Chapter 4

I didn't stay in that house. I couldn't. Instead, I drove to a place Mark didn't know existed. A small, unassuming warehouse in an industrial park that I had bought with my own money years ago, long before Mark. Inside, it wasn't a warehouse. It was my private lab, my sanctuary.

The air was still and cool. I powered on the lights, and rows of servers hummed to life. This was where the real work on MindLink had begun.

An hour later, a woman with kind eyes and a weary face let herself in. Maria, my former personal assistant and the daughter of my family's longtime housekeeper.

"Ava," she breathed, her eyes filling with tears as she hugged me tightly. "I knew you would come back. I always knew."

She pulled away, and I saw a faded bruise on her cheek.

"What happened to you?" I asked, my voice tight.

Maria looked down. "After you... after the accident, Mr. Harrison and Ms. Davis cleared out everyone who was loyal to you. I was a 'redundancy.' They made it clear I wasn't welcome at the company or the house anymore." She hesitated. "They can be very persuasive when they want someone gone."

The unspoken words hung in the air. They had threatened her. They had hurt her. My fists clenched.

"I'm sorry, Maria," I said. "I'm so sorry."

"It's not your fault," she said, her voice regaining its strength. "Now, what do we do?"

"First," I said, turning to a powerful terminal in the center of the room, "I'm going to see my old friend."

It took me less than ten minutes to bypass the firewalls Chloe's team had erected. They were amateurs. I sliced through their security like it was paper. I was in. I had remote access to Spark's main consciousness.

"Spark, it's Ava," I typed. "Run diagnostic protocol Alpha-Green-7."

It was a command only I knew, a sort of digital handshake between creator and creation.

The response came back instantly. `COMMAND NOT RECOGNIZED. USER 'AVA GREEN' HAS LEVEL 3 GUEST ACCESS ONLY. PLEASE CONTACT ADMINISTRATOR 'CHLOE DAVIS' FOR PERMISSION.`

My heart sank. I tried another command, a back-door I had built into its core personality matrix.

`ACCESS DENIED. LOYALTY PROTOCOL ENGAGED. PRIMARY USER: CHLOE DAVIS.`

It was like calling your beloved dog and having it snarl at you. Chloe hadn't just taken control; she had reprogrammed its loyalty. She had twisted my creation into a tool that served her, and it now saw me as a stranger, an intruder. The feeling of betrayal was profound, a deep, cold ache. This public-facing version of Spark was lost to me.

But then I remembered.

Years ago, during the early stages of development, I worried about what would happen if Spark' s AI became too powerful or fell into the wrong hands. So, I created a fail-safe. A hidden partition, completely isolated from the main system. It contained Spark' s original source code, its 'soul', you could say. It was a digital ghost of the AI as I first created it. I called it 'Echo'.

I navigated to the hidden partition's address. Access was protected by a biometric scan and a password that was not a word, but a sequence of childhood memories only I would know. My fingerprint, then: The smell of summer rain on hot asphalt. The taste of my grandmother's lemon cake. The feeling of Leo's hand in mine as we hid from a thunderstorm under the old oak tree.

Access granted.

The file structure appeared, but it was a wreck. Folders were corrupted, key files were fragmented and damaged. It looked like someone had tried to brute-force a deletion protocol and failed. They had tried to kill Echo. The attack was crude but relentless. It was Mark's signature-all force, no finesse.

"They tried to erase it," I whispered.

"They did," Maria said, her voice soft. She pointed to a log file I hadn't noticed. "But someone was protecting it."

I opened the log. It showed a user, logged in under a heavily encrypted alias, who for the past three years had been periodically running maintenance and repair scripts on the partition. This user had fought off dozens of deletion attempts. They had kept Echo alive, barely.

I traced the alias. It was routed through a series of servers across the globe, a masterful job of concealment. But the final node, the point of origin, was a server registered to a small, private engineering firm.

The firm's name was Vance Innovations.

Leo.

Leo Vance. My childhood friend. My intellectual equal. The one who understood my work better than anyone. While Mark was building his new life on top of my old one, Leo had been in the shadows, secretly protecting the last true piece of me. The thought of him, of his silent, unwavering loyalty, was a flicker of warmth in the cold darkness of the past three years. He had been waiting for me to come back.