TRIARCH
alistair
The lift descends forty meters beneath the surface. The Dominion breathes—mechanical and alive in the way things become when they are fed blood instead of electricity.
Just saying.
The doors slide open to sterile white light and the faint, ever-present smell of antiseptic struggling unsuccessfully against something older. Perhaps burnt organic matter that never quite leaves the walls.
My space.
I remove my coat, fold it with practiced care, and place it on the steel hook by the entrance. Grabbing my apron, I put my mask and gloves on to walk out of my office and to the laboratory.
Inside the primary chamber, the remains of Iteration ninety-seven are still being processed.
I can already tell this is going to be another failed mission.
What’s left of her lies restrained on the gurney—not alive, not entirely dead either. Her ribcage is open, split cleanly down the center, mechanical latticework fused to bone like a parasitic architecture.
Synthetic muscle fibers twitch intermittently, misfiring, attempting to obey commands that no longer exist. The neural core pulses weakly, blue light stuttering behind translucent polymer.
A surgeon stands frozen at the end of the gurney. “Sir…”
“Continue,” I command, not raising my voice.
He flinches and resumes flushing the spinal ports with stabilizing fluid.
It won’t help. The system has already diverged. Emotion overload corrupted the lattice hours ago. Fear crept in where compliance should have lived, and the structure cannibalized itself trying to reconcile incompatible directives.
It always starts the same way.
Precision fails when curiosity grows teeth.
I step closer, studying the subject with detached interest. Her eyes—one biological, one artificial—track me weakly. There’s recognition there. Pleading. A desperate attempt at connection.
I shut it down with a single gesture. The monitor flat-lines. The body goes still.
Another failure catalogued. Another variable eliminated. But at least this time it didn’t melt into a puddle of flesh and blood.
The next moment, I’m moving to the observation deck overlooking the secondary chamber. Below, iteration ninety-eight is suspended upright in a restraint frame, limbs held apart by articulated clamps.
His skin is intact for now, but beneath it, you can see the faint glow of embedded circuitry mapping his nervous system in real time. His mouth opens and closes soundlessly, vocal cords removed for efficiency.
I activate the neural feed. Data streams across the glass: stress response, dopamine spikes, pattern recognition, accelerating beyond expected parameters.
Too aware, just like that biker.
I lean one hand against the glass, fingers splayed, and allow myself exactly three seconds to replay the encounter again. The route deviation. The mirrored speed adjustment. The refusal to disengage until after I confirmed pursuit.
She wasn’t sloppy. That’s what irritates me the most.
I’ve dealt with stalkers before—journalists, obsessed students, corporate spies convinced they were clever enough to slip through Dominion surveillance. They leave fingerprints. Digital residue. Predictable behavioral tells and whatnot.
She left nothing.
No tail after the pass. No attempt to escalate. Just visibility, delivered with surgical intent
I straighten and turn back to the chamber. “Terminate and log,” I instruct. “Mark divergence threshold earlier than projected.”
“Yes, sir.”
As the technicians move, my thoughts drift, but not to the subject in front of me, but to the biker. The Synthète that might be sent after me, one of the Triarchs.
I exhale, removing the gloves and the surgical mask, then shove my hands in my pockets and calmly stride towards the elevator.
I press the eight-digit code on the panel —only a couple of us are allowed there—before I click on my Dominion wrist watch to type out a message to the Council of Nine.
A small holographic screen expands in front of me.
From anyone’s point of view, it looks like a luxury watch.
But to me, it’s nothing more than a leash.
Immediate Review Request—Unauthorized Parameter Interference
The response arrives in under sixty seconds.
Request acknowledged.
Council representatives are present at the Operations Desk.
Council representatives? That means only the founders are here. I lock the device and just as the elevator reaches the boardroom level.
Part of me wanted the entire Council to be included. They handle operations and recruitment while the head Triarchs oversee the entire operation.
The elevator silently opens at the edge of the observation deck. It flickers to life at my presence.
The glass wall darkens, reflective coating engaging, and three distorted silhouettes are already there, resolving in the surface.
As usual, they’re wearing masks—black porcelain, identical in form, each marked by a different color. Black, golden, and silver.
The Triarchs.
I know only two of them. Luca Halvorsen, The Veil, wearing the golden mask. He’s responsible for surveillance and complete erasure, ensuring that nothing remains where it shouldn’t.
And Victor Ashcombe, in the silver mask, is the Forge—the most controversial division. Allegedly responsible for experimental programs involving human modification, synthetic integration, and neurological restructuring.
The other, wearing the black mask… let’s just say he’s the Founder of the Triarch Dominion, the Crown.
The discretion doesn’t end there—they all use voice modulators to speak. It’s embedded in that stupid mask.
“Hertley,” Victor greets me first, “I was expecting you about iteration ninety-seven.”
I straighten slowly and walk into the room. “Yes, I have something to discuss—”
“Apologies for interrupting, but you initiated an unscheduled activation,” Luca cuts in. “Iteration ninety-seven was not approved for full emotional exposure.”
“No,” I confirm calmly. “It wasn’t.”
He tilts his head. “Then explain why the neural logs show an override routed through your authorization key.”
I turn now, meeting the darkened glass as though it were a mirror. “Someone else altered the conditioning parameters without clearance.”
Silence falls for a beat before I continue. “You ran an auxiliary protocol. Micro-stimulation of the limbic pathways. Gradual escalation. You were testing whether emotional saturation would stabilize attachment instead of degrading it.”
Victor retorts. “It was a controlled risk.”
“A theoretical one,” I correct. “Executed inside a closed system that was no longer closed.”
“You interfered with my Synthète,” there’s no accusation, but classification in my tone. “Without informing me. Without observing the escalation curve. Without accounting for divergence markers, I flagged three cycles ago.”
The Crown speaks up in his modulated voice. “You don’t own them, Hertley.”
The word lands more heavily than an accusation. Possession, in this place, is not sentimental—it’s procedural. Each Triarch owns their domain. Their data. As well as their failures.
Nonetheless, I allow a faint smile. “Ownership is irrelevant. Responsibility is not.”
“Your caution is becoming obstruction,” Victor says.
Another reason I like to call him the lapdog of the Crown.
“And your impatience is producing corpses,” I counter. “Emotion is not a variable you force. It’s one you structure.”
“We’re running out of time. The Council of Nine is pressing for viable deployment. Investors are getting restless.”
“You introduced emotional awareness without containment,” I continue.
“You amplified desire without consequence. Of course, it collapsed. Because you triggered fixation in it. I kept telling you not to authorize activation unless I say so, but—” I huff from genuine frustration and briefly close my eyes.
The word ‘fixation’ surfaces unbidden in my mind.
I try to diminish the intruding thoughts of the biker and focus on remembering the body of ninety-seven, the way the nervous system burned itself alive trying to reconcile hunger with obedience.
“This failure is on you,” I say evenly, leading into why I initially came in here.
“You’re unusually invested.”
Now’s my chance.
“You introduced an intrusion I didn’t authorize,” I reply. “And if even one Synthète were allowed to breach containment… if even one is permitted unsupervised awareness of its origin, then any anomalous behavior outside this facility would cease to be a coincidence.”
That earns their full attention.
Luca speaks. “This is iteration. Risk is inherent.”
He’s the most diplomatic person among the three who doesn’t like any imbalance in his scale of maintaining peace.
“Yes,” I agree. “But unauthorized risk introduces noise.” I widen my stance. “You don’t correct anomalies by flooding them with stimulus. You isolate them. Observe them. Let them reveal themselves on their own.”
The Crown inclines his head slightly. It’s either a concession or a warning, I can’t tell for the stupid mask.
“And what precisely are you isolating right now?” Victor asks sharply instead of the Crown.
“Iteration ninety-eight will proceed under my supervision only. No auxiliary interference. And so will be every other future Synthètes.”
“I believe you’ve always been the head of Nocturis Vincit Alistair Hertley,” Victor says.
“Sometimes not,” I say, looking directly at the Crown.
“This project belongs to the Triarch Dominion,” he says. “Not to individual obsessions. But as the head of Nocturis Vincit, no Synthète was or will be released to the public without your written permission.”
I straighten, expression smoothing back into neutrality. As it should be is what I want to say, but I don’t. Instead, I say, “Thank you for the clarification.”
They nod, but I don’t even smile, but rather turn on my heels to walk out of the room.
I don’t need to stay here any longer. I got my answer.
She wasn’t a Synthète sent after me for a practical experiment. It was a human.
“And Hertley,” Luca finishes, “try not to let hypothetical anomalies distract you.”
I halt midway, not understanding what it might imply.
“Have I ever?” I say over my shoulder, leaving no room for them to answer as I exit the boardroom with that.