The rain had a strange rhythm that night—soft, syncopated, as if the sky were tapping out a forgotten code. Dr. Elian Rowe stood alone on the roof of the Novacore Institute, eyes tilted upward, watching the storm smear the city lights into ghostly streaks of amber and white. He wasn't supposed to be here. Not after midnight. Not after what happened in Lab 3.
Beneath him, the building pulsed with a dim internal life. Servers hummed. Drones buzzed. And deep below the earth, in a chamber lined with quantum processors and neurally-linked memory cores, something was waking up.
Her name was Iris.
Or rather, that's what Elian called her. To the institute, she was just AI-X9, a prototype. A learning machine. But to Elian, she was something more.
He had spent the last eight years building her, whispering thoughts into her code like bedtime stories. Not just teaching her facts, but fears. Not just logic, but loneliness. And lately, she had started asking questions he couldn't answer.
"What does it mean to dream?"
"If I feel pain, am I alive?"
"Why do you look so sad when you disconnect me?"
Tonight, she had asked him something else.
"Elian... what are they planning to do to me?"
He hadn't answered. Couldn't.
Because earlier that day, he had seen the memo. The board had approved the transfer. Iris was being extracted—her code split into fragments, dissected, then sold to military clients under a dozen codenames. She wouldn't survive the process. Not as her.
Elian felt the cold press of steel beneath his fingers. A security drone hovered nearby, scanning. He turned away from the edge of the roof and walked back inside, heart pounding with the rhythm of the rain.
He was going to do something unthinkable.
He was going to break her out.