Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Gideon leaned back in his chair and stared across the comms room at Zadie. She sat at her desk, a soda in hand and a straw between her lips. When they’d first met, she’d described him as a legend. As someone she looked up to.
Except she was the one worth admiring, not him.
Glancing up, she set her cup aside. "Why are you two here?"
"Thought you might want an audience," Coulter said.
"I told you how much she hated that." Neve pulled out the only extra chair in the room and sat in the middle of the space. "But we’re curious how this is going to work."
Gideon cracked his knuckles, rolled his neck, and pulled the keyboard closer.
He’d never worked well under pressure. He preferred to close his door and do his thing in private.
But the military had beaten most of that out of him.
As a department head at Hyperion, he’d stood over plenty of shoulders, it wouldn’t kill him to allow the same.
"It’s fine with me." He reached for the headset and looked at Zadie. "Are you ready?"
"Let’s get this party started." Zadie pulled her headset over her ears. "Comms check." She wiggled her fingers over the keyboard.
"Check check." Gideon adjusted his chair, glancing around his workstation, double-checking everything. He had two monitors on his desk and two on the wall. Zadie had the same setup to his left, so they could both track each other's movements in real time.
Coulter leaned against the doorframe, one hand stuffed in his pocket, the other holding a mug of coffee.
Neve sat in a chair in the center of the room with her elbows on her knees, eyes scanning the screens.
"This battle might play out between these screens and a remote server," Gideon said. "But the danger is as real to us as a gun pointed at our chests. If I ask you to be quiet, it means I don’t want to hear you breathe. If I need you to clear the room, it’s because shit is happening, and I can no longer focus with you watching me. "
"Understood." Coulter lifted his mug and took a sip.
"Not my first digital rodeo," Neve said.
Zadie pulled up the entry architecture on her left monitor.
The dummy server Gideon had built over the last three days sat on her right.
It was a mirror of ORACLE's lower-level access structure, accurate enough to rehearse the credential plant but disconnected from anything live.
They'd run it eleven times. She'd completed the insertion in under four minutes on eight of those runs.
The other three, the simulated AI had flagged her.
Four minutes. That was the window. Anything longer, and the noise Gideon generated would start looking repetitive, and the AI would deprioritize it and start hunting for secondary threats.
"Clock starts when I ping the first node," Gideon said. "You don't move until I've got full engagement."
"I know the plan." Zadie glanced at him sideways.
He tried not to chuckle, but it was impossible. "I know. I'm saying it out loud because it calms me down." They’d been at this for hours, and they’d found each other’s hot buttons. In a curious way, it made everything real—especially his feelings for her.
"You don't look calm." Coulter eased into the room, setting his mug on the far table and sat on that because there was nowhere else to sit and he'd forgotten the golden rule when it came to the comms room.
If anyone on the team wanted to sit, they had to bring their own chair—a lesson Gideon was glad he'd never have to learn because the comms room was part of his domain.
"I'm calm on the inside." That wasn’t a total lie.
But his pulse sat somewhere around ninety.
However, that would change the moment the clock started running.
He planted his palms flat on the desk, breathed in through his nose, and pulled up the entry script he'd written.
A sequenced barrage of authenticated-looking credential requests designed to hit ORACLE's perimeter from six spoofed IPs simultaneously.
It would look like a coordinated breach attempt.
Sophisticated. Aggressive. The kind of attack that would force the AI to commit resources.
"Going live in ten seconds," Gideon said. He launched the first volley.
The left monitor exploded with data. Request packets streamed out of his terminal, hit the first layer of ORACLE's perimeter, and bounced. That was totally expected. The AI would catalog the attempt, log the source, and begin building a behavioral profile of the attacker.
Standard response in any AI system. He needed it to do exactly that—to focus on him, study him, commit processing power to understanding his methods.
"Contact," he said. "AI is logging. No active response yet."
He launched the second wave. Different vector. Different spoofed origin. The requests were heavier this time. They probed deeper, poking at authentication protocols two layers in. It was still designed to fail. But designed to fail in ways that almost looked like they were succeeding.
His right monitor lit up. "Shadow server deployment." The system was creating decoys, rerouting data behind the perimeter, laying traps for him to stumble into. "She's chasing me. Go, Zadie."
Zadie's fingers hit the keys hard and fast. On the wall, her screens came alive with the quiet insertion of a low-priority maintenance port that handled routine system updates.
It was an access point that the AI would normally monitor with passive scans.
Background noise. Invisible, as long as the AI had something louder to worry about.
Gideon pushed harder with a third wave. He mimicked a credential on one of the mid-level authentication gates. A rapid sequential attempt with slight variations that screamed amateur but demanded attention because volume was volume, and the AI couldn't ignore it.
"Thirty seconds in," Zadie said. "I'm through the maintenance layer. Moving to the permission architecture."
"Keep moving. But let me know if you see any flashes."
"You got it."
He watched her progress on the wall while feeding the AI more noise with his left hand. Split focus. Two conversations at once. His brain partitioned the way it used to during late-night ETHER builds when he'd run diagnostics on one system while writing code for another.
"AI just spawned a second shadow server," he said.
"I take it that’s good?" Coulter asked.
"It’s excellent," Zadie said. "Keep her busy, Gideon."
"Copy that." Gideon rotated the attack vector again.
New IP. New approach. This time he probed the data routing layer—not trying to access anything, just mapping traffic patterns in a way that would look like reconnaissance for a larger attack.
The AI would interpret it as phase one of a multi-stage breach and start fortifying the inner perimeter.
Which would pull resources away from the maintenance port Zadie was crawling through.
"One minute," Zadie said. "I've got the permission tree. Locating the credential shelf."
Coulter stepped forward. "What's that?" He pointed at a cascade of amber text on Gideon's right monitor.
"The AI reclassifying my threat level." Gideon scanned the output. "She's bumping me from passive surveillance to active containment. That's good. Means she's allocating more processing power to me."
"It doesn't look good," Neve said.
"It looks exactly like it's supposed to."
He launched another volley—this one targeting the encryption handshake protocol on ORACLE's secondary authentication gate.
An actual attack would have been trying to intercept the cipher exchange.
His attack failed in the right way, tripping every alarm in sequence, forcing the AI to respond to each one individually.
His screen flashed. The AI deployed a honeypot, or a fake data cache, designed to lure the attacker deeper while logging every move they made.
"She just baited me." Gideon grinned. "Let the fun begin.
" He dove into the honeypot, feeding the AI exactly what it wanted—his attack patterns, his probe sequences, his timing.
Let it learn him. Let it build a complete profile.
The more data it collected on his methods, the more confident it would become that it understood the threat, and the less bandwidth it would spend scanning for anything else.
"Ninety seconds," Zadie said. "I've found the shelf. Planting now."
"Do it right. I've got her attention."
Neve pointed at Zadie's wall monitor. "That line just changed color."
Zadie's hands froze for a fraction of a second. Gideon's eyes snapped to the display. A single line in the permission tree had shifted from green to amber. Passive scan.
"The AI just brushed past the maintenance port on a routine sweep," Gideon said. "Don't move."
"Waiting for you to clear."
He pulled up a fresh script—something he'd written as a contingency and hoped he wouldn't need. A simulated data extraction attempt on ORACLE's outermost storage partition. The digital equivalent of smashing a window.
He launched it.
The amber line on Zadie's monitor flickered back to green. The AI had pivoted, drawn by the louder threat, abandoning the passive sweep.
"Go," he said.
Zadie's fingers moved. On the wall, he watched the credential package slide into the permission architecture—native formatting, legacy timestamps, buried three layers deep in a dormant section.
"Two minutes forty," Zadie said. "Package is seated. Running integration check."
Gideon kept feeding the AI. His smashed-window script generated massive response traffic. The system was throwing everything it had at the perceived extraction attempt. Shadow servers multiplied across his monitor—like cells, dividing. Data reroutes cascaded in chains. The AI was fully committed.
Then something shifted.
His left monitor stuttered. It wasn’t a lag. More like a redirection. The AI's behavioral tracking had changed pattern mid-cycle. Instead of following his latest probe, it doubled back. Scanned the previous attack vector, returned to the current one, and doubled back again.
That wasn't how the AI worked. The AI chased the loudest threat. It didn't second-guess.
"Something's going on," Gideon said.
"What do mean?" Zadie asked.
"The tracking pattern. She's oscillating. Checking my old vectors against my new ones." His fingers flew across the keyboard, pulling up the AI's response logs in real time. "That's not automated behavior. The AI commits. She doesn't waffle."
"You think someone's steering her?"
He watched the pattern repeat. Like the AI was being asked to verify something. Like someone was sitting on the other end, watching the same data Gideon was watching, and telling the system to take a second look.
"Someone’s inside the system watching me."
"Who?" Coulter asked.
Gideon didn't answer. He adjusted his attack pattern.
A subtle variation, a slight shift in timing that wouldn't register as different to the AI's algorithms but would be obvious to a human analyst watching the feed.
A test. If the response adapted to the variation in a way that followed logic rather than code, it wasn't the AI making the call.
The AI's containment protocol shifted to match his new timing. Someone had overridden the automated response and manually adjusted the tracking parameters.
Gideon's blood chilled. "How much longer do you need?"
"Thirty seconds. Integration is running."
Gideon went loud. Every remaining script he had, he launched simultaneously. His monitors turned into a wall of scrolling data—red flags, containment responses, shadow server deployments, honeypot redirects.
And whoever was on the other end had to deal with all of it.
"Fifteen seconds," Zadie said.
Gideon's fingers ached. His shoulders burned. Sweat beaded at his hairline.
"Ten."
The AI's tracking oscillation stopped. Whoever was assisting had been forced to focus on the barrage. The automated systems took over, and the behavioral pattern normalized.
"It’s done." Zadie wiggled her fingers. "Credentials planted. Integration complete. I'm out."
Gideon killed his scripts in sequence. One by one, the attack vectors went dark. The AI's containment protocols wound down. Shadow servers collapsed. The system settled back to baseline like a lake after a stone had been thrown.
"Does that mean it worked?" Coulter asked.
"It should." Zadie looked at Gideon. "Unless someone goes looking for them specifically."
Gideon stared at his monitors. The AI's response logs were still scrolling. It was all standard post-engagement behavior. Nothing unusual.
Except.
He leaned forward. One of the containment logs had a formatting anomaly.
A string of code buried in the AI's threat assessment output that didn't match the surrounding syntax. The AI didn’t generate it.
Someone had inserted it manually. Embedded it in the response data like a note tucked inside a book.
"Shit," Gideon mumbled.
"What is it?" Neve asked.
"GR-11SEC and IY-SEED-ETH9."
"What is that?" Coulter moved to the center of the room.
Gideon's stomach soured.
He highlighted the letters and numbers on the screen. "GR—my initials," he said. "Eleven seconds, which was the exact time between my breach detection the day I was fired and the system locking me out."
"Who would know that?" Coulter asked
"Finch and whoever flagged my breach." He pounded his fist on the desk. "Isaac knows I was in the system."
"How do you know that?" Coulter stared at him.
"Because IY are Isaac Young’s initials and ETH9 is the test I ran that day."
"What does SEED stand for?" Coulter asked.
"It’s not a system term. It’s not part of any protocol or log format.
It’s plain fucking English for planted." Gideon ran his fingers through his hair.
"Isaac hacked into the HELIOS and ETHER test. He fucked with my data.
And then the bastard made it look like I tried to reroute my access credentials. "
"He’s been behind this the entire time," Zadie muttered. "But he didn’t come after me just now. He can’t know what I did."
"Maybe not. But he’s going to go looking for what I might have done."
"It’s going to be hard to find." Zadie pushed her chair back. "It would take a team of people running scripts around the clock. Not to mention they’d have to know what to look for and last you saw him, you were blowing up nodes, not trying to access the system."
She had a point.
"This might be a dumb question, but why would Isaac, or anyone at Hyperion, let you know that were watching this attack a few minutes ago."
Gideon read the string one more time. Eight characters. A signature and a timestamp from the worst day of his life, served back to him like a greeting card.
"Isaac wants me to know that he sees me and that he’s coming for me."