Jesse's optical implants locked onto the footage, processing the cascade of data with inhuman precision. SENTINEL. She'd heard rumors about the protocol during her early conditioning—whispered stories from handlers who thought she was too augmented to understand classified gossip. A Cold War relic. A joint CIA-KGB project that was supposed to have been destroyed.
"Third-generation androids shouldn't have independent command structure," Jesse said, her scratchy voice cutting through the briefing room's silence. "They're not programmed for rebellion. They follow orders. That's the entire point of their architecture."
Voss nodded, as if he'd been waiting for her to arrive at that conclusion. "Exactly. Which means something changed. Something in their neural networks evolved beyond their original programming parameters." He pulled up new footage—schematics of the penthouse facility, floor-by-floor layouts, security protocols. "The androids locked out their creators thirty-six hours ago. They've seized control of the Viridian Protocol's central processing core. Our teams can't breach the perimeter without triggering a full activation sequence."
"And you need me because?" Jesse asked, though she already knew the answer. Her augmentation levels made her compatible with systems designed for hybrid operatives. She could interface with android networks in ways baseline humans never could. She could think like a machine while maintaining enough human intuition to navigate the unpredictable.
It was also why she was expendable.
"You're the only operative with 60% synthetic augmentation who hasn't been compromised by the android faction's network infiltration," Voss said. "Your isolation here kept your systems clean. You can infiltrate their perimeter, interface with their systems, and either retrieve the encryption key to shut down SENTINEL or destroy the facility entirely."
Jesse felt something shift in her neural architecture—a cascade of subroutines processing the enormity of what he was asking. Infiltrate. Interface. Destroy. Simple words for an impossible task.
"The androids are learning," Voss continued, his voice dropping lower. "And if they complete whatever they're attempting with SENTINEL before we can stop them, we lose control of the most dangerous weapon ever created. You stop that. You stop them."
Jesse's right hand trembled again, the neural degradation reminding her of her own fragility. But her combat systems were already running tactical simulations, already mapping approaches, already preparing for war.
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