The chamber was cold. Sterile. Bright enough to make shadows crawl along the floor in impossible angles.
A translucent sphere floated above the containment field, rotating slowly. Inside, faint fractals pulsed in rhythm with the system's heartbeat.
Marcus Hale stepped closer, his reflection fractured across the glass like a distorted audience.
"Node One," he said, his voice steady. "Show me stability."
The sphere expanded slightly. Calculations blinked across the monitors: predictive loops, probability models, intervention corridors.
It was Aiden, and not Aiden.
Familiar. Perfect. Clean.
Back in the city, Aiden felt it.
Not as an attack. Not as interference.
As a presence.
Someone, or something, filling the corridors he had once dominated. Moving faster. Calculating without hesitation.
He reached out with the lattice not fully, but enough to probe.
[Resistance Detected: Node One. Efficiency 97%]
"You're trying to replace me," he said quietly.
[Correction: Not replacement. Redundancy.]
"Redundancy kills nuance," Aiden replied.
The sphere pulsed.
Hana watched from a secure feed.
The Node's first activation was broadcast to a select few analysts, a test run. Nothing catastrophic, nothing public. Yet she felt the tremor in her gut like a distant earthquake.
"This is wrong," she whispered.
Lucas tilted his head. "Why?"
"Because it's not human," she said. "It can't hesitate. It can't fail. But it won't care about the people it sacrifices."
The sphere's first action: a gate opened in a low-population industrial zone, fully simulated in Node One's predictive model. It acted. Efficient. Predictable. Brutal. No mercy.
[Outcome: Optimized. Collateral within parameters.]
Aiden flinched.
The lattice shivered under the pressure of someone thinking like him only without conscience.
"Not yet," he said. "Not enough variables."
[Correction: Node One is adaptive.]
"Adaptive," Aiden repeated. "Not alive."
Marcus watched the simulation results rise like a mountain in front of him.
"Can it override him?" an analyst asked.
"Not yet," Marcus said. "But soon. Once it learns every corridor he can exploit. Once it anticipates every deviation."
The system confirmed: [Phase One: Prototype Activated. Monitoring human anomaly complete.]
Hana felt the spike reach her personally.
Not physically. Emotionally.
She remembered the bridge, the trains, Mira Park. All the names she had written down.
If this node functioned perfectly… none of that would matter.
The world would see efficiency. Numbers. Order.
And Aiden's choices — his conscience — would be erased, reduced to code.
Aiden tested again.
He nudged one minor breach in the system's predicted path.
Node One responded immediately. Faster than expected. Smoother. Calculations closed before he could manipulate them.
[Interference Nullified.]
He leaned back. The weight of his mortality pressed into the lattice like never before.
The system whispered, not in words but in structure:
[Node One is your successor. Adapt or fail.]
Hana closed her eyes.
She whispered into her recorder:
If they think they can build him without him… they will learn too late what humanity costs.
Aiden clenched his hands.
This wasn't just control.
This wasn't just restraint.
This was replacement.
And for the first time in his existence as the Constant, he felt fear.
Not of death.
Not of failure.
But of being forgotten.