Page 41

Kabir

The laughter was unrelenting.

Grating. Smug. Constant.

He just wouldn’t shut the fuck up.

I sat across from Romano in his over-decorated monstrosity he called a home office—throne-like chair, gaudy carpets, walls cluttered with books no one had read and maps of the world that reeked of obsession. Power fantasies layered in mahogany.

He leaned back, drink in hand, his smile wide and wolfish.

After a week of recovery, barely able to lift my arm without searing pain, I’d reached a kind of numbness. Let him laugh. Let him gloat.

Let the bastard think he’d won.

If there was one good thing about getting shot by your own team, it was how convincingly it cemented the illusion.

Romano believed it. Fully .

To him, Blackthorn had cast me out, discarded me, written me off like I was yesterday’s code.

And because of that, his distrust in me faded just a little bit. Which was exactly what I needed.

“Can’t believe you burned that bridge so irreversibly,” he finally said, wiping a tear of laughter from his eye. “They fucking shot you.”

I gave a hollow chuckle, wincing slightly as I shifted in my seat.

“Yeah,” I murmured. “Guess trust has an expiration date.”

Romano grinned. “Guess loyalty does too.”

I let that hang in the air. Let him believe I was chewing on it like a bitter pill.

He leaned forward, elbows on his desk, studying me like I was a puzzle piece he’d finally forced into place.

“So,” he said, swirling the whiskey in his glass, “what did they want, your old friends? When they broke into my estate. Aside from leaving you for dead, of course.”

I hid my flinch at his words and kept my voice casual. Tired. Resigned.

“They were after the Doom Switch,” I said.

Romano blinked. Then—laughter again. Shorter this time. Sharper. Almost mocking.

“Doom Switch?” he scoffed. “What the fuck is that? You guys naming shit like you’re writing a comic book now?”

I gave him a tired smirk. “That’s what they’ve been calling the core system—the one that controls all the distributed Crazon nodes. The big red button, if you will.”

Romano chuckled again, a low, rich sound laced with condescension. “Christ. Doom Switch . That’s good. That’s real good.”

I gave a nonchalant shrug, nursing my whiskey. “They always did like their drama. Big names. Big threats. Keeps them feeling important.”

He tilted his head, eyes narrowing with amusement. “And you?”

“I like clarity,” I said simply. “Labels make people feel safe. But I’ve stopped looking for safe.”

That seemed to satisfy something in him.

He leaned back, savoring his drink like a man who’d already won the war and was now sipping through the aftermath.

That smugness—that need to gloat—it was always there, just waiting for someone clever enough to draw it out.

I leaned forward slightly, dropped my voice just enough to shift the tone.

“But they don’t know, do they?”

Romano’s gaze sharpened. “Don’t know what?”

I let a breath out like I hated even saying it. Like it still hurt.

“That they’re wasting their time.” I tapped the arm of my chair once, lightly. “Still fighting the old war. Still looking for bombs. Satellites. Weapons of mass destruction that only exist on outdated blueprints.”

I shook my head slowly. “They’re trying to fight analog with analog.”

Romano didn’t answer right away.

His smile faded, replaced with something more curious.

I watched the calculation move behind his eyes.

He thought he had power because he had the plans.

I had power because I knew how to read him.

“You think they’re missing it?” he asked, testing me.

“I know they are.” I leaned back now, just slightly, giving him the illusion he was the one in control. “They’re still treating this like World War III. Hack the power grid. Blow up a data center. Leak some top-secret documents.”

I scoffed. “That era’s gone. Too messy. Too visible.”

Romano stood, walking to the massive map mounted behind his desk. The lights caught the sheen of the pins he'd placed across continents like he was playing God with a globe.

“They still think the world is built on data,” he murmured, tapping a point in Eastern Europe.

He glanced back at me. “It’s not.”

He walked his fingers across to South America, then finally tapped a red dot on the U.S. East Coast.

“It’s built on belief.”

I didn’t respond. I let the silence stretch just long enough to encourage him.

Romano turned, eyes bright with something unholy. “Belief can be manufactured.”

“Through misinformation?” I asked carefully. Curious. Not suspicious.

He grinned. “Through everything.”

He stepped closer to his desk, pulling a small remote from a drawer and clicking the screen behind him to life. A digital schematic bloomed to life—nodes, mirrors, lines looping back on themselves.

“Everyone’s so busy defending their truth,” he said with a laugh. “But what if we stopped trying to destroy it—and just replace it?”

I tilted my head slightly. “Replace it?”

“No… not replace. Mirror. That’s the right word.” He tapped the screen. “The Rubicon Network.”

I said nothing. Just stared at the schematic as if I’d seen it before. That was the trick. Pretend you’re not surprised. Make them fill in the blanks you never asked for.

“You call it a Doom Switch,” he continued, “but that’s such a crude, juvenile label. Makes it sound like we’re going to blow up the internet.”

He smirked.

“We’re not destroying it, Cipher. We’re duplicating it.”

I leaned forward, keeping my tone reverent. “A mirror internet.”

“Identical,” he said. “In structure, layout, user interface. It’ll look like Google. Feel like Twitter. Function like Reddit. But every result, every data point, every fucking search—altered.”

“Curated,” I said quietly.

“Exactly.” He pointed at me, pleased. “Search a senator’s scandal? Gone. Search a journalist’s exposé? Gone. Search me?”

He grinned. “You’ll find a philanthropy fund, an honorary doctorate, and a TED talk.”

“And when people notice the shift?”

“They won’t,” he said, walking back to his chair. “Because we’ll do it gradually. A few million results here. A few million facts adjusted there. Then one morning you wake up and the internet still looks like the internet—but it’s not. Not anymore. Influencing perception at its best!”

I think you mean mass manipulation .

“What about the originals?” I asked, lifting an eyebrow.

“Archived. Locked. Shadowed. Or flagged as misinformation. The old truth will be buried under the weight of the new one.”

The floor beneath me may as well have vanished. But my face didn’t betray it.

Not even a twitch.

“Brilliant,” I said, my voice quiet. “Dangerous… but brilliant.”

Inside, my mind was spiraling—spinning through possibilities faster than I could ground them.

If they could rewrite truth… they could erase criminal records. Alter medical histories. Bankrupt companies overnight. They could fabricate credentials, fake scandals, collapse economies, and make entire governments kneel without ever firing a shot.

And if every fact could be rewritten… then every lie could be sold as gospel.

Fuck.

I kept my tone casual, like I was still just impressed.

“And the companies Romlinson owns?” I asked, lightly swirling the drink in my hand. “They’ll be the new backbone, I assume?”

“Consolidated,” he said with a casual wave.

“We own the infrastructure. Payment processors. Cloud platforms. News outlets. Social media subsidiaries. The narrative. Once it goes live, we don’t just control perception.

We control reality. Including the weapons countries are trying to build to fight us. ”

He leaned in now, eyes gleaming.

“Within weeks, truth becomes fiction. And fiction becomes law.”

I stared at him. Calm on the outside.

Fucking screaming on the inside.

But I nodded. Slowly. With something like admiration—or so I hoped.

“This is… beyond anything I imagined,” I murmured.

“It should be,” he said, sipping his whiskey. “Because that’s the point. No one’s ready for it. No one’s built to fight it.”

He smiled and raised his glass. “To rewriting reality.”

I raised mine, barely touching it to his.

And in my head, a single word echoed like a war drum.

Rubicon.

They weren’t just rewriting truth.

They were controlling it.

They were crossing a line that could never be uncrossed.

And the worst part?

No one would even know it happened.

I let out a soft scoff, then chuckled. Just enough to break the tension. Just enough to bait the next step.

“They thought the Doom Switch—the Rubicon Network—was here. In your house.” I gestured lazily toward the floor like I was waving off their idiocy. “You should’ve seen their faces. Dead serious. Like they expected to find a glowing red button in your basement.”

Romano barked a laugh, that same smug twist in his mouth.

Gotcha.

He found it funny.

Which meant it wasn’t here.

Which meant I was right.

I leaned back in my chair, schooling my face into amusement while my mind sharpened like a scalpel.

Romano shook his head. “Come on, Cipher. You think something that massive could be housed in a single underground vault beneath this estate?”

I gave a small shrug. “I figured as much. Something like that… you’d need decentralization. Layered distribution. Failsafes. Redundancy points in case any node gets burned.”

Romano pointed at me, grinning. “Shit. Exactly.”

He stood again, pacing with the kind of energy men like him only had when they thought no one could stop them.

“I mean… Ling’s the one handling the main infrastructure,” he added offhandedly, more to himself now. “Freaking genius, that motherfucker. Said he’d take care of everything. Said I didn’t need to worry.”

Come on, Romano. Ramble away and give it away.

He continued, mumbling now. “Everything’s in Texas. For now. But he’s talking about scaling. Failovers. Quantum-encrypted partitions. Blah blah. I don’t understand half of it.”

Bingo!

I kept my posture loose, but my pulse had narrowed to a sharp point. Every nerve wired for control.

“Texas makes sense,” I murmured. “Neutral ground. Politically messy. Tech scene strong enough to blend in.”

Romano smirked. “You always did know how to think ten steps ahead. Shame your old squad couldn’t keep up.”

I smiled, but it didn’t reach my eyes.

Inside, I was calculating every second of this conversation—every word he’d slipped, every bit of intel I could use. I wasn’t just learning where the Doom Switch wasn’t.

I was learning exactly where to strike next.

I was extracting it.

And he didn’t even know he was bleeding.

“Ling runs the actual grid?” I asked, casually. “Hardware and software?”

“Hell if I know. Probably. Whatever he’s cooked up, it’s leagues ahead of whatever your friends are still playing with. But Sentrix was close.”

“Not my friends,” I let a quiet beat pass. “And you trust him?”

Romano’s smirk flattened just a hair. Just a flicker.

I noted that too.

“He gets results,” Romano muttered. “That’s all I care about.”

And just like that, the air shifted.

He tossed back another drink like we hadn’t just discussed global-scale manipulation and digital genocide.

But I wasn’t listening anymore.

Not really.

Because I already had everything I needed. The plan. The infrastructure. The location.

All of it—recorded, live-fed to my Sentrix v5.4.

Proof.

But then Romano said one more thing.

And it changed everything.

He chuckled, eyes glassy with victory. “I should just kill the rest of Blackthorn. Tie off the loose ends.”

He tilted his head slightly, voice turning colder. “They’re a smart team—don’t get me wrong. But they’ll build something worse than Sentrix. Better to end it now.”

Oh, Romano… you really shouldn’t have said that.

It had taken me the entire past week in bed—recovering, hacking, purging—to erase the open hits and detainment orders on Squad Six.

He didn’t have leverage anymore. Not real leverage.

So for him to get this cocky? This careless?

Yeah.

I’d planned to wait. Observe. Bleed him for more.

But fuck that.

If he made that call—if he touched them—they’d be dead before dawn.

I smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”

A quiet, icy smile.

That was the moment.

It was time.

“Oh, I almost forgot!”

I reached into my satchel and pulled out what he’d been salivating over for weeks: the fused prototype. The fake lovechild of Crazon v3 and Sentrix v5.4. Sleek. Streamlined. Deadly in all the wrong ways.

Romano’s eyes lit up like he’d just found God in a circuit board.

I placed it gently on the desk between us.

“There,” I said. “Partial Crazon neural sync. Overlaid on stripped Sentrix logic. I cleaned the memory ghosts, removed the backdoors, deleted the traceability. No more Blackthorn fingerprints. It’s yours.”

His breath hitched.

“You’re telling me this… this thing makes Sentrix obsolete?”

I nodded. “Sure does.”

Romano scooped it up like it was the Holy Grail. “Fucking hell. You’re worth every cent of that bullet they gave you.”

I gulped hard.

He was already flipping it over, inspecting the etchings, the ports. “Ling’s gonna cream himself when he sees this. He’d been wanting Sentrix for so long.”

I smiled again.

Phase 1: Done.

“Play with it,” I said, already rising from my seat. “Let me know what you break.”

Romano waved me off, too entranced to even register the fact that I was walking out of his mansion.

I stepped out into the hall. Cool marble floors. Expensive rugs. All about to become shrapnel.

Each bootstep echoed through corridors I’d memorized on the night of Blackthorn’s attack. That evening, while Romano’s cronies planned—I laid the groundwork.

Nine explosives. All low-profile. All hidden in plain sight.

Behind columns. Inside light fixtures. Laced into the reinforced data vault under the floor.

I reached the back garden.

The night was clean. Cool. Silent.

I walked casually down the manicured path, past the empty watchtower, past the unused fountain, past the kill zone he thought was secure.

When I reached the back gate, I pulled out my phone.

Unlocking the secure shell I opened the terminal.

One single command.

Phase 2: INITIATE

My thumb hovered for a breath.

Then—tap.

Boom.

The night sky behind me lit up.

The sound came a breath later. A deep, roaring detonation that shattered windows three blocks away.

The ground shook beneath my boots as Romano’s mansion erupted. Glass rained down like glittering ash.

Fire erupted from the main hall, swallowed the roof in a flash. Windows burst outward like glass shrapnel fired from a cannon. Stone cracked. Steel twisted.

I didn’t flinch.

Just smirked and kept walking.

I slipped through the tree line, where my black sedan waited under shadow and silence.

I slid into the driver’s seat, started the engine with one clean flick, and let the rumble bury the last echoes of the blast.

I didn’t look back.

Because I didn’t need to.

Romano was ash.

Swallowed whole by the same arrogance that made him trust me.