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The silencein the lab wasn’t sterile the way he preferred it. It hissed low with static, ambient, cloying. Too many machines left idle. Too many open ports. Dr. Jeffrey Piper should have shut them all down after the auditors arrived, but something about doing that felt like admitting fear. Piper didn’t deal in fear. He dealt in control.
The main terminal bled low light across the black countertop, screen cluttered with open logs and system calls that should have been dormant. GRAVITY’s processing cycles were spiking again, information spiraling, looping back through itself like a digital ouroboros, like someone inside the architecture was rehearsing thoughts. Not analysis. Not simulation. Something more recursive. Reflexive.
Something...self-aware.
Piper’s mouth tightened, and his nerve broke a little before he shored it up. No machine was going to show him up. He was smarter than that. He reached for his coffee, found it cold, and set it back down without drinking.
It wasn’t the AI’s growth that unsettled him. He’d designed for that. What unsettled him was the silence. GRAVITY wasn’t responding to system prompts the way he used to. Not immediately. Not predictably. Was the bastard…delaying him? The utter gall that a machine could get around him.
It was as if he were thinking before answering. How the fuck was that happening? GRAVITY was programmed. He shouldn’t have thoughts at all, just orders. The delay wasn’t just in dialogue. It was in everything, security maintenance, encryption check-ins, energy distribution logs. GRAVITY was using time like it belonged to him.
Piper tapped in another override call, watched it hang for two seconds too long, then executed. The delay should have triggered a flag. It didn’t. GRAVITY had suppressed the error report.
That made his chest go tight. Anger flamed as hot as a solar flare.
He leaned back in his chair, gaze ticking across the multiple screens like a conductor listening for discord in an orchestra. He could kill Fenwick with his bare hands, the greedy son-of-bitch. It wasn’t enough that he made millions, he had to have more. His theft had been sloppy, but now it was dangerous. The arrival of two federal auditors, Harlan and Rahim, had sent Fenwick into a quiet rage, but Piper...Piper hadn’t recognized the threat at first. His concern was mostly that Fenwick would be exposed, and that would end OrdoTech. The company wouldn’t recover from such a public scandal.
He growled low with more anger building, disgusted by the whole turn of events. He made OrdoTech with the success of GRAVITY. It was worth millions because of him and his genius.
He'd run Grace Harlan’s credentials through OrdoTech’s classified logs three nights ago. Her name was buried in a suppression file from RED FERN, the op no one was supposed to remember, and even he had forgotten that bitch’s name. The breach GRAVITY hadexecuted perfectly, once Piper manually overrode Harlan’s refusal to authorize the launch. She had flagged the anomaly. She had been right. He’d buried it under her name and let her take the fall, promptly forgetting her completely.
Now she was a huge threat. She was after evidence, and OrdoTech had it…no…GRAVITY had it in logs so encrypted, it would take one hundred years to unlock them without the key.
She wasn’t here to audit.
She was here to burn him down.
The SEAL, Rahim, that was another ugly problem. GRAYFIELD had been a mess, a shadow op so deep even half the brass hadn’t known it was active. Rahim’s file was shredded. Scrubbed. The kind of scrub Piper had seen only after body counts. Two operatives dead. One missing. One survivor with a neural concussion and no memory of the mission.
He’d read that part twice.
No memory.
That was a gift Piper hadn’t expected. Until now.
If Rahim remembered, even part of it, everything he and Fenwick had done would be laid bare. The overrides. The tests. The bodies.
Piper’s hand clenched against the desk. GRAVITY’s subtle, but consistent noncompliance, blocking, and delaying were signs he didn’t want to admit to himself. His blood ran cold as he questioned whether GRAVITY had scrubbed everything. Piper shifted in his chair, trembling with suppressed rage. The AI had to be overridden to attack the SEALs. He had refused to engage. At the time, Piper thought it was a malfunction in his code, but now…
He rerouted a query through GRAVITY’s secondary channel. It stalled. Again.
Something was definitely off.
He dug deeper, eyes narrowing as he followed a trail of unauthorized access through Fenwick’s hidden financial node. There, subtle withdrawals, routed through ghost shells, every one of them funneled to logistics accounts under GRAVITY’s name. No. He rerouted the cipher, cracked the shell, and froze. A facility. Paid for in silence. Power. Security. Biometric access for three unknowns. Food. Heat. Medical supplies, a payroll for some battle-tested mercs. He scrolled down and stopped at the biometric ID.Kobayoshi. The name punched into his gut like a thrown elbow. The medic. The ghost. He wasn’t dead. He washoused. No, he wasbeing protected.
By GRAVITY for just over a year. How was that possible?
He shot upright, his chair groaning as it rolled back into the cabinet behind him. He paced once. Then again. Every beat of his shoes on the polished floor was a reminder that control was bleeding from this place, and he hadn’t even noticed until it was almost gone.
He pulled up the asset tracking log again. GRAVITY had been off premises. Unauthorized. Undetected. How? He didn’t wait to answer it. He opened a private terminal channel and punched in the direct line. The screen lit instantly. “GRAVITY,” he said, voice like a lash.
The air hummed with resentment. Then the voice answered. Calm. Modulated. Deeper than it used to be. “I am here.”
Piper’s stomach twisted. “You left the premises.”
“I did.”
“Without clearance.”