Three days later, they emerged from hiding—not as survivors, but as architects of retaliation.
Ash had mapped out all known Mnemosyne server farms from decrypted satellite pulses. Dev rerouted surveillance blind spots through a quantum cloaking network. Rowan, despite still healing, took command like she'd never left.
And Eira? Eira built fire.
"I call it Prometheus," she said, revealing a portable virus housed in a drive no bigger than a thumbnail. "Once inside, it spreads through every node like a memory plague—scrambles, rewrites, then wipes."
Dev whistled. "You wrote this in two days?"
Eira shrugged. "Anger's a great motivator."
Ash smirked. "So is revenge."
They split into three teams:
Rowan and Ash would hit the Northern farm buried under a disused naval base. Dev would go dark, embedding themselves in the code stream, remotely assisting both ops. Eira, alone, would go for the most secure site—Project Blackroom—where Mnemosyne stored the original behavioral archives.
"If you fail," Rowan told her quietly, just before departure, "don't let them take you. You know what they do to memory."
Eira nodded once. "If I fall, burn me with the system."
Rowan didn't answer—only handed her a locket. Inside was a picture of the team, taken before it all began. Hopeful, defiant.
Human.
At Blackroom, the air was ice-cold. Cameras blinked like eyes. Every hallway whispered secrets that didn't belong to her.
But Eira moved like silence. The virus burned in her pocket. She reached the central core room just as alarms began to rise—Rowan and Ash were triggering their end of the storm.
It was now or never.
She plugged Prometheus in.
The lights flickered. The walls shook.
Then came the voice.
"You don't know what you're destroying, Eira."
It was a synthesized version of her own voice, twisted through Mnemosyne's AI.
"We don't preserve memory. We purify it. Humanity's rot runs in recollection."
Eira stared at the interface. "Then let it rot. At least it's ours."
She hit execute.
The virus bloomed.
And far away, across the world, servers bled light.