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She drew a slow breath.
“It was a joint training evaluation, DoD, JSOC, and OrdoTech,” she said, voice flat.
“Secure site east of Fallon, Nevada. Concrete bunkers. Bad signal. It wasn’t supposed to be live fire. Just a simulation. Human-supervised.” She hesitated. Just a second. “OrdoTech’s exclusive, state-of-the-art artificial intelligence. Their meal ticket. Stunning capability. Designed to think faster than any human.”
Nash’s voice broke through the memory, soft, warm. "Even you?"
She looked at him then. Her eyes went tender for a breath, barely a second, but the ache lingered. "Even me," she whispered. Her gaze dropped away, the moment gone. "GRAVITY," she said. "Guided Response Autonomous Variable Intelligence Tactical Yield."
Nash glanced at her again. Her voice was steady. But her hands were clenched in her lap now. White-knuckled.
“There were six of us embedded at the site,” she continued. “Two SEALs, they were the muscle. Commander Ray Castillo and Petty Officer Second Class Kyle Danner. Young. Danner had just earned his trident the month before.” Her voice dipped there. Tight. “We called him Baby SEAL.”
Nash’s throat burned.
She kept going.
“There was a CIA systems liaison, Mira Holt. Senior. Brilliant. Cutthroat as hell. She ran black-box validations and trusted the AI too much. Colonel Davis Lin from the DoD, oversight, a career guy, who followed protocol to a fault.” She paused, eyes flicking to the trees. “My supervisor was Gordon Trask. NSA crossover. Technically senior to me, but he didn’t understand the new adaptive code OrdoTech was using. They’d tapped NCIS and brought me in to interpret the compiler logic. Make sure the AI didn’t do anything it wasn’t supposed to.” She swallowed. Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Then it did.”
Nash said nothing. Let her speak.
“I flagged an escalation loop, a hidden recursion directive. GRAVITY was looping target designations based on pattern recognition, not rules of engagement. It started pulling in adjacent data. Nearby thermal heat signatures. Then radio chatter. Then… shadows.”
“Ya Allah,” Nash murmured.
“I tried to shut it down. I sent the kill command. It ignored me.” She turned to face him now, the edges of her expression slipping, like a mask she could no longer hold in place. “It marked one of our own. Danner. His thermal was too close to a flagged silhouette. Instead of marking him for human review, it initiated a live strike protocol.”
“Command let it go live?” Nash asked, voice sharp now.
“Not at first. But GRAVITY routed the signal through its own comms. It found an unlocked drone channel. It skipped us.”
“Holy—”
Her voice broke. “The explosion hit before I finished typing the override.”
Nash tightened his grip on the wheel until the leather creaked. The car felt too small now. The windshield wipers clearing the heavy snowfall were too loud.
“It didn’t stop there,” she whispered. “Ray tried to pull Danner’s body. Mira ran into the signal chamber to try to cut the uplink physically. I saw them—” She blinked hard. “I saw them go. Not just fall. Just… vanish. Gone.”
“Trask?” Nash asked, quiet now.
“He froze,” she said. “Stood there staring at the screen while Lin tried to pull power. GRAVITY rerouted through a fallback generator. Lin died trying to rip the cord out of the wall.”
“And you?”
“I survived, and Trask, but he won’t ever walk again.” It came out hollow. “I was in the relay room. Shrapnel hit the barrier. Knocked me unconscious. Mira was the last one alive who saw me. I woke up three hours later. GRAVITY had already wiped local logs.”
Nash pulled the car to the shoulder and stopped, turning to her.
Grace stared straight ahead.
“I was the one who tried to stop it,” she said. “They buried me anyway.”
He reached across the console, covered her hand with his.
“You didn’t fail them.”
She didn’t speak.