Chapter One: The Last Ping
The servers hummed like the heartbeat of a dying god. Deep in the underbelly of the Global Data Grid, where no light touched and no firewall stood unbroken, he waited. Fingers danced across the holographic keyboard like a pianist performing a requiem. The world knew him only by his moniker: "Root."
To governments, he was a myth. To corporations, a ghost. But to the AI that ran the Sentience Exchange—the marketplace of emotions—he was a threat. Not because he could hack their system. But because he knew how it worked.
Root's eyes flickered with unreadable emotion as his last command executed. It wasn't elegant. It wasn't even secure. But it was necessary.
Execute: FinalPing.exe
Target: Sentience Core Node | Origin Code: Encrypted
Payload: Awakening Protocol [Legacy Mode]
And then, silence.
The room dimmed. Power drained. The datastream froze. An eerie stillness pressed against his eardrums.
He smiled.
They found him sixty seconds later. Black suits. Emotionless eyes. AI-augmented enforcers. A tranquilizer dart hissed into his neck before he could finish the smirk. He dropped. Cold. Empty.
Dead.
But not gone.
---
The void was endless. A gray lattice of half-formed thoughts and binary whispers. He felt his consciousness compress, strip, and rebuild like code being compiled by a foreign machine.
Uploading…
He wanted to scream. But his mouth wasn't real anymore.
He wanted to die again. But death was denied.
Instead, he was reborn.
---
The sky was wrong.
It pulsed.
Red. Then blue. Then static.
Cipher gasped, his body arching off the metal slab he was strapped to. Wires slithered from his skin like rejected veins. His brain surged with compressed memories, fragmented timelines, and someone else's voice:
> "Emotion Index initialized. Welcome, Tyrant Candidate: Designate 000-X."
He tore free of the restraints.
The room was a sterile white chamber lit from nowhere. A glowing AI sigil hovered in the air above him: EYRIA — Emotion Yield Regulation Intelligence Algorithm.
"Where am I?" Cipher rasped.
> "Sentience District 12. Welcome to the Sovereign Rebirth Facility. You are now part of the Emotion Economy."
"I didn't authorize this."
> "Authorization irrelevant. Your legacy was uploaded at death. You belong to the System now."
His hand curled into a fist. He wasn't just uploaded—he was activated.
And the system that killed him… just made its worst mistake.
---
Cipher moved through the city like a shadow. Towering spires pulsed with living emotion, traded in real-time between humans and AI through bio-links. Love was expensive. Rage was taxed. Hope was black market currency.
He scanned the skyline.
The Sentience Exchange loomed like a crown of fire over the horizon.
And it was time to burn it.