Chapter 42 - Severance Protocol
The electrical discharge rippled through the rising water like a net of liquid lightning. The perimeter barrier flickered violently, its magnetic hum dipping from a high-pitched whine to a guttural stutter.
"Now!" Marco bellowed.
Ignoring the lethal current dancing across the wet floor, Marco ripped off his heavy wool trench coat, wrapping it around his forearm to insulate his grip. He vaulted over the bronze rail, driving his combat knife straight into the primary junction box at the foot of the chair.
Blue fire erupted across his chest. The kinetic shock threw Marco backward into the freezing water. His own thoracic implant flashed an angry, warning amber through his soaked shirt, his heart rhythm stuttering into an erratic ventricular flutter.
"Marco!" Silas yelled, breaking his weapon's aim for a fraction of a second as the biological part of his brain fought against the neural tether.
Silas slammed his own cybernetic temple against a marble pillar with sickening force, deliberately shattering the optical housing of his mechanical eye. Blood and coolant streamed down his face, but the blinding red glare in his socket sputtered and died. The gun slipped from his numb fingers and splashed into the surging water.
"I severed the link," Silas coughed, sliding down the pillar into the knee-deep ice water. "Marco... the sarcophagus... look at the cradle!"
I felt the barrier collapse around me as Marco's blade grounded the terminal. The crushing weight of the neural overwrite slowed, hovering at twenty-eight percent, but Prototype Zero remained locked into the chair’s interface through the bronze needles buried in my flesh.
My eyes snapped wide. My breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps.
Across the flooded chamber, the titanium aquatic cradle hissed. Pressurized nitrogen vented in thick white plumes from its seals. The reinforced glass viewport cleared, revealing what had rested in the abyss beneath the lake for eighteen years.
It wasn't a computer server. It wasn't an archive.
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It was a body.
Suspended in pale amber preservation fluid lay the perfectly preserved, surgically altered form of Samuel Bellini—his skull crisscrossed with surgical sutures of platinum wire, his chest open beneath a translucent synthetic sternum that pulsed with a dark, crystalline core identical to the master chip in my hands.
