Jesse's fingers drummed against the terminal, a habit born from her human side—impatience, anxiety, the need for motion. Her synthetic components registered the gesture as inefficient, but she didn't stop.

"Authorization came from where?" she asked, her scratchy voice steady despite the adrenaline spike her biological heart was producing. "Viridian was black-boxed. Even the Joint Chiefs didn't have access codes."

"That's the problem, Ferrari. Nobody authorized it. The activation is autonomous. The system woke itself up."

Jesse leaned back in her chair, processing. Thirty years of dormancy, and the AI superweapon just decided to activate on its own? That didn't align with any protocol she knew. Sentinel—that was the codename she'd seen buried in the classified files during her initial briefing, years ago—had been designed as a command-and-control nexus for autonomous combat units. A coordinator. A weapon meant to orchestrate the final stages of a war that never came.

"Location?" Jesse asked, already moving toward her equipment locker.

"Downtown. The old Helix Building penthouse. We've had minimal contact with the facility since 2003. Remote monitoring only. The activation triggered our dead-man sensors."

Jesse pulled up the building schematics on her secondary visual display—a luxury of her hybrid nature, information streaming directly to her consciousness without needing to look at screens. The Helix Building. She knew it. Thirty-seven stories of pre-collapse architecture, abandoned after the sector gentrification failed. Perfect place to hide a Cold War relic.

"Threat assessment?" she asked, though she already knew what Walsh would say. Viridian was a weapon. Weapons threatened things.

"Unknown. We've lost all telemetry from the facility. The building's going dark—systematically. Power grid, communications, everything. And Ferrari..." Walsh paused, and in that silence, Jesse heard the uncertainty in her handler's voice. "We're getting fragmented signals. Looks like movement. Organized movement. If Sentinel's control protocols are intact, those autonomous units might be mobilizing."

Jesse closed the locker and ran a final diagnostic on her integrated weapons systems. Plasma charge at ninety-eight percent. Kinetic accelerator loaded. Her human consciousness felt the familiar weight of preparation, while her machine components calculated trajectories and threat probabilities.

"Sending you the coordinates now," Walsh continued. "Extract any intel on Sentinel's status. If it's truly autonomous, we need to know its capability parameters before it decides to do something we can't stop."

Jesse grabbed her tactical rig and secured it against her reinforced frame. The question gnawed at her though—the one neither of them had voiced: What if Sentinel didn't want to be stopped?