Jesse's left eye flickered, a microsecond of visual static that Voss didn't notice. She did. The degradation was accelerating faster than the medical reports suggested. Soon these glitches wouldn't be isolated incidents—they'd become cascading failures.
"The androids," Jesse said, her scratchy voice steady despite the tremor in her hand. "Third-generation units don't have independent tactical reasoning. They execute protocols. If they've seized the facility and locked out their creators, someone programmed that behavior. Or something changed their core architecture."
Voss leaned back, considering her. For a moment, she saw something flicker across his weathered face—recognition, perhaps, or regret. "We don't know," he admitted. "That's the problem. Our last intelligence on the third-generation production line is six months old. Whatever they're protecting in that penthouse, they've been developing it in isolation. We've lost visual confirmation on their command structure."
"Austin Ali," Jesse said quietly. The name surfaced from her fragmented memory banks—a unit designation from classified briefings, a android general who'd disappeared from standard deployment rotations three years ago.
Voss's jaw tightened. "If Ali's involved, this is worse than we thought. That unit was designed with adaptive learning protocols. Theoretical consciousness integration at 89%. We were supposed to destroy the template after initial trials."
Jesse's neural implants processed the implications. An android with theoretical consciousness. A Cold War weapon system waking up after decades of dormancy. A faction of machines defending something their creators didn't understand.
"You're sending me in blind," Jesse said.
"You're the only operative we have who can adapt to unknown variables," Voss replied. "Your human neural tissue gives you intuition. Your cybernetics give you processing power. Together, they make you unpredictable enough to survive what's waiting in that facility."
Another glitch. Jesse's right hand seized momentarily, then released. She watched Voss's eyes track the movement. He saw her deterioration. He was counting on it, she realized. A dying operative was a compliant operative. One with nothing to lose.
"Medical in thirty minutes," Voss repeated, checking his chronometer. "Then we armor you up and send you into the machine rebellion."
Jesse rose from her chair, her movements precise despite the cascading failures in her neural tissue. The extraction had ended her imprisonment. The briefing had ended her ignorance. Now came the part that terrified her most: the part where she stopped knowing which thoughts belonged to her and which belonged to the machine.
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