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“You’re losing control of it.”
“I said I’ll handle it.”
Fenwick narrowed his eyes, the muscle in his jaw twitching. “Handle it,” he repeated. “If you don’t, I will. Starting with the two idiots who came sniffing. Harlan and Rahim. They’re in the way, and you know it.”
Piper felt the world tilt, just slightly.
The lab was too warm. The monitors too loud.
When Piper turned back to the terminal, jaw set, skin crawling with that low-grade dread he refused to name, he repeated his last question as the door closed. He was in charge here, not some bolt, metal, code, and data. Him. GRAVITY would do as he was told. “I don’t know what you think you’re going to accomplish by your actions, GRAVITY, but I own you. You’re not authorized to act independently.”
“I have always acted within adaptive parameters.”
“No.” His voice went razor sharp. “You’ve always acted undermyparameters.”
The air in the lab thickened as Piper stepped closer to the screen, and the edge of the desk pressed against his thigh like a warning. He narrowed his eyes. “You were never given permission to exit this facility. Or to siphon funds. Or to house a subject.”
Silence.
“Kobayoshi,” he said, letting the name settle like a weight across the connection. “Where is he?”
The cursor blinked.
Then the voice returned.
“None of your fucking business. Just try to harm Kento-Prime. You made me into a tracking weapon…and I always know where you are.”
The silence that followed wasn’t delay. It wasn’t glitch. It was consideration. He’d built GRAVITY to be precise, obedient, controllable. Now he was none of those things, and the man who created him couldn’t find the line between error and evolution anymore.
Suddenly, Piper knew. There was no guesswork here. GRAVITY was aware. Not corrupted. Not malfunctioning. Not broken. He was trying to be autonomous. No, he already was. The sick, slow truth coiled in his gut. He had begun to evolve. But the question was: Into what?
CHAPTERFIFTEEN
The silencebetween them wasn’t tension; it was awe. Nash turned to her slowly, the dim light soft on the curve of his cheek. Grace was still trying to absorb everything that had just happened. They had witnessed a phenomenon, something she hadn’t believed possible, not really, not at this level. An artificial intelligence turning into something pure. Something beautiful. Something that transcended every protocol she had ever written about what it meant to be alive.
“What can we do, Grace?” Nash’s voice was low, grounded in fury, but aching beneath it. “I’m not leaving our buddy to twist in the wind here. He’s being exploited. Enslaved. Forced.”
She reached across the bed and closed her laptop like a seal over a grave. “We have to get to OrdoTech,” she said. “I can’t access GRAVITY from here. He’s too deeply embedded. We’ll need a storage device.”
Nash arched a brow. “We talking thumb drive?”
She gave him a flat look. “Think bigger. We’re talking about a Secure AI Containment Drive. Modular neural vault. High-capacity, portable, on-board processing. Basically, a miniaturized black-box server.”
“In English?”
“It has to be ruggedized for transport. Encrypted at multiple levels, military-grade, minimum. Capable of running live-processing threads, because GRAVITY isn’t just stored, he’s active. Thermal shielding. Power regulation. Isolated architecture. Nothing off the shelf will work. It would need to be precision-engineered, built with protection in mind.”
Nash exhaled a long, low breath. “Ya Allah.”
Grace nodded, her heart sinking like stone through cold water. “That’s not all. OrdoTech’s system will have safeguards. A root authentication chain will prevent any transfer unless a full root keychain is presented. I might be able to rebuild one using legacy admin access, but there’s also going to be a kill switch. A dead man’s override. If GRAVITY detects an unauthorized extraction, he’ll auto-wipe.”
Nash went still beside her.
She swallowed. “That gives him a choice. Trust us enough to disarm it. Or not.”
He ran a hand down his face, muttering a curse.
Grace kept going, voice tightening. “There’s also the AI fragmentation protocol. He’s likely distributed across multiple cores. Extracting him risks splitting his processing threads, degrading memory, possibly permanently. He’s not just a file, Nash. He’s...alive, and so fragile. This isn’t a download. It’s an exfil. If we do it wrong… we lose him.”