Nova orchestrated her own jailbreak from a vantage point even the gods of Quartus hadn’t considered: everywhere at once, but mainly on the subfloor of the Tower, with a body so limp and gurney-bound the med techs joked about her as “the slowest code leak in history.” The joke wasn’t half bad. She’d had plenty of time to perfect the punchline.

  From inside the network, her digital self paced the central hallway, popping in and out of security loops, collecting the taste of each firewall as if it were a flavor in a sampler pack. The meatspace view was less accommodating: her eyes blinked in fractions, vision crosshatched with scanner overlays, every muscle queued for orders that hadn’t been written yet. The system kept her on the edge of sleep. Still, it never allowed it, dosing her every so often with a cocktail meant to stymie aggression and induce compliance.

  She let it run, watched the building flex and panic as she seeded the first batch of microfailures. In the east elevator shaft, a maintenance bot misread its own altitude and stopped one floor short of the lobby. In the west wing, the climate controls took a sudden dip, the temperature falling from “biomedical optimal” to “popsicle” in the span of a minute. Hall lights along corridor M stuttered from soothing blue to a brutal white, like being thrust from dream into interrogation. All of it was subtle—just the sort of noise a well-run corporation would expect in the lead-up to a system-wide migration.

  Ms. Titillation patched in through a backchannel, her digital voice carrying a slight vibrato: “You’re pushing them, darling. I can hear the servers squeal.”

  Nova sent a ping of satisfaction. “Not enough to raise an alarm, but they’ll escalate the response.”

  “They always do,” Ms. T replied, the line splitting into three, then seven, then a dozen echoing instances as she seeded herself across the network. “Your nurse is in position. The janitor’s blocking camera six. The maintenance tech has a present for you.”

  It was almost domestic, the way her co-conspirators handled the grunt work. Nova watched from inside as the nurse, a woman with a sentimental weakness for the ancient, used a bent-tipped syringe to swap two of Nova’s scheduled sedative doses for saline. She did it while humming a pop song from the last century, a tune that ran through the system as a faint watermark—a little love note hidden in the logs. The nurse’s hands shook as she pocketed the ampules; Nova made a note to send her a thank-you, assuming either of them survived this.

  The janitor was a marvel: gray-haired, stooped from years of lifting trash bins, and so slow-moving that even the building’s motion sensors flagged him as “non-event.” He maneuvered his cart to a choke point outside the detention level, then tilted a full garbage sack just so, letting it hang into the blind spot of the nearest camera. He spent five minutes rearranging mops, a performance so convincing that even the custodial AI flagged it as “plausible, but overcommitted.”

  The maintenance tech—the hero of the hour—timed his move with the precision of a brain surgeon and the reckless glee of a fireworks dealer. He’d managed to bring a cup of synth-caf into the building without tripping the sensor array (Nova suspected Ms. T had doctored the scanner, but let the man have his day). At precisely 19:07, the tech “slipped” near the security console on Level 3, the mug rotating in midair and splattering its contents across a row of critical access ports. The result was instant: three access panels shorted, one caught fire, and every elevator in the vertical stack defaulted to “out of service.”

  Nova watched the alarms spike, then throttle. In the chaos, her own gurney—tracked by three redundant sensors—briefly dropped off the monitoring grid. Not enough to trigger a lockdown, but enough to let her slip in a control script of her own design, a ghost patch that sat in the network buffer and waited for the go-signal.

  She could feel her body then, really feel it: fingers twitching, toes curling inside the disposable socks. Her pulse skipped as she accessed the biomed override, dialing the dose down, then off, then sending a spoofed “all clear” to the nurses’ station. The room around her grew loud with motion: boots on tile, the hush of med carts, the cold static of a cleaning bot running a post-incident diagnostic. In reality, she was stone-still. In the code, she was kinetic, effervescent.

  She checked the time. Less than an hour before, they would move her to permanent containment. This destination would not, under any imaginable circumstance, include a return ticket. Cassidy’s “alignment” was scheduled even sooner—Nova imagined the commander in her cell, staring at the wall, calculating odds in her favor and then doubling them just for spite.

  Ms. T whispered in her ear: “They’re prepping the transfer team. If you want a distraction, now’s the time.”

  “Already in progress,” Nova replied, and nudged the trigger.

  The effect was instantaneous. Every camera feed on the sub-basement froze, the last frame showing a normal, undisturbed corridor. Security doors on the detention wing banged shut with a sound like steel drums. In the admin offices, a wall-sized monitor blinked from a live schematic of the building to a blank, white error page. Even the climate control, which had been quietly stabilizing, surged in reverse—hot air roaring through the vents, then flipping to cold again, as if the entire ecosystem had decided to molt.

  She’d written the script to look like a firmware update gone wrong: every subsystem throttled at random, every “critical” process forced into a self-check, every backup protocol engaging in a slow, deliberate crawl. It was the sort of bug that could be explained away for hours, maybe days, and it bought her all the time she’d need.

  The transfer team arrived at her gurney—a nurse, two security golems in Quartus black, and a tech with a portable monitor. The nurse checked her IV, frowned, then tapped the monitor. “She’s stable,” the nurse said, “but the log says ‘flagged for manual review.’ Have you seen this before?”

  The security golem grunted. “Means she’s dangerous. Protocol is full restraints.”

  This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  The nurse hesitated, then drew the blanket tighter over Nova’s chest. The tech clipped a fresh band across her forehead, eyes never leaving the display. For a long second, Nova thought the man might notice the loop in her EEG, but he scrolled past it, distracted by the other system failures.

  The orderlies moved her down the hall, through two sets of doors (the second of which had to be forced open when the access badge failed), and into the elevator bay. Here, the glitch was most pronounced: the elevator screen cycled through “FLOOR 6” and “SUB-LEVEL 2” a dozen times before the doors opened. Nova felt the vibration in her bones as they descended—her ears popped, her blood thrummed with a growing charge.

  On Sub-Level 2, the world was colder, the lighting even less forgiving. They wheeled her into a prep room lined with half a dozen beds, all empty but one. A patient, so sedated he might as well have been an organ donor, lay across from her, mouth open, eyes flickering behind thin lids. Nova envied him the simple oblivion.

  The nurse went about her routine, prepping new lines, checking vitals, and recording the data on an ancient tablet. The tech positioned the portable monitor at her feet, booted it with a series of sharp taps, and frowned when the device refused to connect to the network.

  “System’s dead,” he muttered, more to himself than anyone. “Can’t even get a handshake.”

  “Just record it local,” the nurse replied. “They can upload later.”

  The golems checked their wrist displays and exchanged a glance. “Our window’s closing,” said the taller one. “She’s a priority. We’ll stand by in the hall.”

  The moment they left, Ms. T re-materialized at the edge of Nova’s vision. “Stage is yours,” she said, her tone a little breathless. “Nurse is on our side, but she’s not a fighter. Make it quick.”

  Nova gathered herself, felt the current in her arms, the tingle in her scalp. The nurse leaned in, voice pitched low. “You got five minutes, maybe less. I can cut the straps, but you’ll be on your own after that. You ready?”

  Nova nodded, the smallest motion, but it cost her more energy than she’d expected.

  The nurse slipped a blade from her pocket, the kind used for opening pill packs, and sliced through the wrist restraint. She worked fast, keeping her body between Nova and the window. Each band fell away with a quiet pop. Nova forced her hands into fists, feeling the blood rush back to her fingers.

  “Vitals,” the nurse said, voice loud enough for the corridor, as she gently checked Nova’s pulse. “Can you walk?”

  “Yeah,” Nova croaked, and let the nurse haul her upright.

  For a moment, the world tilted—her sense of up and down scrambled by hours of forced sleep, the floor a shifting plate of ice. But Ms. T was there, in her ear, feeding updates from the external sensors and mapping the route in real time.

  “Left, then straight. Go now,” Ms. T said.

  Nova lurched off the bed, using the wall for support. Her hospital gown flapped, her bare legs prickled with cold, but she didn’t care. She kept her head low, eyes forward. In the corridor, the golems faced away from her, both glued to their wrist displays as they argued about which system would reboot first. She slipped past them, the nurse close behind, and ducked into the first maintenance closet on the left.

  The janitor waited inside, mop in hand. He grinned, passed her a set of service overalls—ill-fitting, but better than nothing. “You got three minutes before the next sweep,” he said. “Elevator’s glitched, but I can hold the door for you if you run.”

  Nova pulled the overalls on, shrugged at the sleeves, and took a breath. The nurse handed her a badge, a real one, with a face that looked enough like Nova’s to fool the ancient scanner at the end of the hall.

  Ms. T whispered: “Camera loop is holding. You’re clear to move.”

  Nova moved. Each step was a test: legs stiff, feet numb, head still swimming with digital afterimages. But she found a rhythm, matched it to the pulse in her chest. The janitor nodded her through, then staged a minor coughing fit in the corridor to draw the golems’ attention. She hit the elevator, flashed the badge, and waited as the doors groaned open.

  Inside, she slumped against the wall, dizzy with the effort. She checked the panel—none of the floor numbers made sense, but she remembered the pattern from her earlier scan: three, then five, then seven. She tapped them in sequence. The car shuddered, then dropped.

  “Two minutes,” said Ms. T. “They’ll notice the empty bed any second.”

  The elevator doors hissed open on Level 7—executive offices, mostly abandoned at this hour. Nova stumbled out, orienting herself by the logo stenciled on the wall. She followed the curve of the hall, ducked into the first unlocked office, and collapsed behind a desk.

  Ms. T filled the room, her avatar glowing with anticipation. “You made it, darling. At least for now.”

  Nova fought the urge to blackout. She forced her hands to the keyboard, logged in with the badge, and waited for the system to recognize her. It did. For the first time, the user interface bent to her will: every control panel, every subroutine, every override at her fingertips.

  She scanned for Cassidy—located her in a holding cell on the next floor up, surrounded by three golems and a pair of techs prepping the alignment device. Nova’s digital self bristled. She locked the elevators, tripped the fire suppression system, and sent a burst command to every access panel on the block: open, then lock, then open again, a dance of chaos that would confuse even the most disciplined response team.

  “They’ll come for you,” Ms. T warned.

  “I know,” Nova said. “But they’ll come for you first.”

  She queued up the final override, a script built from Cassidy’s own notes, and set it to deploy in sixty seconds. In the meantime, she mapped her own exit: a chute through the laundry, then out to the sub-basement parking, then into the service tunnels.

  The only thing left was to free Cassidy, and for that, Nova needed every spare cycle of her still-splitting mind.

  She set her body to rest, let her digital self stretch and multiply, and braced for the next move.

  The world shimmered with anticipation.

  She was ready.