Chapter 4

For a split second, the engineer's words-Her code could heal people-flickered in Mark's mind. It was an absurd, nonsensical claim. He dismissed it as the ramblings of a terrified idiot. The urgent news about Linda was far more important.

He raced to the central AI hub, a cavernous, climate-controlled room where Linda's core servers were housed. His medical and tech teams were in a panic.

"What happened?" Mark demanded, his eyes scanning the frantic activity.

A lead technician, a man named Chen, approached him, his face grim. "It's a cascading failure, sir. The new algorithm she ingested... it's like a virus. It's beautiful on the surface, but it's hollow. When she tried to integrate it, it created a feedback loop that's frying her core logic."

The implication was clear. The data from the source, from Chloe, was not just weak, it was poison.

A black rage, pure and absolute, consumed Mark. She had done this. The mute data-slave in the basement had tried to destroy his muse, his only source of relief. It was an attack.

"Get her back online," he snarled at the technicians. Then he turned to his head of security. "Take a team down to the R&D unit. I want her to feel this. Full sensory overload. Maximum pain. Let her know what happens when she bites the hand that feeds her."

The security chief nodded, his face impassive, and relayed the orders.

Deep in the server farm, Evelyn and the guards received the command with horror. They had no choice. They activated the room's emergency failsafe systems, flooding the small, sterile space with strobing lights and a deafening, high-frequency shriek. It was a protocol designed to incapacitate, to break a person.

But when they watched the camera feed, they saw nothing. The body on the bed, covered by a sheet, didn't move. There was no reaction. No twitch, no scream, nothing.

Mark, watching on a monitor from the AI hub, felt a strange, chilling unease. He had expected a reaction. A scream, a seizure, some sign of the suffering he had ordered. The absolute stillness was wrong. It was unnatural.

"Why isn't she reacting?" he muttered, more to himself than anyone else. A seed of doubt, the one planted by the engineer's shout, began to sprout.

His anger, while still burning hot, was now tinged with a confusing disquiet. He barked a new order, a strange, contradictory command.

"Cut the noise. And... turn up the heat in her room. Back to the original setting."

It was a nonsensical order, a subconscious flicker of concern he couldn't explain or acknowledge. As he watched the still, silent form on the monitor, the white-hot spike of his migraine returned with a vengeance, more intense than ever before. It felt directly connected to the silent, unnerving scene playing out on the screen in front of him.