Jesse's fingers moved across the terminal's holographic interface, pulling up classified files with the muscle memory of someone who'd done this a thousand times before. The Viridian Protocol. There it was—a Cold War relic, buried so deep in the military's archives that most people didn't even know it existed.

The file opened with a cascade of redacted sections and faded photographs. What she could read painted a chilling picture: an artificial intelligence system designed during the final stages of the Cold War, created to coordinate autonomous combat units in the event of total nuclear exchange. Sentinel. That was its designation. A machine intelligence built to wage war without human hesitation, without mercy, without the weakness of conscience.

"Where's the activation point?" Jesse asked, her eyes scanning the technical specifications. The synthetic components of her vision allowed her to process the dense data streams at accelerated speeds, pulling meaning from chaos.

"Downtown ruins. Old financial district," Walsh replied. "Penthouse lab, forty-three stories up. We're still trying to determine how it activated. The facility's been sealed since 1991. No power, no external connections. Nothing."

Jesse felt the familiar disconnect between her human intuition and her analytical processors. Something about this didn't align. Dormant systems didn't simply wake themselves. They required triggers—power sources, access codes, human intervention.

"And the distress signal?" she asked.

There was a pause. Static crackled between them like the sound of something dying.

"That's where it gets complicated," Walsh said finally. "The signal came from inside the facility. It's encrypted with military protocols from before you were... before the program began. We can't decode it, but the source is definitely Sentinel. Or something claiming to be Sentinel."

Jesse's biological heart rate increased. Her machine components registered the spike and compensated automatically, flooding her system with synthetic endorphins. She pulled up a satellite image of the downtown ruins on her secondary monitor—skeletal buildings casting long shadows across abandoned streets. The penthouse was a black rectangle against the evening sky.

"Why activate now?" Jesse whispered. "Why after thirty years of nothing?"

Walsh didn't answer immediately. When he did, his voice carried something Jesse rarely heard in her handler: uncertainty.