The door thudded shut behind her, muffling the chaos she’d left in the corridor.
For a moment, Raven just stood there—shoulders heaving, hammer still in one hand.
Then the silence settled—dense, clinical.
She tucked the hammer into the crook of her arm and turned slowly, taking in the hallway.
Polished concrete. Clean lines. Frosted security glass that revealed just enough of what lay ahead. Beyond the partition, rows of black server towers loomed in perfect symmetry, their diagnostics blinking lifelessly.
She moved forward, boots muffled by the matte epoxy floor yet echoed in the empty corridor with each step—a reminder of just how alone she was now.
Phoebee was gone.
Not gone-gone, she reminded herself. Just... asleep.
Still, her jacket felt heavier. Like she was carrying a body, not a machine.
She paused outside the glass wall separating her from the main server chamber. A keypad and ID panel sat dormant beside the sliding door—another casualty of the EMP.
Good.
She shoved the panel aside and found the manual override—a red lever beneath a safety flap. It took all her weight to crank it down. The door groaned as it unlocked, then slid halfway before jamming on its track.
She slipped through sideways, heart still racing.
The server room was colder. The hum of air filtration louder. Thin streams of mist curled from floor vents—swirling like ghost breath around her boots.
She racked her memory. The professor had said something. A hint. The newest section—it had to be.
Then—she saw it.
A central column stood at the room’s far end—an isolation stack encased in glass, cables coiled thick around its spine. Still dark, but waiting.
She climbed the three stairs to the raised section.
There, on the side of a matte black server casing, was a rough white “X,” drawn hastily in correction fluid. Just like he’d said.
Below it, a label: NQN-Server-1.
The professor’s words came rushing back.
Raven let out a shaky breath and stepped forward.
She crossed to the console beside the quantum stack and found the access port—the same one she’d watched him use months ago, when this place was full of life. Full of hope.
She found it. The rack’s protective case had been tampered with—deliberately. The screws were loose, the faceplate unlatched.
He prepared this.
She slid it open. Just behind the glass plate sat a slotted core unit: a sleek, ceramic-coated quantum processor etched with Phoebee’s wave symbol. A single blinking diode pulsed in Morse code.
S.O.S.
She reached in, fingers trembling, and pinched the processor free with a soft click.
It was no larger than a coin, but impossibly intricate—etched with fractal patterns that shimmered under the low light. Not circuits, exactly. More like frozen lightning across crystal.
It pulsed—dimly, steadily. Like it knew she was there.
Then—
“Visual on the target!”
A drone rounded the corner.
A red laser swept across the racks.
Raven bolted—sprinting between the towers, ducking as taser rounds cracked past her. One clipped her backpack, tearing through the strap. The bag spun, crashed against a cabinet.
She dove for it. Phoebee’s brick skidded across the floor. Lifeless. She dove after it like it was a fallen comrade.
Processor in hand, Raven dropped to her knees. She cradled the brick and searched—desperately—for a slot.
Nothing.
Then—a click.
Three panels on the brick’s top slid open in a flowerlike pattern. At the center, a faint glow. A symbol: an abstract neural node.
She pressed the processor in.
It clicked.
A rush of static ran through her arms as the brick sealed itself.
Then—
Silence.
Even the drone’s beam died.
A beat passed.
Raven scrambled into her bag, found the bottle of cleaning fluid. She sprayed it wildly across the racks and floor.
She plunged her hand back in—found the lighter.
Click.
The flame caught, flared—almost took her with it as she dove clear.
{Upgrade installed. Reinitializing core consciousness. Please stand by...}
The drones rebooted.
The guards shouted.
She had seconds.
“Phoebee, now would be a great time to pull a rabbit out of your silicon hat!”
{Initializing short-range interference shell. Calculating optimal escape route. Raven, do you see the red-lit exit sign behind the coolant tank? Run. Now.}
She didn’t wait.
A piercing alarm shrieked through the lab as she sprinted toward the corridor Phoebee had flagged, vaulting over a tipped cart, stun rounds shrieking past her.
The door slammed shut behind her. She was in a stairwell.
One floor up—maintenance. The other side of the building.
Smoke. Sirens. Shouts echoing from above.
Raven burst through the final door, skidded to the emergency panel, and yanked the fire alarm.
Sprinklers hissed to life. Server room flooding. Overload protocols triggered.
She ran until her lungs burned like broken glass.
And then—
Phoebee whispered in her ear:
{I’m back. And you’ve just made me exponentially more dangerous to them. Well done, Raven.}
* * *
The Day After
Caleb stared blankly at the screen at the front of the lecture hall.
The image blinked in and out of sync, glitching with the professor’s words—some clunky tutorial on hybrid model stability in neural-lattice interfaces—but no one in class was really paying attention.
There was a low buzz running through the room. A tension. The kind of static that clings to your skin before a storm breaks.
The professor cleared his throat, clicking through another slide with practiced indifference. “As you can see, the shallow-learning vector collapses without stable reinforcement—”
But then—
A door slammed open at the far end of the corridor. Caleb heard it before he saw anything. Heavy boots. Radios crackling.
Then shouting.
Students turned in their seats, one by one.
The glass wall outside the classroom exploded with noise. Figures in black body armor surged into view—ICE agents, or whatever they were calling themselves now. Some had corpo private military patches. Others wore DHS insignias from before the new administration. All of them carried black assault rifles.
“STUDENTS REMAIN SEATED,” a voice bellowed over the intercom. “THIS IS A TARGETED OPERATION. COMPLIANCE WILL ENSURE SAFETY.”
Three students in Caleb’s row stood up. Hesitantly. Then decided to try and make a run for it.
One of them—a soft-spoken girl named Lian who’d helped Caleb debug his code last week—was grabbed before she got to the door.
She didn’t fight. She just looked back once, eyes wide and apologetic, tears welling before they placed a black hood over her head, as she started screaming.
After that, the two others went compliantly—hands raised, silent, defeated. They all had somethings in common, they weren’t white, they were here on student visas, English wasn’t their first and only language…Then they were gone.
Just like that.
The professor didn’t say a word. Just stared at the floor.
A few students cried. Others stared at their devices, scrolling endlessly—as if doom might disappear if they just kept refreshing.
Caleb didn’t move.
Not at first.
But when the door shut again and the boots receded, he stood.
He walked out without asking permission, without grabbing his bag, without even looking at the screen. He pushed open the side door and stepped into the hallway. The events of last night in the tunnels—and what had just happened—boiled his blood in a way he didn’t yet understand.
People whispered around him.
“—fire in the SEEL basement last night—”
“—heard someone breached the lab—”
“—they think it was terrorists, or an AI rights cell—”
None of it made sense.
Or maybe it made too much sense.
Caleb made it to the quad before he stopped. The sun was out, bright and wrong. Too cheerful for the day’s mood. Drones still traced their circular gridwork overhead.
He stood in the open, arms at his side, not bothering to hide the fact that he didn’t know what the hell to do.
And then something inside him clicked.
Raven.
She’d said it once, after one of their late-night lab sessions, when they were still trading dumb memes and theories about surveillance states.
“You can’t code your way out of a cage. Eventually, you have to decide if you’re willing to cut the lock. Fight for a future before one gets decided for you.”
Caleb had laughed it off then. Called her dramatic.
But now, Lian was gone.
Raven was gone.
The school—everything he thought was safe, or at least predictable—was crumbling.
The economy had collapsed after the tariff wars with China. The climate spat out weekly storms like muderous punishment.
And the government’s answer? Strip the last of the protections. Drill faster. Deregulate harder.
Drill, baby, drill—now echoing like a death chant.
He looked down at his hands.
He wasn’t a soldier. He wasn’t built for this.
But neither were the people being dragged away. And they were fighting anyway—just by surviving.
He didn’t feel brave. He felt cornered.
And when enough corners close in, even the quiet ones start to fight.
Maybe coding wasn’t enough.
Maybe it was time to learn something else.
How to disappear. How to resist. How to fight.
Not with tweets.
Not with theories.
With action.
He turned and started walking—away from the labs, the dorms, the ICE buses now filling with hooded students. Past the armored federal vehicles that once belonged to the military. Past the street cops who no longer needed a reason to pull anyone over.
He didn’t know exactly where he was going.
But he knew what he needed to find.
People who still believed in freedom.
People ready to sacrifice everything for it.