15. BloodlineVirus
BloodlineVirus
Playlist: Virus - Rogue VHS, Kareful, pale fortress
Kael
It’s nearly midnight when I return to the empty lab. I do a quick sweep of the floor, eyes skimming over consoles, a check of the cybernetics room, listening for the smallest noise to indicate movement. No footsteps. No voices. Just the low, constant hum of the servers breathing behind the walls.
Alone. Exactly how I like it.
The systems seem to run smoother once I’m alone, or maybe I just notice it more, like the lab knows when it’s just us. This is when LINK and I align code and unravel problems. I’ve always done my best work after hours, in the quiet where control comes easier and nothing interrupts my focus.
This is the moment when the noise fades and for some strange reason the system listens, the code pouring from my fingers like a hover-car on auto-pilot.
The lab is still thrumming patiently when I step back into my office. The monitor comes alive at my touch with data streams and pulsing grids. I can’t seem to shake the sour feeling in my gut from when I walked in on Ember and Vikktor this morning, and I just can’t let it go.
“LINK—access the lab security feeds from two this morning.”
YES DR. RYUDON
WELCOME BACK TO THE LAB
LINK pulls up the lab video footage from just before I arrived and allows me access to scan it for any clues. My eyes flick to the corner of the feed for the exact time.
The anomalies flash across the central display, two jagged blips of light that refuse to resolve. Ember locks in on them, tuning out the background. She turns so her back is blocking them from Vikktor. “Father, this isn’t what you promised.” She’s holding the sleek thumb drive in her fingers.
Vikktor and Ember are standing close, their voices low but the cams pick up everything. I turn the audio up, their half-whispers becoming clearer. “This isn’t a patch. It’s a purge. You’re rewriting the system to collapse entire networks. You’re talking about the genocide of non-citizens.”
“Genocide is such an ugly word, Ember. It isn’t genocide,” Vikktor assures her, his tone clipped, dismissive. “It’s a correction. A reset for those who were never meant to thrive in our city. This virus isn’t death, it’s mercy.”
Ember’s face contorts. She swallows hard, the words difficult to speak. “These are real people, Father. There are kids in some of those non-citizen sectors. We can find jobs for them. Get them help. I can oversee it.”
The glow of cascading data streams flickers across Vikktor’s face, painting him in pale blue light that makes his sharp cheekbones look carved from stone.
“Dearest Daughter...you’ve presented the data to me yourself; the U21 rebels have infiltrated these groups, we’re just removing dangerous variables before they spread.
Most have already aligned themselves with the rebellion. ”
Ember stands stiffly at his side, her fiery hair catching the reflections of the data streams. Her eyes are fixed on her father.
“Variables? They’re families. People in the non-citizen sector are not all rebels and not all of them have magic.
You’ll wipe them out because they don’t fit into your perfect world? Because they don’t work for you?”
Vikktor turns away from her, a razor-thin smile slides across his stone face.
“And tell me, my brilliant daughter, would you prefer chaos? Riots in the streets? Magic running unchecked until the city burns?” He tilts her chin up to match his steel gaze.
“No. Order must be absolute. Those children you’re so worried about?
They’re without structure, they’re already lost. What kind of life are they currently living on the streets, hungry, cold, and uneducated?
They’re the perfect target for the rebel leaders. ”
Ember shakes her head, her voice trembling but firm. “You’re just dressing up slaughter in corporate language. Call it order all you want, but it’s still murder.”
Vikktor steps closer, smothering any space around his daughter.
He lowers his voice, but the lab cameras still catch it “Careful, Ember. You forget who gave you your seat in this lab. Who gave you your name. Loyalty is not optional in this family—it’s mandatory for survival. If you insist on speaking like this...”
He lets the pause stretch, his shadow falling over her like a cat about to devour a mouse. “You might find yourself in the same sector as those children you pity so much and not in that pretty little penthouse on the upper east quadrant.”
The air between them seems to freeze, the hum of the servers swallowing the silence. Ember holds his icy stare, jaw set, but I can see her begin to shake.
I shut the feed down, the video searing into my retinas. I’ve seen enough of “Father Of The Year.” Vikktor’s calm, clinical menace is inhuman. Having him as a father must be torturous on her.
Genocide. Correction. Variables.
The corporate management speak twists in my skull like a dagger. Vikktor Vosse never lost control of the conversation, or of her. But Ember? She was being reckless and defiant, a raw fire against his polished steel.
Brave but foolish. I tent my fingers. The kind of foolishness that gets people erased and labs shut down in this city. I’ve never seen this side of her.
I should walk away, and file what I just saw in the footage in the mental drawer marked “not my problem.” But I can’t.
Instead, I linger, the image refusing to leave me.
Ember’s body seized under the surge of adrenaline caused by her father’s shadow swallowing her whole.
Vikktor didn’t back down, didn’t even hesitate.
When he threatened her, his only daughter, it wasn’t rage or desperation in his eyes, but cold calculation.
As if she were just another employee to be leveraged.
That realization settles heavily in my chest. He didn’t become one of the most powerful men in the Corporation because of ambition. His status and power comes from ultimate control, and it has rotted his soul.
A man who would sacrifice his daughter without blinking for the sake of progress is not a man at all.
Now I don’t just understand what Vikktor is, I feel it in my bones.
He isn’t just a tyrant billionaire playing with power.
He’s far worse: A man who believes love is a weakness to be exploited.
People are just tools to be used and discarded.
I lean back into the darkness, away from the glow of the monitors, the metallic tang of sadness stings my throat.
I exhale slowly, controlling my thoughts, like I’ve been trained to do.
This is the Vikktor I know. The one who speaks of humanity like data to be rewritten and dollars to be shoved into his enormous wallet.
I’ve seen this every day I’ve worked for him.
It sickens me that Ember is caught in his sights, and that she still believes there is a line he won’t cross.
Is she naive or frightened to the core?
I come to the realization she’s not wrong.
This isn’t an update. It’s a virus. A purge dressed in suits and semantics designed to erase people.
Vikktor’s CIC geek squad didn’t build it to protect the city.
He had them build it to silence it. To rid the world of magic and rebellion, the two things he fears the most.
I hate that I have to stand by tomorrow night in this lab, my lab, and watch it run its course. I’ll stand there, the perfect corporate lapdog and watch it execute line by line while I pretend I don’t know exactly what it’s doing.
It’s not my war, not my responsibility. I have to convince myself restraint is the same as innocence, but the truth is uglier.
I could stop it. I know where to have LINK intervene, where to corrupt the rollout just enough to buy time. I’ve done worse things at times. I just...don’t.
I ask myself why. Because my focus keeps sliding elsewhere, as if I’m being drawn into the depths of a black hole. Because every piece of my mind is consumed by two powerful anomalies glowing on my map like beacons pulling at something inside me I didn’t know I still had.
So, I let the purge loom in the background, unresolved, ignored. I tell myself I’ll deal with it later. No blood on my hands that way.
After I find them, study them, understand them, I’ll process the moral dilemma of VikkCorp. It’s easy to justify looking away when obsession gives you something more satisfying to look toward.
But Ember’s eyes linger in my mind as I turn away from the screens. A warning or maybe a mirror to my soul.
My next thoughts drift to earlier this afternoon. The “urgent” meeting in the glass-walled boardroom upstairs. Suits lined up like stone statues, their ties too tight, their eyes too cold.
I’d been presenting the anomaly data from last night, tracing their irregular pulses, showing how TheKast on top of this type of power could strain or even destabilize entire dream layers in the DreamNet.
I made it blatantly obvious to the corporate pricks that anomalies could even take down the very system that VikkCorp runs daily to keep this city running.
Nothing like hitting them in the wallet to get their attention.
From GameNet and advertisements, to crime monitoring, I carefully explained to them, like six-year-olds, how surges of this size can impact the grid. I thought they were listening, but then Vikktor cut me off at the knees.
“I’ll handle this from here, Dr. Ryudon.” His voice was silky smooth but dismissive. “I have a CIC team that can investigate this for me, now that we know just how powerful this source may be.”
“With respect, sir,” I pushed back, “my team is already embedded. I created this system. If the anomalies strengthen, it compromises my entire grid. That’s not something you can brute force stop.”
“You underestimate me, Kael,” he said, a flicker dark behind his smile. “Or perhaps you underestimate how easily TheBoard bends to me. This is a very large surge, absolutely unheard of. The power that must be behind it...” He shakes his head in disbelief. “Leave the anomalies to me this time.”
I’d wanted to argue more. To press until his calm demeanor cracked, but then he’d said it. “Don’t let obsession cloud your loyalty.”
A warning? No. A cleverly disguised threat. This is Vikktor Vosse.
I’d capitulated, sort of, out of loyalty, but mostly because the anomalies had already wrapped themselves around my mind. I was going to do what I had to do, because I needed the data more than I needed the fight.
“These two anomalies are no longer your jurisdiction. They belong to CIC enforcement now. Consider it...streamlining.” Vikktor dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Going forward all your time will be dedicated to furthering the cybernetics research and building my security team of the future.”
I snap back into the moment, a delivery drone startling me by glitching and bumping against the lab window.
Now, staring at the glowing map in my lab, I know Vikktor is rolling this out tonight.
Whatever he’s releasing into TheKast, this purge, it’ll light up my grid.
Maybe it will bring it down. Serves him right.
My fingers hover over the console, the map pulsing like a living thing on the glass. The anomalies twitch, almost as if they sense what’s coming. If they could only flare again so I could get an exact location.
If Vikktor has his hands in this, then I need mine deeper. This, in fact, is my battle and I’m not ready to die on this hill.
“Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.”
—Sun Tzu—The Art of War
I swipe across the grid, opening a hidden channel buried three firewalls beneath VikkCorp’s surveillance system. Only Ember knows it exists, and even she thinks it’s only a stress-testing protocol.
With a few keystrokes, I reroute the anomaly data stream through my private loop and have LINK send it to my hard drive at the penthouse. Whatever Vikktor unleashes tonight, it won’t just hit TheKast, it’ll land right here, in my lap. I’ll see it, dissect it, own it.
A warning flashes across the screen, and LINK chimes in loudly:
UNAUTHORIZED DIVERSION DETECTED
OVERRIDE DR. RYUDON?
I override it with a single code phrase only I have knowledge of.
The monitor dims, the reroute locks into place, and the anomalies flare brighter than before. I can almost feel their heat bleeding through the screen, calling me like a siren song.
Leaning back in my chair, I allow myself the ghost of a smile. “Your move, Vikktor.”
For the first time, I’m not just reacting to him. I’m playing his game. You never know when the genocide card will need to be played, revealing just how evil Vikktor Vosse really is.
A flicker of neon from outside the building washes over the lab’s glass walls, causing my eyes to quickly adjust to the contrast of the darkness in my office. I don’t know if this makes me more dangerous or more trapped.
Ash once said to me, “You pretend you don’t see the bodies piling up, but you still take the paycheck. That’s not innocence, Kael, it’s cowardice dressed as research.” His words play in a feedback loop in my head.
I stand to lean over my desk, fists braced against the edge. My reflection stares back from the grayed glass, fractured by lines of code LINK is running. Dark tired eyes, haunted...that’s me. Every damn day.
“Just hold it together long enough for me to see what you are,” I murmur to the anomalies, to the ghosts dancing on the feed.
And for the first time, I think I agree with Vikktor.
He was right about my obsession.