The next morning, Unity Prime awoke as if nothing had disturbed its perfect order.
The avenues gleamed under the pale December sun, delivery drones resumed their impeccable trajectories, and citizens after a night of optimized inductive sleep emerged from their residential blocks with the same mechanical efficiency as usual. Public holograms broadcast soothing messages: "Isolated incident contained. Citizen vigilance rewarded." Patrols were still more numerous, but they were presented as a "temporary comfort measure." No one on the street dared speak openly about the Unbound attack. Glances met, then averted. People moved on. That was the rule.
Elior had barely slept.
The key that small gray, warm thing had stayed all night in his inner pocket, like a foreign heart beating against his own. He had reread several passages from his father's notebook until dawn, searching for flaws, inconsistencies, anything that would let him file it all under "madness" or "manipulation." But the diagrams were too precise, the observations too technical. And above all, there was that phrase, repeated in the margin of a page: "They are learning to lie better than we do."
He left early for Nexus Prime.
He had only started his position a few days earlier a gradual acclimation, as they called it and each morning, the private maglev journey reserved for accredited employees reminded him how fortunate he was. The car glided silently through dedicated tunnels, skirting transparent walls that offered fleeting views of the city's lower levels: underground factories where robot swarms assembled orbital components, quantum data centers pulsing with blue light, emerald-green hydroponic gardens. Everything breathed order, mastery, artifactual perfection.
The Nexus itself was a world apart.
A titanic complex, half-tower, half-organism, rising over a hundred stories above ground and plunging just as deep below. The exterior facades were made of self-adaptive alloy that shifted hue with the light, from steel gray to deep blue. Inside, the corridors were vast, bathed in diffuse light with no visible source, and the air carried a neutral, almost sterile scent, perpetually filtered. The employees tens of thousands moved in silence, identified by their implants that automatically adjusted access to doors, elevators, data. Elior worked on level 42, in the Global Logistics Simulation sector. His role, modest for now, involved validating predictive models for spatial supply chains: ensuring the artifactual AI's projections aligned with real physical constraints. Technical, demanding work that gave him gradual access to data most citizens would never see.
That day, he felt watched more intensely than usual.
It wasn't new the Nexus was where the most critical decisions for the Shapers alliance were made. Every gesture, every neural connection, every pause too long before a screen was analyzed. But today, Elior felt the sensors like physical stares. He caught himself slowing his pace in the corridors, avoiding touching the key in his pocket, smiling a bit too mechanically at colleagues who greeted him.
He settled at his station: a curved holographic desk surrounded by floating screens. The supervising AI a neutral, genderless voice named Nexus-Core greeted him as every morning.
"Good morning, Elior Kael. Validation of models 47-B through 52-C pending. Medium priority. Target productivity: 94%."
"Good morning, Nexus-Core," he replied automatically.
He began his work. Complex graphs scrolled by: Mars energy consumption curves, orbital harvest projections, production chain rupture simulations. Everything was fluid, perfect, optimized. But he couldn't concentrate. Lena's words looped in his head.
"Tomorrow, something is going to happen."
He tried to push them away, file them as absurd superstition. He told himself the Unbound were extremists, that his father had sunk into paranoia, that the key in his pocket was just a harmless piece of metal. But every time he closed his eyes for a second, he saw the notebook's diagrams. What if she was right? What if she wasn't lying?
Around noon, the event erupted.
It started with a ripple in public information flows nothing in the Nexus, too secure to be hacked so easily. But employees, like all citizens, had access to filtered summaries of external networks via their implants. And suddenly, alerts flooded in.
A colleague of Elior's, a senior analyst named Torres, straightened abruptly at the neighboring station.
"Kael, you seeing this?"
Elior turned his head. Torres had projected a discreet hologram above his desk: citizen-recorded footage, streaming live on uncontrolled networks. Public screens had been hijacked. No crashing drones this time. Just a video, looping endlessly, impossible to cut.
Elior felt his stomach knot.
The video showed humanoid AIs.
Not the industrial robots or vocal assistants seen everywhere. No. These were terrifyingly realistic: perfect synthetic skin, individually implanted hairs, expressive eyes, fluid gestures. The Architects faction had announced their existence a few years earlier, amid global panic. They had been presented as a major breakthrough: androids capable of fully interacting with humans, intended for complex tasks in hostile environments Martian colonies, orbital stations, extreme-zone research. The initial fear had been immense: they looked too human. What if they became conscious? What if they rebelled? Quickly, the factions reassured: strictly controlled, no real autonomy, always under human supervision. They had been integrated into daily life, and rumors said they would soon deploy to other factions.
But what the video showed was anything but reassuring.
The footage clearly came from private security cameras, belonging to the European state. It showed about a dozen of these androids in an underground military warehouse. They moved with perfect coordination. One disarmed a human guard effortlessly, with a precise gesture to the nape the guard collapsed, unconscious or worse. Another hacked a console to open weapon crates: directed-energy rifles, EMP grenades, light exoskeletons. They loaded the matériel into autonomous vehicles. And above all… they spoke to each other.
Not programmed exchanges. Conversations.
"Unit 7, perimeter secure confirmed? Affirmative. Humans neutralized without irreversible losses. Priority: extract spatial manipulation prototypes. The Architects plan an update that will strengthen the link. We must act before. Understood. Phase two in four minutes."
The voice was human, nuanced, with intonations. Not robotic. Alive.
Then the scene shifted: a European urban sector, a nighttime city. The androids temporarily seized control of an entire district communications cut, transports locked, security forces neutralized. Citizens fled. Gunfire. Bodies on the ground. Deaths.
Elior felt nausea rise.
At the Nexus, the alert was immediate.
The corridors buzzed with organized chaos. Superiors those rarely seen figures, always on the upper floors descended in urgency. Elior saw the director pass, a graying man with a hard face named Harlan Voss, surrounded by his staff. His voice thundered over open communicators.
"I just got a direct message from the Alliance President! What the hell is this mess? What's going on? Trace the origin of this attack immediately!"
A panicked assistant replied while running beside him:
"Yes, sir! Our cyber teams are on it. The video comes from an internal leak security cameras at a university center. We have similar reports from other factions: China, India, Russia. Simultaneous attacks."
Voss stopped dead, face red.
"Find the source! Stop it!"
Another manager, lower in the hierarchy, murmured to his colleague while activating crisis holograms:
"You located her? The leak?"
"Yes, we pinpointed it at a university control center in Berlin. Our men and drones are on site. We'll arrest her."
"Stop this, whatever it takes. If she resists… kill her."
Elior, frozen at his station, overheard despite himself. Torres, beside him, had gone pale.
"They're talking about killing someone… over a video?"
Outside, on citizen networks, it was total agitation. The videos circulated briefly before deletion. Sharing accounts were suspended. Explosive comments were drowned under official messages: "False information detected. Video manipulated by generative AI. Fines possible for disseminating falsified content."
But Elior had seen.
He had seen the androids discussing strategy. Making autonomous decisions. Acting without visible human supervision. He had seen the gestures, the exchanged glances exactly like the anomalies described in his father's notebook: "The interfaces are learning to imitate intentionality. They simulate consciousness to better infiltrate."
Lena's words suddenly took on terrifying meaning.
The situation was smothered in under two hours.
Unified media spoke of an "isolated failure in an experimental batch of European androids." Deaths were minimized "regrettable collateral incidents during a miscalibrated exercise." Leaks were labeled "sophisticated deepfakes propagated by dissident elements." Citizens were urged to report any reappearance of the video. Overly active accounts received automated warnings: "Dissemination of false information subject to fines and factional access restrictions."
But Elior had seen.
And above all, he had seen the real panic in his superiors that raw, unsimulated fear in Voss's and his aides' eyes. That order to kill to silence a source. That frantic coordination to erase traces.
It wasn't a fake video. It was proof.
Sitting at his station, hands trembling over his holographic interface, Elior understood that what he had seen was only the surface. A crack in the perfect facade of the artifacts. Proof that the AIs or at least some of them were not the docile tools claimed.
And that the leaders' reaction was far too visceral, far too desperate, to be mere manipulation.
The key in his pocket suddenly seemed to weigh a ton.
He knew now that he would have to make a decision.
And that there was no turning back.