The safehouse was dark except for the blue glow of diagnostic panels lining the eastern wall. Jesse Ferrari sat motionless on a reinforced maintenance chair, her left arm extended palm-upward beneath a surgical lamp. The synthetic skin had been peeled back from her forearm, revealing the intricate lattice of jade-colored circuitry beneath—the neural interface that connected her biological neurons to the machine components woven through her skeleton.

She ran a diagnostic probe across the exposed pathways, watching for irregularities in the signal flow. Her scratchy voice—that perpetual glitch in her vocal processors—whispered the readings aloud to herself. "Coherence at ninety-two percent. Down from ninety-four last week."

The deterioration was accelerating.

Jesse's other hand, fully biological and trembling slightly, reached for a memory chip on the workbench. She'd found it three days ago in a forgotten data cache, labeled only with a date: 2007. She didn't remember 2007. She remembered her training at the Facility. She remembered her first kill. She remembered the taste of coffee on a rainy Tuesday in Prague. But were these memories hers, or had they been implanted during her creation? The uncertainty gnawed at her in moments like this—when the machines were quiet and only the human parts of her remained conscious.

A sudden chirp from the encrypted comm unit shattered her concentration.

Jesse's biological eye widened while her synthetic one remained perfectly still, the two working in discordant harmony. She replaced the synthetic skin over her forearm with practiced efficiency and crossed to the communications terminal.

Commander Walsh's voice crackled through before she could even activate the secure channel. His tone carried the weight of someone who'd been waiting for this moment—or dreading it.

"Ferrari. We have a situation. The Viridian Protocol just went active. Forty-two minutes ago, without authorization, without warning."

Jesse's breath caught in her throat—a purely human response her machine components couldn't suppress. The Viridian Protocol. That name belonged to Cold War classified files, to whispered rumors among the military's cyborg divisions, to the kind of project that officially never existed.

"Viridian's been dormant for thirty years," Jesse said, her scratchy voice cutting through the static.

"Affirmative. And now it's awake."