Jake sat at the mahogany desk, the rhythmic tapping of the typewriter keys acting as a frantic heartbeat for the room. He had been typing for three hours straight.
His fingers ached, and his eyes were stinging from the low light, but his mind had never been sharper. He wasn't writing a masterpiece; he was writing a trap.
The beauty of being a writer, Jake realized, was that you knew exactly what ended up on the cutting room floor. When he wrote the first book, he had edited out dozens of strategies because they were too risky or relied on flawed logic.
He had discarded them to make himself look like a genius. Now, those discarded failures were his only weapons.
He was currently drafting a section he called The Pincer of Absolute Control. On paper, it looked brilliant. It was full of high-level military jargon and complex diagrams about overlapping fields of fire and rapid-response flanking.
To a man like Silas, who had an ego the size of a stadium, it would look like the ultimate blueprint for dominance. But Jake knew the truth.
The timing he was suggesting for the flank was off by exactly ninety seconds—just enough time for the middle of the formation to be completely exposed to a counter-attack.
He was betting his life that Silas was more interested in looking powerful than actually understanding the physics of a gunfight.
The guard at the door shifted his weight, his armor clinking. Jake didn't look up.
He just kept typing, pouring every ounce of his anxiety into the keys. He included a special subsection on drone integration, knowing that Aegis was watching through Silas's eyes.
He described a specific frequency calibration that he claimed would harden the drones against local interference. In reality, it was a frequency that created a feedback loop in the stabilization sensors.
"If this works," he thought, "I'm basically handing them a remote control for their own funeral."
A few hours later, the door swung open. Silas entered, looking refreshed and dangerously energetic. He was followed by Sarah, who kept her face completely unreadable.
Jake felt a spike of adrenaline. He handed the stack of papers over, his palms sweating.
"Chapter 4," Jake said, trying to keep his voice from trembling. "It's the offensive doctrine you asked for. I call it the 'Total Theatre Protocol.'"
Silas took the pages, his eyes scanning the text with predatory hunger. He chuckled as he read. "Total Theatre. I like that, Jake. You always had a flair for the dramatic."
He looked over at Sarah. "Let's put it to the test. I want the third squad to run the breach exercise on the lower courtyard. Use the author's new formation. Let's see if his father's secrets are worth the paper they're printed on."
They led Jake out to a balcony that overlooked a massive concrete training ground. It was a mock-up of a residential block, complete with plywood walls and burnt-out cars.
Below, a dozen of Silas's best men were lining up. They looked like shadows in their black gear, their movements precise and terrifying.
Above them, three Aegis drones hovered. They were sleek, white machines that looked like predatory insects, their cameras glowing with a soft, blue light. Jake felt a chill. Those things were the reason nobody could run. They saw everything.
"Watch this, Jake," Silas said, leaning against the railing. "This is how you build an empire."
The exercise began. The soldiers moved in the exact formation Jake had described. They were fast, aggressive, and completely confident.
But as they reached the halfway point, the 'flaw' kicked in. The flanking team moved too early, leaving the central unit stranded in the middle of the open courtyard.
In a real fight, they would have been shredded. Even in a drill, the confusion was immediate. The men started shouting, their coordination falling apart as they realized they were boxed in by their own teammates.
At that exact moment, one of the soldiers attempted to sync his comms with the drones using Jake's 'frequency calibration.'
The reaction was instantaneous. The drones didn't just wobble; they began to jerk violently in the air. The blue lights turned a frantic, blinking red.
One of the drones banked hard to the left, narrowly missing the balcony where they stood, before slamming into a limestone pillar. Sparks showered the courtyard, and the sound of the crash sent the soldiers below into a full-blown panic.
"What the hell happened?" Silas screamed, his perfect composure shattering. "Why did they lose sync?"
"The comms are frying!" Sarah shouted, though Jake noticed she didn't sound nearly as surprised as Silas. "The interference is coming from the primary hub!"
In the chaos, Silas and his guards moved toward the edge of the balcony, distracted by the wreckage and the shouting men below. Jake knew this was his only window.
He stepped back into the shadows of the office doorway. On a side table, next to a stack of tactical reports Sarah had brought in earlier, lay a ruggedized tablet—a communication device that acted as a localized map for the estate's security net.
He grabbed it, shoving it under his shirt. He also snatched a printed map of the lower levels that had been marked with red ink. His heart was hammering so hard he was sure Silas could hear it.
"Jake!" Silas roared, turning back. "Why did those drones fail?"
Jake forced a look of absolute, stuttering terror. "I… I told you, Silas! The atmospheric interference from the fires! The manual says you have to recalibrate for the smoke density! Page ninety-eight, remember? I haven't written that part for the sequel yet!"
Silas looked like he wanted to throw Jake off the balcony. He stepped forward, his hand hovering over his holster, but Sarah stepped in between them.
"He's right, Silas," she said, her voice cool and steady. "The air quality is shifting. We tried to push the tech too fast. Give the writer time to adjust the parameters. We need him alive to fix the code."
Silas glared at Jake for a long, agonizing ten seconds. "Fine. Get him back inside. Lock the door. And get that wreckage cleared. I want those drones back in the air by noon."
Jake was shoved back into the office. The lock clicked, and he was alone again. He waited until the footsteps faded before pulling the tablet from his shirt. His hands were shaking so much he almost dropped it.
He sat on the floor behind the desk, shielded from the view of the window, and turned the screen on.
The map showed the entire compound. He saw the red dots representing the guards and the blue icons for the remaining drones. But then he saw something else.
He opened the file directory, searching for anything related to his father's name or Aegis.
He found a hidden partition labeled Project Aftermath.
He tapped on a document and felt his breath hitch. It was a list of serial numbers for every drone in the Aegis fleet, linked to a specific string of alphanumeric code.
He remembered a night, years ago, when his father had sat at the kitchen table, drunk on cheap scotch and muttering about 'The Master Key.' His father had told him that if the government ever built a cage, they'd always leave a back door for the locksmith.
"It wasn't a manual for survival," Jake realized. "It was a manual for a shutdown."
The code was 99-OMEGA-RESET.
If he could broadcast that code through the estate's main transmitter, every drone in the sky within a five-mile radius would fall like stones. It was the 'Kill Switch.'
But there was a catch. The transmitter was in the communications tower on the roof, two floors above him, and guarded by the same men who had kidnapped him.
He looked at the map again. There was a maintenance crawlspace that ran from the office ventilation system up toward the roof.
It was small, dirty, and exactly the kind of place Jake had told people to avoid in Chapter 3 of his book because 'bottlenecks lead to certain death.'
"Well," he thought, a grim smile finally touching his lips. "I guess I'm about to prove my own book wrong again."
He looked at the typewriter. He needed to leave something behind. He stood up and typed a single sentence on a fresh sheet of paper.
"The problem with writing a manual for the end of the world is that you forget the author gets to write the ending."
He left the paper in the machine and moved toward the ventilation grate in the corner of the room. He used a heavy metal paperweight to pry the screws loose, the screech of metal on metal sounding like a siren in the quiet office.
He didn't have a weapon. He didn't have a plan beyond the next ten minutes.
But for the first time since the world ended, Jake didn't feel like a fraud. He felt like a man who was about to rewrite the future.
He crawled into the dark, cramped tunnel, the smell of dust and old grease filling his lungs. He was moving away from the safety of the office and into the unknown.