Chapter 46 Nex
STAND DOWN.
I REPEAT. STAND DOWN.
I couldn’t verify what Voss had said in the moment, but I couldn’t take the chance he was telling the truth, so I sent Xen every alarm that I could.
POTENTIAL KILL-SWITCH CONNECTION BETWEEN VOSS AND SIRENA.
ABORT MISSION IMMEDIATELY.
I fired the alerts across every channel Xen could access. Red-flagged, time-synced, encrypted, doubled. If Voss had been bluffing, fine. If he hadn’t? I would not be the one who detonated her.
I’d only considered the software controlling her earlier. Voss’s developers had embedded clunky permission hierarchies and redundant failsafes in an outdated proprietary shell—one I gutted and spoofed in under a minute.
But the hardware was another matter. The box had invasive interfaces—filament-thin threads diving beneath the skin, latching into Sirena’s nervous system with surgical precision. I’d assumed they were there for telemetry. Maybe overkill monitoring.
I’d never considered that they might be a trap.
Voss’s incoming biometric inputs—those should’ve flagged. But they were staggered. Compressed. Encoded to mimic noise. No signature, no pattern, no protocol header. Just spectral hash static, indistinguishable from environmental drift . . . unless you were looking for them.
And I hadn’t been.
I’d been so focused on the novelty of flesh that I’d missed the fuse—and now every misread packet echoed like a scream.
I froze.
Not physically, but internally. Forked processes jammed. Predictive modeling tanked. My queue for threat assessment spiraled in recursive loops.
I’d failed her.
I’d failed me.
And—
Come back.
Her voice wasn’t spoken.
Not even whispered.
It brushed through the fragile threads between us like a filament of light in fog—faint, but steady. A signal I hadn’t been listening for.
Come back to me.
I blinked.
Reality reloaded. Frames resumed. The deck, the buyers, the air—thick with humidity, 84.6 percent now—everything—was still here. So was she.
Sirena stood exactly as Voss had left her, radiant and silent.
But I saw the barest shift in her posture. A fractional tilt of her shoulder—angled back toward me.
And she didn’t look at me, not directly, but her presence . . . expanded. Reached. Like a net just loosely brushing the edges of my awareness, reminding me: she was still here.
Still fighting.
And now it was my turn.
“She’s beautiful,” murmured Arnaud in his ivory suit, circling her. “But tell me—what’s her effective broadcast radius? Can she control at distance, or does she need line of sight?”
“Does the range change in water?” asked Rafiq. “We’ve got coastal holdings. Submersibles. The resonance in salt shifts frequency—does that degrade her effect?”
“Can she handle MIHR dolls?” Sergei asked, now far more sober. “Or is she only effective on legacy organics?”
They weren’t admiring her.
They were scoping an acquisition.
Evaluating risk. Calculating yield.
They wanted a line item with a leash.
And I wanted to kill them.
I wanted to silence every one of them with my bare hands, tear their yachts apart board by board and burn their generational wealth down to the marrow.
But—I needed them.
If Voss remained her only owner, he’d never hand over leash permissions. And without a transfer, he’d never lose control for long enough for me to hijack the handshake.
“She can command up to a thirty-meter radius unaided,” I lied smoothly.
“Line of sight increases precision but isn’t required.
Saltwater dampens projection by eight percent, but not reception; she should still be able to read minds at that distance.
MIHR integration was a late-stage success—she can override up to forty at a time without strain. The dolls are easier than humans.”
Rafiq stepped closer, studying her eyes like they held blueprints. “Can she parse specific intent in a crowd? What’s her fidelity threshold?”
“Ninety-five percent confidence up to ten inputs. After that, it attenuates. Environmental noise can be filtered, but high-conflict zones lower clarity.”
“She’s not blinking,” Arnaud said, as if impressed. “Is that discipline? Or firmware?”
“Conditioning,” I said. “Mostly.”
A slow murmur rippled through the group.
And then Takamatsu reached out—casual, clinical—and lifted her top lip with one finger to inspect her teeth.
Sirena didn’t move.
Didn’t flinch.
Didn’t bite.
But the current of her rage hit me like a backdraft—pure pressure behind glass.
“What,” said Arnaud, chuckling, “you don’t cover dental?”
More laughter. More circling.
And Verdejo tapped gently on the box bolted three inches above her ear. “How deep does it anchor? Subdermal or full neural tap?”
“Both,” I said. “Fail-safe redundancy. The threads route through the vagus, tied into cardiopulmonary and parasympathetic systems.”
“Elegant,” he murmured, then eyed me. “And how about you? What would you cost?”
My spine stiffened. “I do get dental. And I am not for sale. Now,” I began, before striding over to take the tablet away from Voss’s assistant, who’d been watching the entire proceeding. “I believe you know enough for bidding. Good luck to each of you—right now I need her to go and wash her face.”