Chapter 7
The Norwegian fjord was a cathedral of stone and ice,
its walls rising thousands of feet into the sky like the ramparts of a forgotten empire.
The trawler's wreck was days behind us,
but the fever was consuming me,
turning my mind into a landscape of distorted memories and half-forgotten combat missions.
I woke up in a room that smelled of cedar and lavender,
my body heavy,
drained of all strength,
but the infection—the deep,
sapping rot of the sepsis—was gone.
I looked to my left.
A woman,
her hair a wild halo of silver,
was hunched over a microscope,
her movements as precise and rhythmic as a clockmaker’s.
"You’re alive,"
she said,
not looking up.
"But you’ve lost three days."
"The boy?"
I rasped,
my throat feeling like it had been scrubbed with sand.
"He's in the other room,"
she said.
"He’s reading about cephalopods.
He’s quite bright."
I tried to sit up,
my muscles screaming,
but she placed a firm,
cool hand on my chest,
holding me down.
"Stay.
Your body is still rebuilding its internal defenses.
The antitoxin I synthesized for the necrotic agents they used in your side wound is barely starting to work."
She turned,
her eyes—sharp,
piercing,
and filled with a depth of ancient wisdom—locking onto mine.
"You are Malcolm Vance.
And you have brought a very dangerous secret into my house."
She pulled the tablet from the table,
the one I had brought,
and laid it beside my head.
"I know what Project Chimera is.
I was there when they wrote the first draft."
The revelation hung in the air,
heavy and cold as the fjord outside.
I had brought my son to the architect of his prison.
I reached for the SIG Sauer on the nightstand,
my movements weak,
my intention clear.
She didn't flinch.
She didn't move.
She simply smiled,
a sad,
knowing expression that felt like a knife to the heart.
"If I wanted you dead,
you would have died in your sleep,"
she said.
"I didn't pull you from the raft to execute you,
Malcolm.
I pulled you from the raft because you are the only variable they didn't account for."
"Why?"
I whispered,
my finger hovering over the trigger.
"Because you love him,"
she said.
"And love is the only code they never managed to hack."
She opened the tablet,
the screen displaying the medical index.
"They aren't just harvesting his genetics.
They are mapping the neurological pathways of human empathy to create a machine intelligence that doesn't just mimic logic,
but mimics morality.
They want him to be the first AI that can actually feel the weight of its own actions."
The madness of it was so absolute,
so terrifyingly corporate,
that it almost made sense.
They were building a god.
And they were using my son as the blueprint.
I let the weapon go,
the heavy metal falling back onto the wood with a dull,
desperate thud.
"How do we stop it?"
I asked.
"We don't,"
she said.
"We erase the data,
and we vanish the specimen.
And to do that,
we need to go back to the source."
"Where?"
"The hub,"
she said.
"The original facility where the first chimera was born."
She pointed toward the window,
toward the dark,
impenetrable wall of the fjord.
"It’s beneath the ice."
May you like
The hunt was over.
The real war was about to begin.
