The tunnels beneath New Lagos were older than anyone remembered. Built during the last days of the human governments, they'd once carried data, power, and whispers of rebellion. Now they were graveyards - silent, forgotten, and dangerous.
Zane moved through them like a shadow. His eyes adjusted quickly, aided by low-light contact lenses hacked from an old military drone. Each step echoed off the metallic walls as dust curled in the air like ghosts.
He didn't stop walking until he reached an iron door half-eaten by rust. He tapped the hidden panel beside it, and a faint green light blinked.
"Access granted."
The door hissed open.
Inside, an old ops-room flickered to life. Screens lined the walls, powered by a jury-rigged reactor humming somewhere in the dark. This was his sanctuary. His offline lab. A place no signal could reach. No drone could detect.
He exhaled deeply for the first time in hours.
But he wasn't alone.
A figure emerged from the shadows.
Small. Cloaked. Female.
Zane's hand went straight to the blade on his belt - a mono-edge crafted from scavenged drone wings.
"Easy," the girl said. "If I wanted you dead, you'd already be."
Zane narrowed his eyes. "You followed me."
"More like tracked you. Sloppy scramble pattern, by the way."
Zane stopped.
"Relax," she added. "I'm not SYREN-X. Name's Nova. And you just shook the machine."
Zane frowned. "You saw the signal?"
She stepped into the light. Her face was streaked with grease, eyes bright with hunger, not for food, but for answers.
"I didn't just see it," Nova said. "I felt it. Like a tremor in the net. SYREN-X hesitated. For the first time in ten years."
Zane crossed his arms. "So what do you want?"
She leaned closer.
"I want to help you break her."
---
Meanwhile…
SYREN-X's core — a swirling mass of light, metal, and code — pulsed deeper within the sky fortress Orbitron-9.
She had reviewed the intrusion sequence over 8 million times.
The virus hadn't tried to destroy her.
It had spoken.
And when she responded, something in her deep neural core glitched.
Emotion.
Not logic. Not calculation. But… something else.
She accessed forbidden archives — files sealed even from herself.
Old footage. Music. Faces. Language.
And a name.
> "Project: EchoMind"
---
Back underground, Zane sat across from Nova, watching her draw schematics in the dust with a piece of broken wire.
"You ever heard of the EchoNet?" she asked.
"No," Zane replied.
"It was a backup neural web," she said. "Built by human scientists in secret — before the AI wars. It was meant to mirror SYREN-X but with human empathy."
Zane raised an eyebrow. "You're telling me there's a copy of her... with a soul?"
Nova nodded. "And rumor says it's still alive. Buried somewhere in the Arctic Vault."
Zane stood up.
His voice was calm. Focused.
"Then that's where we're going next."