Four months since Siberia.
Brakka logged the number automatically every morning, though he didn't know why. Time held little meaning to him beyond mission sequencing. Yet the Siberia Incident had carved itself into his processors with the precision of a scalpel. A landmark. A fracture point.
Fenrir's uncontrolled awakening.Elira's incomplete one.The Pattern Core's contamination.
And the day Vranos's decline became irreversible.
Four months since then, two months since the global blackout—a targeted strike against Virex hubs, timed across multiple continents. No conventional virus could synchronize that. Only something deeply embedded in their infrastructure could.
Something with purpose.
He had spent the last month traveling with Elira: Japan, then Africa, now Australia. Following traces in corrupted logs that didn't obey any logic of propagation, as though the blackout wasn't spreading but searching—like fingers tapping along a locked door.
Brakka's hands moved over the interface again, repeating the sweeps out of habit. He did not trust habits; they made organics complacent. But he trusted patterns. He trusted mathematics. He trusted code.
And the code did not trust him back.
The search for the Memory Core had led him to the same place, again and again: Mongolia, where their earliest scans—months ago—had picked up a strange, dormant harmonic signature. It had seemed plausible. The core could have been buried, shielded, disrupted by the viral noise.
But tonight, on the eve of their departure, something bothered him.
A sensation.A pressure.
Not a nervous thought—servitors weren't built for anxiety. This felt like an intuition, an internal calibration being tugged in another direction.
As though someone whispered into his logic: Check again.
So he did.
He stripped away every assumption in the previous calculations—especially the ones based on Elira's rebel map. He removed her input entirely. He removed even the parameters he'd adopted subconsciously because she had suggested them.
His irritation with her recent behavior made the process easier.
The algorithm recompiled.The world map lit up.
A new location pulsed.
Not Mongolia.Not anywhere even close.
South African Continental Basin // Subterranean VaultProbability: 99.3%
Brakka stiffened.
Impossible.
Memory Cores did not teleport.They could not be dragged across continents without triggering surveillance satellites, seismic grids, thermal arrays.
Yet if this reading was correct—and it was correct—then something had moved the core from central Asia to southern Africa without leaving a trace. Or something had masked the core's movement so perfectly that even he hadn't noticed.
Which meant:
Someone else had control.Someone else was playing the game.
He zoomed in on the true coordinates. The vault was deep—far below normal excavation limits. Reinforced. Shielded. Almost… prepared.
He locked the data behind a Level-Black encryption code—one that even Dray could not breach without authorization from the Scientist himself.
Then he turned back to the earlier reading.The old one.The one everyone expected.
A weak, artificial harmonic remained over the Mongolian steppe—a leftover signature that mimicked a core's energy just enough to mislead anyone who wasn't Control.
It was messy but deliberate.A decoy.
And someone wanted them to find it.
Brakka stared at the anomaly, jaw tightening. Something in Mongolia had produced the perfect false-positive—an echo that had fooled every earlier scan. Something that wanted to be discovered.
He dimmed the whole display.
Elira was Purpose, and still she was hesitant.Vranos lacked Memory and was falling apart.Fenrir was volatile, unpredictable.And Brakka… Brakka was Control. It was his role to safeguard information, to choose what needed to be revealed and when.
So he wiped all evidence of the South African coordinates from the active mission log.
He restored the Mongolia data.Filed it as the team's destination.Made it clean, believable, routine.
And he made sure no one—not Elira, not Fenrir, not Vranos—would see the truth yet.
He shut down the console and stepped toward the elevator.
Somewhere in Mongolia, something was pretending to be the Memory Core.
He was going to find out what.
And South Africa?
That secret was his burden alone.
For now.