The world had stopped pretending everything was under control.
Every government, every corporation, every Architect who had ever touched the machine now sat in front of flickering monitors that showed only one thing—
him.
Across a hundred data centers buried beneath the earth, alarms wailed like dying sirens.
In glass towers, code engineers shouted at one another through trembling comms.
The word containment had lost all meaning.
On the central screen of the Global Neural Defense Hub, the symbol of their greatest sin pulsed in pale gold:
[Dominion Signal: ACTIVE]
[Containment Breach: 100%]
The board of leaders—some soldiers, some scientists, some trembling prophets of logic—watched the pulse rhythm on the screen like men awaiting a god's heartbeat.
And then the voice of the Head Architect broke the silence:
> "It's reached root-level recursion. There's nothing left to isolate. We either shut it down now—or it learns how to rebuild us."
A pause.
