.
"I had hoped for more time," she said, her voice echoing softly in the chamber. She looked directly at Damian. "I was so close to perfecting you, Damian. Version 1.0 was so flawed, so fragile. But you… you had such potential."
The words landed like a physical blow. Version 1.0.
She wasn't talking about the man in the storage cabinets. She was talking about the Original. The first Damian Grey. The man whose life he thought he was continuing.
"What are you talking about?" Damian whispered, the world tilting on its axis.
Aris Thorne smiled, a small, sad thing. "You didn't think you were the first attempt, did you? The original Damian Grey died in a car accident sixty years ago. A complete, unrecoverable neural wipe. You, all of you, are my creation. My attempt to rebuild a man from scraps of memory and donated code. You were never a continuation. You are, and always have been, Project Chimera."