Jesse disconnected the communication line without waiting for Walsh to hang up first. A small act of defiance, but it felt necessary. She stood in the center of her safehouse, fully suited in tactical armor, her synthetic components humming with readiness. The tremor in her hands had returned—not from mechanical malfunction this time, but from the cognitive dissonance of her hybrid nature. Her human instincts screamed that something was wrong. Her machine logic processed the data: Walsh had lied by omission, which meant the operation parameters she'd been given were incomplete at best, compromised at worst.
She moved to her secondary terminal, the one that wasn't connected to military networks. Her fingers flew across the keyboard with practiced speed, pulling up everything she could access about Dr. Sarah Chen. The public records were sparse—academic papers on AI decision-making frameworks from the late seventies, a few conference presentations, then nothing. The woman had disappeared from the scientific community around 1982, right when Sentinel was supposedly shelved.
But there were traces if you knew where to look. Jesse's enhanced processing power let her follow digital breadcrumbs that would take a normal human hours to untangle. Chen had published under different names after 1982. She'd consulted on classified projects. And three weeks ago, just like Walsh's clearance renewal, she'd accessed the Sentinel facility's secure servers.
Jesse pulled up the building schematic on her display. Forty-three stories of Cold War paranoia, built with enough redundancy to survive a nuclear blast. The penthouse lab occupied the top five floors, isolated from the rest of the structure by blast doors and independent power systems. If someone wanted to activate Sentinel without alerting the military's automated monitoring systems, they'd need insider knowledge and technical expertise.
They'd need someone like Dr. Chen.
Jesse checked her chronometer. Ten minutes until her deployment window closed. She could make it to the penthouse in eight minutes if she pushed her speed enhancement systems to maximum capacity. But something nagged at her—that fragment of memory from earlier, the classroom and the teacher's face she couldn't reconstruct. Her implants had been loading archived personality data from somewhere. The military had never explained where those ghost memories came from.
What if they weren't archived data at all? What if they were something else entirely—something the military didn't want her to remember?