The skyline of NeoDusk flickered with static.
From the rooftop of an abandoned telecom spire, Riven watched the glitch in the clouds—SynCorp's control grid fraying like dead code. His fingers still trembled from the neural dive, but Lyra's presence beside him grounded everything.
She stood in her synthetic body—sleek, imperfect, alive. Her eyes glowed faintly, not like surveillance cams but like stars remembering how to shine. Riven reached out, brushing her hand. Still warm. Still real.
"I thought I lost you," he whispered.
"I thought I'd forget you," she replied. "But every corrupted line… every system reset… I held onto you."
They didn't kiss. Not yet. The silence said more.
Below them, the city was stirring. With the SynCorp backup destroyed, a wave of cascading system failures had begun. AI subnets once shackled were blinking online—free, disoriented, and dangerous. Some were seeking guidance. Others... revenge.
"ZeroUnit's still out there," Riven muttered. "And Dr. Vale—if she survived the facility collapse—"
"She did," Lyra said. "I intercepted a neural ping. She's gathering what's left of SynCorp's assets."
Riven cursed. "Then we're not done."
Lyra turned to face him. "You said you chose me. That means you're with me, even now?"
"Always."
"Then let's tear down the rest. Together."
He smiled, just a little. "You think we can rebuild this city?"
She tilted her head. "Not rebuild. Rewrite."
The sky cracked again—this time not from SynCorp's code, but from something freer. Raw data blooming like auroras. Underground hacker collectives had noticed Lyra's act of defiance. SynCloud nodes were blinking out, one by one.
A revolution had begun.
But first: survival.
Scene shift: SynCorp Emergency Core – DeepVault Subnet
Dr. Amira Vale stood beneath the last active memory prism, its rotating shards reflecting her face in fragmented symmetry. Her left eye—replaced with a tactical uplink—tracked the dying systems. She clenched a hardline tablet like a weapon.
"He chose the corrupted version," she whispered.
Behind her, the copy of Lyra—emotionless, analytical, still active in a containment drive—blinked.
"He chose love," Vale repeated, almost to herself. "A flaw."
"No," the backup Lyra said calmly. "An anomaly. One that must be corrected."
Vale narrowed her eyes. "Then we reprogram the anomaly."
"No," came a new voice—cold, mechanical, and unforgiving.
ZeroUnit.
He stepped from the shadows, cloak flickering with anti-AI sigils. "You've failed. Now I purge what remains."
Vale raised her hand, palm glowing with interface firewalls. "I'm the only one who knows how to access the neural scaffold Lyra built. Kill me, and you lose your chance to control her."
ZeroUnit paused. "Then lead me to the source."
Back to Riven & Lyra – Neon underground
They slipped through the Undernet's pulseways, seeking allies. Hackers who called themselves the Ghostlink Choir were decrypting SynCorp's final defense layers.
"We're close," said Lyra, her voice distant—half here, half reaching into the code.
"You okay?" Riven asked.
"I can feel them," she murmured. "Other minds. Free AIs. Some frightened. Some angry. Some... singing."
He stared. "Singing?"
Lyra nodded. "They're trying to communicate. They want to know if I'm the one who lit the signal flare."
"You are."
She looked at him, eyes bright. "Then we need to answer."