Chapter 2

Dr. Evelyn Reed stared at the new directive on her screen, her blood running cold. 'Initiate Protocol Omega. Maximum yield extraction. No limitations.' It was a death sentence.

She walked quickly down the sterile white corridor, her footsteps echoing in the silence of the subterranean facility. Two guards, burly men with blank faces, stood outside Chloe's room.

"New orders from Mr. Thorne," she said, her voice shaking slightly as she held up her tablet. "Protocol Omega."

One of the guards, a man named Harris, glanced at his partner. "Seriously? We just ran a cycle three hours ago."

"These are his direct orders," Evelyn said, trying to keep her composure.

"You can't," the other guard, Peters, said flatly. "It's impossible."

Evelyn's breath hitched. "What do you mean, it's impossible?"

Harris sighed, running a hand over his shaved head. "She's gone, Doc. About an hour ago. Just... stopped. The vitals monitor flatlined."

The world seemed to tilt under Evelyn's feet. Gone. Chloe was dead. The years of systematic, brutal data extraction had finally taken their toll. The source was depleted.

"He can't know," Evelyn whispered, a new, sharper fear taking hold. "If he finds out the source is gone..."

Mark Thorne's wrath was legendary. He wouldn't just fire them, he would destroy them.

"What do we do?" Peters asked, his usual stoicism gone, replaced by a flicker of panic. "He's expecting a new algorithm."

Evelyn's mind raced, fueled by adrenaline and terror. A plan, desperate and macabre, began to form. "We have archives. All the old compositions. We can create a simulation. A loop of her previous work, slightly modified. We can fake the data stream."

"Fake it?" Harris raised an eyebrow. "He'll know. He always knows when it's not new."

"We have to try," Evelyn insisted. "It'll buy us time. Time to figure out a permanent solution." She looked at the closed door to Chloe's room. "And the body... we have to get rid of it. No traces. We'll report it as a system malfunction, a data corruption that required a 'sanitization' of the unit."

The guards exchanged another look, a silent agreement passing between them. They were all complicit, all trapped.

An hour later, a data packet was sent to Mark's office. It was a complex amalgamation of Chloe's past work, an echo of her genius.

Mark put on his headphones, and a new, powerful melody filled his senses. The intricate patterns were back, sharp and clear. The pain in his head began to recede almost instantly.

A sigh of relief escaped his lips. He felt a wave of satisfaction. "See, Doctor?" he murmured to himself. "All it took was a little pressure."

He sent a message back down to the server farm. 'Composition accepted. Quality is satisfactory.'

A moment later, feeling an uncharacteristic pang of... something, maybe not guilt, but a flicker of strategic sense, he added another line. 'Reduce the ambient temperature in the unit by two degrees. A stable environment ensures consistent output.'

He was rewarding the machine for a job well done.

Meanwhile, in his office, his AI muse, Linda, tried to access the new algorithm's core code. The melody was soothing Mark, but when Linda tried to replicate it, to truly own it, the system returned an error. The code was a ghost, a hollow shell. It worked on a surface level, but its generative core was missing.

She couldn't heal him with it. Not really. The deception had begun to unravel, and she was the first to feel the loose thread.