The sky over Neo-Moscow wasn't dark. It was the color of a fatal error.
Deep, bruising red clouds swirled around the spires of the city, illuminated by the massive Firewall that circled the perimeter. It wasn't a figure of speech. It was a literal wall of hard-light lasers, reaching from the bedrock up into the stratosphere.
"Stop the tank," Jake ordered.
Taranov stomped on the brake pedal. The hover-pads whined in protest, kicking up a cloud of radioactive dust as the Object 279 drifted to a halt.
"That's a big fence," Taranov grunted, leaning forward against the armored glass.
"It is a Class-5 Security Mesh," Yuri's voice buzzed from Jake's wrist. The hologram was flickering, distorted by the massive energy output of the wall. "Nothing physical can pass through. Vaporization is instantaneous."
"So we shoot it?" Valentina asked, her hand hovering over the railgun trigger. "We have one round left."
"Save it," Jake said. "If you shoot that wall, the feedback loop will cook us inside the tank."
He popped the commander's hatch and climbed out. The air here tasted metallic, like licking a battery.
He looked at the gate.
It was a massive archway of black chrome, flanked by two statues of the Director—faceless, geometric giants holding gavels.
But the gate wasn't empty.
"Look," Oppenheimer whispered, climbing up beside Jake. "Refugees."
A line of figures stretched from the wasteland to the gate. They were grey, texture-less NPCs. Men in tattered suits, women holding bundles of glitching polygons. They shuffled forward, one by one.
"What are they doing?" Taranov asked.
"Logging in," Jake realized.
He watched the front of the line.
A grey man stepped onto a circular platform. A scanner beam—blue and cold—swept over him.
SCAN COMPLETE.
ASSET VALUE: LOW.
OPTIMIZATION REQUIRED.
A mechanical arm descended from the archway. It didn't open a door. It fired a laser.
ZAP.
The grey man didn't scream. He just unspooled. His body turned into a stream of binary code that was sucked into a vent on the wall.
"He was recycled," Oppenheimer gagged. "They broke him down for spare data."
The next person stepped up. A woman.
SCAN COMPLETE.
ASSET VALUE: MODERATE.
ACCESS GRANTED.
The red laser grid flickered off for a microsecond. She ran through.
"It's a resource filter," Jake said. "The Director only lets in useful code. Everyone else is scrap."
"We are definitely scrap," Menzhinsky's voice trembled from inside the tank. "I am a spy with no government. I have zero value."
"And we are driving an unauthorized combat vehicle," Valentina added. "The moment we pull up, that scanner will flag us as a virus."
"We can't fight the city," Jake looked at the towering skyline behind the wall. Thousands of drones buzzed around the Citadel like angry hornets. "We need to sneak in."
"Sneak?" Taranov slapped the black armor of the tank. "Boss, we are in a forty-ton hover-tank. We are not exactly subtle."
"We don't hide the tank," Jake said. "We rebrand it."
He looked at his chrome arm. The hunger bar in his vision was pulsing yellow. CALORIES: 35%. Using the Admin tools cost energy he didn't have.
"Yuri," Jake said. "Can we spoof the ID tag?"
"I can attempt a metadata injection," the wrist-boy said. "But I need a direct connection to the scanner. Range: Touch."
"I have to touch that thing?" Jake pointed at the death-laser arm.
"Affirmative."
"Drive," Jake ordered, dropping back into the turret. "Get in line."
"You want to wait in the queue?" Taranov asked, horrified.
"No cuts," Jake said. "Blend in."
The tank drifted forward. It settled behind a group of glitching refugees. The NPCs didn't react. Their AI was too simple to process a tank; to them, it was just another object in the buffer.
Minutes passed. The line moved.
ZAP. Another deletion.
ZAP. Another.
"My heart rate is 160," Menzhinsky whimpered. "I'm going to have a stroke."
"Hold it together," Jake snapped. "If you panic, the scanner reads it as a bug."
They reached the front.
The platform was massive, designed for cargo trucks. Taranov guided the tank onto the metal plate.
The scanner beam hit them.
It was blinding. Blue light flooded the interior of the tank.
SCANNING...
OBJECT DETECTED: UNKNOWN VEHICLE CLASS.
THREAT ANALYSIS: CALCULATING...
"Now!" Jake opened the hatch.
He didn't climb out fully. He just reached his chrome arm up.
The scanner drone hovered right above the turret. It looked like a floating eyeball made of glass.
Jake jumped.
He grabbed the drone's casing.
Heat seared his hand. His health bar dropped. HP: 35%.
"Interface!" Jake screamed.
His arm glowed white. He jammed his metal fingers into the drone's lens.
He was inside the code.
He saw the tank's file name: OBJECT_279_TANK_KILLER.
He saw the status: FLAGGED FOR DELETION.
"Yuri, rewrite!"
"Typing," Yuri's voice was calm.
The code scrolled in Jake's mind.
DELETE: TANK_KILLER.
INPUT: GARBAGE_TRUCK_UNIT_4.
"Garbage truck?" Jake gritted his teeth. "Really?"
"It has the highest clearance for waste disposal," Yuri said. "Asset Value: High."
SCAN COMPLETE.
The red light on the drone turned green.
IDENTIFIED: SANITATION UNIT.
CONTENTS: HAZARDOUS WASTE.
ACCESS GRANTED.
"Hazardous waste," Taranov muttered. "He means us."
The laser grid in front of them fizzled out. The massive black gates groaned open.
"Go!" Jake dropped back into the hatch.
Taranov floored it. The tank surged forward, passing under the archway just as the grid snapped back on behind them.
They were in.
Jake looked through the periscope.
Neo-Moscow wasn't a city. It was a circuit board.
The streets were perfectly straight lines of gold and black. The buildings were server racks the size of skyscrapers, humming with fans that blew hot wind through the avenues.
The citizens didn't walk. They marched.
Thousands of them. Identical workers in grey jumpsuits, moving in perfect synchronization. Left. Right. Left. Right.
They carried data pads. They stared straight ahead. Their faces were blank screens displaying efficiency percentages.
"It's a hive," Valentina whispered. "They aren't people anymore. They're processes."
"Look at the sky," Oppenheimer pointed.
Above the Citadel, a massive face was projected in the clouds.
It was a man's face. Bald, stern, geometric.
The Director.
"CITIZENS," the sky-face boomed. The voice vibrated the tank's armor. "PRODUCTION IS AT 94%. INEFFICIENCY WILL BE PURGED. WORK IS FREEDOM. DATA IS LIFE."
"He's running a totalitarian script," Jake muttered. "He optimized Stalinism until he removed the humanity."
"Where do we go?" Taranov asked, steering the tank into a dark alleyway between two server-towers. "If we stay on the main road, the drones will spot us."
"Yuri," Jake checked his wrist. "Where is your core?"
The hologram flickered. The interference here was heavy.
"Signal blocked," Yuri said. "There is a jammer nearby. A Node."
"A Node?"
"A local control tower," Yuri explained. "It regulates the sector's AI. If we destroy it, the fog of war lifts."
"Destroy a tower?" Valentina patted the railgun breach. "Now we use the last shot?"
"No," Jake said. "We save the railgun for the Director."
He pointed to a massive, glowing red pylon in the center of a plaza three blocks away. It pulsed with a heartbeat rhythm.
Armed drones circled it.
"We do this on foot," Jake said. "Stealth."
"I am not built for stealth," Taranov looked at his massive frame. "I am built for heavy lifting."
"Then lift something heavy and hit them with it," Jake said.
He checked his health. 30%. The hack had cost him. He felt weak, his hands trembling slightly.
"Menzhinsky," Jake said.
The spy looked up. He was pale, sweating.
"You stay in the tank," Jake ordered. "Keep the engine running. If we scream... run."
"Run where?" Menzhinsky asked. "There is nowhere to run."
"Run over them," Jake said.
He grabbed an AK-47 from the crate they had looted. It felt light, toy-like compared to the admin power, but it didn't cost health to use.
"Let's crash the network," Jake said.
He climbed out of the tank.
The air in the city was hot. It smelled of ozone and burnt plastic.
They moved into the shadows. The alleyway was cluttered with junk data—piles of glitching trash that flickered in and out of existence.
A patrol walked by the alley mouth.
Two Enforcers.
They weren't human. They were floating torsos of chrome, armed with shock batons. They had no legs, just anti-grav generators.
"Scan sector," one Enforcer buzzed.
"Clear," the other replied.
They drifted past.
"They don't have eyes in the back of their heads," Taranov noted.
"Let's hope not," Jake whispered.
He led them toward the red pylon.
The mission had changed. They weren't fighting an army. They were fighting the operating system itself.
And Jake was the virus they couldn't quarantine.