Chapter 36 #2
I stood at the bank of monitors, hands braced against the edge of the console, watching the world collapse in a twelve-channel symphony of violence.
Everywhere I looked, chaos metastasized: inmates swarming the halls, guards firing into crowds with less discipline and more desperation, bodies careening in and out of frame with every flicker of the surveillance feed.
The air in the control room was thick with the armpit heat of machines run too hard for too long; every vented exhalation stank of recycled panic.
It was almost beautiful, in a way that made my skin crawl.
I could feel Kang behind me, one shoulder pressed to the wall, the other hand hovering at the small of his back like he was waiting for a sidearm that wasn’t there.
He watched the screens, too, but not the way I did.
His eyes darted from face to face, searching for pattern, for threat, for anything that looked like it could be predicted.
I imagined he was already three moves ahead, mapping how long it would take the Authority to retake the blocks, how fast the mutiny would burn itself out.
He didn’t say a word.
I punched up the feed for the D block yard, tracking the surge of grey and blue as the cell doors released.
The guards had dug in around the security checkpoint, stacked riot shields three high, and were lobbing gas canisters into the crowd with the ugly precision of men who’d done this before.
The prisoners broke on the line, splintered, then regrouped, fanning out to flank the perimeter. It was as much a massacre as a mutiny.
My stomach pitched. My hands slipped from the console, suddenly damp, a thin sheen of sweat coating my palms. The electric heat of the machines felt too close, like the room was shrinking around me.
“This is what I agreed to?” My voice cracked. “You didn’t say it would be a slaughter.”
Kang didn’t even blink. “I didn’t say it would be clean either.”
The matter-of-fact tone made my stomach twist tighter. “I thought we were giving them a chance, not shoving them into open fire. Half of them don’t know how to fight, let alone take a rifle off a guard. You’ve just—” I swallowed hard. “We’ve just sent them into a meat grinder.”
His jaw tightened, the scar along his chin bleaching pale. “If Petrov kept them, most would be dead in a week. You know how the culling cycles work. This way, at least they die trying.”
“That’s not freedom,” I said, my voice low and raw. “It’s a death sentence dressed up as mercy.”
On the monitors, the prisoners made another run at the checkpoint.
This time, they managed to rip a shield out of the line, turning the Authority’s own defense back on them.
Two guards went down in a mess of boots and swinging fists, their rifles disappearing into the crush of bodies.
The crowd pulled back, regrouped, then surged again.
The corridor started to fill with smoke, bodies blurring in the haze, movement stuttering in slow motion under the strobe of the emergency lights.
My hands went cold, knuckles bone-white against the console.
“You think they’re going to last more than ten minutes out there?” I hissed.
Kang grunted, low. “Maybe not. Maybe that’s enough.”
The words caught in my throat. I slammed my fist onto the edge of the desk, the noise sharp and hollow. “You’re such a bastard,” I said. “You pretend not to care, but you’re just too fucking scared to try something that might actually work.”
He straightened, the Authority bearing snapping back into place. “You have a better idea?”
“I have lots of better ideas, all of which require you not playing stoic chess master while people get their skulls caved in for your amusement.”
He crossed his arms, eyes narrow. “Go on, then. Enlighten me.”
I scanned the console again, this time looking for anything that wasn’t a dead end.
The control panel was Authority-standard, security protocol so old it was practically fossilized, but the OS underneath was something I’d seen before.
Hybridized, modular, but with an ugly flaw in the patchwork code.
“Automated defense,” I muttered.
“What?”
I jabbed at the monitor. “The base is lined with automated turrets, right? Perimeter defense, corridor suppression, you name it. The guards use wristbands to ID as friendlies, but the system has to be able to tell uniforms from prisoners in real-time or it’s useless in a riot.”
Kang nodded. “So?”
“So you just let all the prisoners out and gave the guards a reason to lock the place down. In about sixty seconds, the AI is going to classify every non-guard in this place as a live target.”
He shrugged. “That’s not new.”
I bit down hard, tried not to scream. “We could reprogram it. Turn it on the guards, or at least give the prisoners a fighting chance. But I need access to the core. You have a password?”
He shook his head, not in negation but in frustration. “They keep it isolated. Only accessible through the command node.”
I scanned the room, eyes landing on a lonely workstation in the far corner—separate from the main console, monitor still on, the glow of a single login prompt painting the air above it a sickly green.
“That it?” I asked, already moving.
The workstation was old, Authority-era, but someone had tried to upgrade it—a bundle of new wires trailing from the back, a cheap plastic thumbprint reader taped to the front of the chassis.
I slid into the chair, fingers already dancing over the keyboard.
The login screen was a joke; I bypassed it with a simple shell exploit, then paged through the root directory for the defense software.
Kang hovered behind me, breath hot on my neck. “You really know how to do this?”
“I know how to do a lot of things,” I snapped.
The software was ugly, a layer-cake of hard-coded rules and last-minute patches.
I picked through the variables, searching for the decision tree that sorted guards from prisoners.
My pulse was pounding so hard it blurred the text, every keystroke feeling like a countdown tick.
If I mistyped, the system would lock me out—game over.
“That’s it,” I said, clicking through to the override.
Kang squinted at the screen. “You can reclassify the guards as hostile?”
“I can reclassify everyone as hostile, if I want. But what I’m going to do is set a delay—twenty seconds, just enough to let the prisoners get clear. After that, anyone in Authority blue becomes a target.”
He nodded, once. “Do it.”