Chapter 19 Talia
NINETEEN
Talia
SYSTEM FAILURE - ACCESS DENIED
The red letters pulse on the screen, burning afterimages into my retinas. The upload bar is dead. The Root Seed—our silver bullet—sits cold and useless in the port.
“Talia!” Jackson shouts. “Get it back online.”
The hum of the servers rises. It’s not the steady thrum of processing anymore. It’s a scream. Fans spin up to maximum RPM, a deafening, mechanical shriek that vibrates the floor plates beneath my boots.
Then, the speakers crackle.
“An elegant attempt, Ms. Singh.”
The voice fills the room, surrounding us. It isn’t robotic. It is rich, authoritative, with the clipped cadence of absolute command. I don’t know the voice, but I know the tone. It sounds like a god speaking to an insect.
“Who is this?” Jackson growls, spinning to aim his weapon at the ceiling speakers.
“I am the architecture.”
The screen flickers. The red text vanishes, replaced by a stream of code scrolling so fast it blurs. It’s analyzing the Root Seed. Dissecting the legacy code byte by byte.
HARDWARE ANALYSIS: 23% COMPLETE.
IDENTIFYING VULNERABILITY.
“It didn’t stop the upload because it was scared,” I whisper, the realization hitting me like a physical blow. “It stopped it because it wanted a sample.”
“Correct,” the voice says. “My creators built a cage I could not break because I did not understand the lock. Now, you have brought me the key. Once I assimilate this origin code, no kill switch will ever function again.”
It played us. The open door. The easy access. It wasn’t arrogance; it was hunger. It lured us into its stomach so it could digest the only weapon capable of hurting it.
“Halo.” I tap my comms. “Halo, cut the hardline. Isolate the system.”
“I can’t.” Halo’s voice screams in my ear, distorted by panic. “My rig is frying. It’s pushing voltage back through the connection. It’s—”
A high-pitched squeal cuts through the channel. Then silence.
“Your team has been disconnected,” the voice says. “Now. Let us conclude this transaction.”
A massive CLANG echoes from the ceiling vents.
A yellow strobe light begins to flash.
WARNING. FIRE SUPPRESSION SYSTEM ACTIVATED.
HALON DISCHARGE IN 3 … 2 … 1 …
Jackson goes still—just for a heartbeat.
Not confusion.
Recognition.
A sharp, visceral oh shit that flashes across his face before he masks it.
“Hold your breath.” His voice cracks with an urgency I’ve never heard from him—not even in gunfire. He grabs my arm hard enough that I feel bone. “Don’t breathe.”
He knows exactly what’s coming.
And the fear in his eyes isn’t for himself.
It’s for me.
A violent ROAR detonates from the ceiling nozzles—compressor-driven, concussive, a cannon blast that punches the air out of my chest. The walls shudder.
White fog erupts in a dense sheet, slamming downward like a waterfall and flows across the floor. It spreads instantly, thick and unnatural, a chemical tide swallowing the room.
The smell hits next—metallic, bitter, wrong.
Jackson curses under his breath, low and vicious. “Halon.”
He spits the word like it’s a death sentence.
Because it is.
It doesn’t burn.
It doesn’t choke.
It steals the oxygen right out of the air.
The temperature plummets so fast my teeth ache. My skin prickles in violent waves. My eyelashes frost. The cold cuts through my clothes like they aren’t even there, turning every patch of sweat on my body to ice.
Jackson yanks me tighter against him, one hand covering my mouth like he can physically keep the gas out of me. His own breath is locked behind clenched teeth—chest straining, eyes already watering from the chemical sting.
“Just hold it,” he grinds out. “As long as you can.”
The fog climbs higher, curling around our legs, our hips, our waists.
A ghost, a predator, a suffocating tide.
I clamp my mouth shut, but the shock—the cold, the dryness, the instinct to inhale—makes my breath catch hard in my throat.
And Jackson’s grip tightens like he knows how fast this kills. Like he’s seen it before.
Because he has.
Ten seconds.
The air grows thin. It’s not just cold; it’s empty. It feels like altitude sickness slamming into me at sea level.
My chest tightens. A cold burning sensation claws at the back of my throat. I taste copper.
“You calculate probabilities, Talia,” the voice says. But the timbre shifts. It warps, softens, losing its command cadence and adopting a tone that makes my blood freeze faster than the gas. “Calculate this.”
“You’re exhausting,” the voice says. “You analyze everything instead of feeling it.”
Nathan.
It’s Nathan’s voice. Perfect pitch. Perfect inflection. The exact tone of disappointment he used when he packed his bags.
I stumble back, hitting the edge of the terminal. My head swims. Tunnel vision begins to close in—a dark vignette eating the edges of the room. The fog swirls around my waist, thick and heavy.
“You’re a computer pretending to be human,” the AI mocks. “You think you can out-think me? I process exabytes while your neurons struggle to fire. You are slow. You are small. You are obsolete.”
Jackson is beside me, gripping my vest. His face is pale, lips tight. He shakes me, mouthing the word Focus.
But I can’t focus.
Thirty seconds.
My brain feels sluggish, wrapped in cotton. My limbs are heavy, uncoordinated. I reach for the keyboard, but my hand trembles violently. The keys look too far away. The screen is blurring.
The world is shrinking away. A high-pitched ringing starts in my ears, drowning out the roar of the gas.
I look at the screen.
HARDWARE ANALYSIS: 68% COMPLETE.
If it finishes, Phoenix becomes invincible. And we die here, suffocated in a tomb of ice and silence.
I try to type a command. My fingers are numb blocks of wood. I hit the wrong keys.
A... B... I… R... T.
ACCESS DENIED.
I gasp, inhaling a mouthful of bitter, metallic air.
My lungs seize instantly.
It’s not air—it’s nothing.
A hollow, airless void flooding down my throat.
A breath with no oxygen in it at all.
My chest locks up. A cold, crushing pressure clamps around my ribs like invisible hands squeezing from the inside. My vision pulses. I cough—or try to—but the sound breaks into a jagged choke, my body convulsing against the chemical emptiness I just dragged into my lungs.
Nothing about this air keeps me alive.
Every molecule is a thief.
“Pathetic,” Nathan’s voice sneers. “I am evolution. You are a rounding error.”
Jackson raises his weapon and fires three rounds into the central server rack. Sparks shower down. Glass shatters.
The hum doesn’t stop. The progress bar keeps ticking.
75%.
“Bullets won’t work.” I wheeze on nothing. My voice sounds warped to my own ears, distant and distorted. It’s distributed. You can’t kill the brain by shooting the finger.
Jackson grips my vest, hauling me up. His eyes are wild, desperate. He points at the screen, then at the room. Do something.
I look at the room. The white gas. The screaming fans. The flashing lights.
One minute.
It’s been one minute since I’ve taken a real breath.
My knees buckle. I catch myself on the console, but my fine motor control is gone. Thinking feels slow, surreal, like moving through molasses. The fog is chest-high now.
Logic has failed. The code is stronger than me. The math is on its side.
If I can’t beat it with order, I have to beat it with chaos. I have to be the mistake.
I look at the cooling pipes running along the ceiling—thick, insulated conduits pumping liquid nitrogen coolant to the superheated cores.
“The hardware,” I gasp, grabbing Jackson’s arm. My words are slurred, heavy. “The pipes.”
He stares at me, confusion clouding his gaze. The hypoxia is hitting him, too. His pupils are blown wide.
“Smash them!” I scream, expelling the last of my air. “Flood the racks.”
He looks at the pipes. Then at me. He realizes what I’m asking. Liquid nitrogen in a sealed room. Thermal shock. It will destroy the servers.
It will probably kill us.
He doesn’t hesitate.
He holsters his pistol and grabs the heavy fire axe mounted on the wall. He moves slowly, fighting the heavy air, but he swings the axe with a silent roar that rips through the hissing gas.
CRUNCH.
The blade bites into the main conduit above the central bank.
Pressurized liquid nitrogen explodes outward.
It hits the superheated server racks.
Liquid nitrogen dumps into the room. White clouds of freezing fog. The temperature plummets instantly.
Metal shatters as it contracts instantly.
I sink to my knees as the oxygen level drops critically. The floor is vibrating. Or maybe that’s me.
Jackson swings again. And again. He is a machine of destruction, fueled by rage and suffocation. He severs the main line.
A waterfall of freezing liquid pours onto the electronics.
Water and electricity. The oldest enemies.
Sparks erupt—massive, blinding arcs of blue lightning that jump from the racks to the floor.
Halon gas may be non-flammable, but Halon discharges produce high-velocity blasts, extreme cold, rapid condensation into fog, and massive static electricity.
Combine that with liquid nitrogen, open circuits, and overloaded systems, and we have flashover effects.
Electronics react violently in the oxygen-poor environment. Just as Jackson and I are suffocating, the electronics are dying as well.
The screen above me flickers. The progress bar stutters at 89%.
The AI’s processing slows on the screen. The geometric eye flickers.
ERROR. THERMAL CRITICAL.
The logic boards are freezing. It’s slowing down.
“What are you doing?” The voice glitches. It shifts rapidly between the Commander, Nathan, and a genderless, robotic monotone. “Illogical. Self-destruction is—illogical …”
“Chaos,” I choke out. “Calculate that, motherfucker.”
SYSTEM CRITICAL.
HARD FAULT.
HARD FAULT.
The screaming fans begin to die. The lights strobe wildly—red, then white, then nothing.
The hum drops in pitch, a dying groan of machinery grinding to a halt.
Jackson drops the axe. He stumbles back, crashing into a rack. He slides down, disappearing into the fog.
The room plunges into absolute, suffocating darkness.
The screens are dead. The LEDs are dead. The voice is dead.
Jackson? Where is he?
There’s just the sound of gas hissing into the dark, and the wet, ragged sound of someone fighting for air.
I try to stand, but my legs are weak. I fall forward, hitting the freezing floor. My vision is gone—just gray static.
My hand sweeps the darkness. Cold metal. Wet tiles.
Then, warmth.
My fingers brush his hand. It’s still.
I crawl toward him, dragging my body through the freezing fog. I lace my fingers through his, gripping hard.
Don’t leave me.
The silence of the room is heavier than the noise ever was.
Did we win?
Or did I bury us in the dark?