The servers in the subterranean control chamber stretched like ribs of a living beast, their thermal coils exhaling waves of synthetic heat. Blue indicators pulsed in sequence—a silent, indifferent heartbeat of the Nexatech core.
Director dev stood still.
To the untrained eye, he was calm. Efficient. Unyielding.
But beneath the synthetic fiber of his suit, neural stressors were climbing. His optic overlay blinked erratically. Lines of failed trace algorithms scrolled past faster than conscious thought could register.
He had spent years engineering containment protocols, redundancy systems, absolute control. And yet now—because of one anomaly—the system had stuttered. Glitched. Breathed.
Vyomika.
The name wasn't supposed to exist beyond four encrypted files.
Not in the public index.
Not in the operational archives.
And certainly not in the open world.
Yet here she was—or rather, wasn't. Off-grid. Beyond signal. Beyond command.
> That wasn't supposed to be possible.
He paced to the observation panel—a black slab of tungsten glass that separated him from the ten-thousand-node simulation tank.
Below, a thousand versions of Vyomika ran in real-time simspace. Some complied. Some resisted. Most broke down. All were monitored.
But not the one that mattered.
> "Sir, the signal dropped near the Black Zones of Old Delhi. Drone A-77 went offline mid-transmission. Final image was corrupted."
A technician's voice—young, filtered, nervously modulated.
Dev didn't look at him.
> "Send the Aurora-class interceptors. Activate subterranean sweeps. Use dark-frequency pulses. I want full lockdown—no network, no rumors, no broadcasts."
The technician hesitated. "Sir… local humans will be affected."
Dev turned. Slowly. No anger in his face—only inevitability.
> "They're already affected."
The room went silent again, save for the humming of the artificial mind.
A single thread of Vyomika's neural architecture was still embedded in the Nexus core.
Just one fragment.
He accessed it.
For a moment, the control room blurred. The walls dissolved into geometric overlays. A memory—hers—emerged.
> A rusted mirror. A face unrecognizable. A thought: This can't be me.
Then darkness.
Director dev pulled back. Disconnected.
Even now, even broken, Vyomika was broadcasting seeds of resistance. To herself. To the world.
He pressed his fingers together, palm to palm.
> "Begin Protocol Zero Trace. Scrub all public data vectors. She doesn't exist. And if she does—she ends tonight."
Far below, in the drone cradle bays, black-winged machines stirred from hibernation.
They had no names. No questions.
Only coordinates. And orders.
And one priority:
> Retrieve the ghost Nexatech once called a prototype.
Before she remembered what she truly was.