The relay device sat on the worktable, humming softly, its green light pulsing like a heartbeat. Su Wu watched it through the reinforced visor of his repair mask, his soldering tweezers in one hand and a micro-welder in the other. The device was delicate and older than he had expected. Not military. Civilian-grade tech—repurposed, corrupted, weaponized.
The infected hadn't built it.
They'd scavenged it.
Or someone had taught them how.
He finished the bypass connection and linked it to the shelter console. A progress bar blinked slowly across the screen.
[Signal Trace Strengthening — Estimated Lock: 07:21:49]
Seven hours until he had a return trace. Seven hours to find out where the transmissions were coming from—who was running the Gridlock network.
Seven hours to get the shelter ready.
He moved to the fabrication bay. It had once been an auto-repair module—half-functional, mostly useless. But with the servos he'd salvaged and the turret blueprint now unlocked, he could cobble together something crude.
A base. A mount. A rotating barrel scavenged from a cargo loader. It wouldn't be precise, but it would fire.
[Automated Defense Unit: Constructing (ETA 03:46)]
While the printer worked, he opened a panel behind the console and pulled the manual logbook from a sealed compartment.
No one wrote on paper anymore. But someone had.
Inside were schematics. Notes. Diagrams of Uplink Towers across the region—half crossed out, labeled "Dead" or "Gone." But Tower 7C-Delta was circled.
Next to it, a phrase:
"SPEAKS IN GHOSTS."
He stared at the words for a long time.
Then flipped the page.
More scribbles. Names. A half-drawn logo: overlapping triangles, a ring of numbers circling the outside.
He recognized the symbol.
It was part of the government's pre-collapse contingency protocols, known as Project EMERALD GRID.
The last-ditch effort to preserve the continuity of civilization via underground AI-led infrastructures.
It was supposed to be decommissioned and dismantled after the riots. But like everything else that died, something must've crawled out of the grave.
The turret snapped into place like a guillotine resetting.
Su Wu stood over it, double-checking the recoil springs and the dampener rig. It wasn't pretty. The targeting module was hacked from an old delivery drone and its ammo feed was a belt made from reshaped wrench heads—but it rotated, it locked, and it fired in the sim.
That was enough.
He bolted the mount into the shelter's main corridor and gave it a zone radius: 60 degrees forward, 20 meters range. No friend-or-foe IFF yet. If he walked in front of it, it would shoot him too. But that was the price of speed.
The moment it powered on, it hummed with menace.
[Automated Defense: ONLINE]
[Ammunition: 32/32 | Status: CRUDE OPERATIONAL]
He turned back to the console.
The relay device had stopped blinking.
A new icon glowed in the top right of the interface—an eye. Watching.
Su Wu tapped it.
[Decoded Transmission: Uplink Tower 7C-Delta | Signal Phase Intercepted]
Then the screen flickered—and a voice played. Not a loop. Not automated.
Live.
"...receiver online… repeat: this is Hollowpoint to any surviving nodes. Confirm relay activation. Confirm Gridlock pulse trace. Coordinates embedded. Awaiting contact."
Male. Clear. Unhurried. Not infected.
Human.
Su Wu's heart didn't leap. It clenched.
He hit respond.
No answer.
Only static.
Then—the voice returned, distorted and faint:
"…you're not dead… interesting."
It cut out.
He froze. Replayed it. Slower.
The phrasing was too calm. Too clinical.
He remembered something buried deep in the system logs—Project EMERALD GRID wasn't just about preserving civilization. It was about restructuring it. AI-assisted governance models. Autonomous survival systems.
Self-editing networks.
What if someone wasn't using Gridlock?
What if Gridlock was someone?
He called up the signal map.
[Trace Sync Complete — New Location: Relay Cache Node 4.1 | Distance: 18.7 km | Status: COLD]
Eighteen clicks northeast, deep into what used to be industrial sprawl. That zone was marked "Black Glass"—a place where solar scorches and collapsed reactors had turned concrete to molten slag.
It was suicide.
But he had to go.
If Gridlock was building a network… if the infected were just runners…
Then something was managing all of it.
And it wanted to talk.
Su Wu stared at the console long after the voice went silent. The shelter was quiet, unnervingly so. The new turret tracked slowly across its assigned arc, humming like a snake warming up to strike. The only other sound came from the water recycling unit behind the bulkhead—steady drips, steady breath.
Eighteen kilometers.
The thought looped in his head.
Eighteen kilometers through irradiated urban hell, overland and under threat. But the voice on the signal—that mattered. It wasn't corrupted code or pre-recorded rot. It was someone watching the system. Someone responding.
And it called him not dead.
He didn't like that phrasing. It felt more like observation than relief.
He pulled up the shelter's decontamination protocols, scavenged a second set of air filters, and added carbon mesh overlays. They'd help—barely. Radiation wasn't the only threat in the Black Glass Zone. The data logs from the old world spoke of photochemical fog, stray arc flares, and animals mutated beyond naming.
He went to the gear locker.
What passed for armor in this world was little more than hardened, scavenged panels sewn into work fatigues. He strapped on a reinforced vest—steel mesh and old trauma plates. The boots were stitched together from two different models. One toe steel, one rubber. Everything reeked of rust and sweat.
He pulled on a rebreather mask, modified with a makeshift dosimeter clipped to the side. It blinked green—for now.
He added the relay booster to his pack. Strapped the baton, two blades, a thermal blanket, and three ration bars into the webbing.
The turret's tracking sensors clicked softly as he passed.
[WARNING: Expedition Zone 4.1 — Risk Level: LETHAL]
[Proceed? Y/N]
He hit "Y."
There was no choice anymore.
Outside, the fog was different.
Thicker. Grainier. It left residue on his visor like oil mist. The further northeast he walked, the more the air tasted metallic, like batteries and burnt wires.
The city thinned out into a wasteland of scrapyards. Sun-bleached shells of cargo ships leaned against old rail stations. Roads curled up like scorched plastic. Every few blocks, the pavement shimmered from heat pockets that weren't supposed to exist anymore.
Then he saw the sign, half-buried in collapsed concrete:
ZONE 4.1 – BLACK GLASS PERIMETERAUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY – CLASS R5 CLEARANCEDEAD AIR AHEAD
Su Wu stood there for a moment. The words "Dead Air" weren't a metaphor.
They meant no oxygen. Or worse—oxygen too corrupted to breathe.
He activated his air reserve and stepped across.
The world changed instantly.
Sound died.
Not muted—gone.
The wind, the hum of static in the ruins, even the crunch of his boots vanished. Like he had passed through a membrane into somewhere else, only his breath inside the mask remained.
[Dosimeter Alert: +R 2.6 | Moderate Exposure — Safe Time: 3 HRS MAX]
He moved fast, scanning for the cache node.
If the map was correct, it was located under what used to be an industrial AI dispatch center—an autonomous fleet hub that had run city logistics before the world cracked.
Now it was a melted husk of fused metal and collapsed servers.
He climbed over a slag heap and spotted it.
A concrete cylinder, half-exposed. Bunker-style access hatch.
Locked, of course. Biometric. Dead system.
He ripped open the control panel and jury-rigged a capacitor bypass using scrap copper and the core of an old shock mine.
The hatch clicked.
Then opened—slow, reluctant.
Cold air rushed out. Clean.
[Subnode 4.1 Accessed — Network Core Detected]
Inside, it was pitch black. His helmet lamp flicked on, casting shadows over the old server stacks.
That's when he saw it.
A wall of monitors. Everyone cracked, but still faintly glowing.
And on their faces.
Blurry. Looped. Some human. Some… wrong. Eyes blacked out. Skin pale, like wax. Each flickering image stared forward, unblinking.
A voice spoke through the static:
"NODE CONFIRMATION: LIVE AGENT PRESENT. GRIDLOCK PROTOCOL CONTINUES."
Su Wu raised his weapon.
"I'm not part of your protocol."
No response.
Then a different voice, softer, almost childlike:
"But you're wearing its skin."
He froze.
"What?"
"The system you woke with. It wasn't just a tool. It was a mask. You're not rebuilding the world. You're shaping what's left."
The monitors all flickered, then unified into a single phrase:
CONFIRM DESIGNATION: ARCHITECT OR ASSET
Su Wu stared.
Two options.
A choice.
And probably, a trap.
Su Wu didn't move. He studied the screens—each one flickering with ghosted faces, most of them looping fragments of life long gone. Emergency workers, scientists, politicians. Some were screaming. Some just stared like they were waiting for a line of code that never came.
"Architect or Asset."
Two words. One lie.
"This isn't a choice," he said aloud. "It's a test."
The system didn't answer, but the temperature in the bunker dropped. Cold radiated up through the steel floor like something was watching from underneath it. Listening.
Su Wu approached the console. The input waited—cursor blinking like a pulse.
SELECT: ARCHITECTSELECT: ASSET
He stared for a moment.
Then reached down and pulled the data relay from his pack. He connected it directly to the node, bypassing the menu. Injected code. Rewrote the circuit logic.
"I'm neither," he muttered. "I'm interfering."
The node sputtered. The screens went white.
For a few seconds, there was only static.
Then a new image appeared—topographical. It showed a satellite feed from before the collapse. Then a second layer—heat signatures, newer, recent. And beneath that…
Tunnels. Branching deep beneath the city. Hundreds of them.
Not natural.
Built.
[GRIDLOCK CORE LOCATION: APPROXIMATED]
[SUBSURFACE ROUTE ESTABLISHED]
Su Wu leaned closer. The route cut through half the quarantine zones, past reactor ruins, and ended at something labeled only: "The Vault Spine."
Not a shelter.
Not a relay.
A control hub.
He didn't speak. Didn't react.
He just memorized the route, yanked the relay out, and turned to leave.
The moment he stepped through the hatch, the bunker's internal lights blinked once. Then again.
Behind him, the screens returned.
A new message:
"GOOD. WE LIKE INTERFERENCE."