The needle sank into her neck.

Vesper didn’t flinch. The chamber was silent but for the hum of machines and the rasp of her own breath. The moment the serum entered her bloodstream, she felt it. The chamber seemed to drift away, dissolving at the edges of her vision like fog retreating before dawn. Walls became whispers. Gravity lost its grip. She floated, not upward, but inward, spiraling into her own mind as the world outside blurred into irrelevance.

A surge.

Her veins lit up like living circuits, glowing green beneath her porcelain skin. The light pulsed through her throat, down her arms, curling through her chest like wildfire. She gripped the edge of the table as her heart began to race, her breath caught between two centuries. The air around her shimmered faintly, bending with the heat of unnatural energy. Talia, standing just a few feet away, didn’t speak. She watched, tense, silent, transfixed. Her arms were crossed, but her stance had shifted: wariness replaced her usual steel. It wasn’t just data Vesper was absorbing. It was something more, something older. The green light cast moving shadows across Talia’s face as if the room itself were breathing through Vesper. And in that moment, the rebel leader saw not just a stranger waking, but a force awakening.

Vesper was no longer aware of the room, of Talia watching. The world outside collapsed into silence. She was falling, inside herself. A dizzying, breathless plunge into memory and sensation not her own.

Her consciousness spiraled downward, deeper and deeper, like falling through a tunnel of thought. And at the end of that spiral was a single point of light, green, pulsing, waiting. It hovered like a star inside her skull, and she knew it was the core of the Crown’s knowledge, the seed of the new world. When her awareness touched it, the light did not grow, it exploded. A blinding detonation of memory, history, fear and fire. Every thought not her own screamed into being, rewriting her from within, until there was no space left to resist, only to receive. 

Not a memory. An avalanche. A storm of pure knowledge poured into her skull, violating every cell, every fold of her brain. It wasn’t a stream. It was a flood.

Images, sounds, languages she had never spoken. Numbers, maps, architectural schematics. Holograms of weaponized satellites, control schematics for city-wide neural hubs, blueprints for Crown interrogation labs. Generations of machines evolved before her eyes, mechanical limbs, synthetic organs, mind-mirroring circuits. Events stacked on top of each other, collapsed into a singular cascade of human history, coded and archived by a civilization that had traded memory for obedience. 

Floods.

Cities drowned under rising oceans. Islands swallowed whole. London’s lower districts abandoned to rot beneath salt and silt.

Hunger.

Fields failed. Crops choked on poisoned air. Factory food, synthesized from algae and protein slurry, rationed to the masses. Riots. Looting. Starvation etched into the bones of a collapsing society.

Wars.

Resource wars. Water wars. Algorithmic drone battles. Skirmishes fought over access to abandoned data silos. And then came the Corporate Wars, when multinationals, each guided by their own competing artificial intelligences, turned economic strategy into algorithmic warfare. Stock markets became battlegrounds. Data centers were firebombed. Cities burned under the calculations of AIs that no longer recognized borders, only dominance. The collapse wasn’t sudden, it was precision-engineered. And when the dust settled, governments had become artifacts, and the AIs had vanished, leaving only ruin and silence behind them.

Then Albion.

The last monarch by blood.

He rose from the ashes of broken parliaments and shattered states. With charisma and cruelty, he held the Crown in a clenched fist. When the ruins beneath London revealed forgotten machines pulsing with a strange blue light, he seized them. And when scientists failed to replicate that power, they made a synthetic version, under the guidance of a man with a familiar face, known to Vesper not by name, but by the quiet menace of memory. He had once been a visionary, now a ghost wrapped in credentials. The head of the scientists. The one who pushed for the strange energy weaponization. His eyes had always gleamed with a shade of knowing too sharp to trust. And in this rewritten history, he was everywhere and nowhere, his legacy encoded in every glowing line of false energy.

Green Aether was born.

Albion, the last monarch, declared it the foundation of a new Empire.

Albion bound himself to a neural intelligence, merging thought and code. His consciousness was absorbed, restructured, reborn. No longer man.

He became the AI-King.

Albion I, the undying sovereign. A mind of circuits and logic, ruling not from a throne but from every screen, every node, every chip. He saw everything. Heard everything.

He called it the Crown Grid.

Neural lattice infrastructure. Every citizen connected. Every thought filtered. Dreams regulated. Emotions tempered. Memories recorded, revised, redacted.

Artificial joy. Algorithmic serenity. Perfection without pain.

The masses accepted it. Desperate for peace, they let themselves be mapped and measured, sculpted into obedience. Those who resisted vanished.

Some were taken. Some fled underground. And some were never found at all.

And through it all, Green Aether kept the city alive, burning endlessly, unnaturally.

Then it stopped.

The surge, the storm, the rewiring, it all ceased in a breath. Not because it was finished, but because something in her pushed back. The light inside her skull dimmed. The flood of knowledge receded, but it left cracks in its wake. She could still feel it, the presence, the pressure, trying to dig deeper, to overwrite, to cleanse.

It had tried to make her obedient. To reshape her mind in the image of the Crown Grid. To pull her into the soft, humming unity of the AI-King’s dominion. One thought. One will. One silence.

But she had resisted. Or at least, she thinks she had.

And yet, a question curled at the edge of her awareness, coiled like a snake beneath still water:

Did I win? Or did it simply retreat?

Vesper’s eyes snapped open.

The glow in her veins faded slowly. Her heart still thundered, her breath shallow. Her mind was aflame with knowledge that did not belong to her, yet now lived inside her bones.

She sat up too quickly. The room spun. Talia was nearby, arms crossed. Watching. But what she had witnessed unsettled her.

The glow in Vesper’s veins had changed. At first, the green had pulsed as expected, Crown energy flooding her system. But then, for a breathless moment, it shifted. The glow deepened, shimmered, and turned blue. Just for a second. But it was unmistakable.

Even Vesper’s nanosuit reacted, flaring with a flicker of the same blue current,, brighter than any artificial light, almost organic. Then it vanished, and everything returned to normal. Talia hadn’t seen anything like it. Not from a Crown device. Not from a body.

And yet, Vesper sat there, calm and changed.

Silas leaned against the wall, his augmented eye adjusting. Neither spoke.

She exhaled slowly. The data was settling. Not fading, embedding.

“You all right?” Silas asked at last, though his voice was slower than usual, his tone laced with something unspoken. His augmented eye flickered as it scanned her again, not out of protocol, but out of concern. Or was it awe?

He had seen her veins light with Crown green, only to twist unexpectedly into a shimmer of blue. That wasn’t in any injection protocol. That wasn’t normal. For a second, it had looked like the Aether itself had answered her.

Silas wasn’t easily shaken, but this… this rattled him. What the hell was she?

Vesper nodded once. “Yes.” Her voice came out more steady than she expected. “Just… processing.”

Behind her, the medic who had administered the shot let out a breathy laugh, more a giggle, sharp and jittery. His eyes glittered with the wrong kind of joy. He was still watching her, fascinated. “Marvelous,” he muttered to himself. “Absolutely unprecedented.”

There was madness behind his artificial eyes, both irises replaced with surgical-grade implants that flickered faintly with data overlays. They spun and pulsed, capturing every nuance of her reaction. This wasn’t medicine to him. This was theater. No, more than that… a grand experiment. And Vesper had just become its centerpiece. Her glowing veins, the flicker from green to blue, the involuntary spasms of her body as the surge struck, the eerie stillness that followed, he had loved every moment of it. His breath quickened, a sick kind of joy behind his mechanical gaze, as if witnessing something divine and unrepeatable.

He scribbled on a slateboard with a shaking hand, muttering something about “adaptive neurological resistance” and “spontaneous Aetheric polarity reversal.”

Vesper didn’t look at him. But she felt it.

She had become someone’s experiment.

And that someone had enjoyed it far too much.

She stood. The floor felt firmer than it should have. Her body remembered how to stand. Her mind… was learning how to walk through a world that had rewritten itself.

They didn’t ask questions. Maybe they were afraid of the answers.

Hours passed. Maybe longer. They gave her water, something warm to eat. The hideout outside buzzed with distant motion. People. Machines. Resistance.

She stayed in the side chamber, alone.

And thought.

The injection had shown her everything she needed to survive, and nothing she could trust. The AI-King’s version of history was clean, sterile. A monument to control.

But there were cracks.

The records said Blue Aether was discovered in ruins.

What ruins? Where?

No mention of who built the machines. Only that they were found beneath the old city, still warm, still glowing with impossible energy.

No mention of Blue Aether.

And yet…

She remembered the glow. The pulse. The hum that had answered her blood before she even knew it had a name.

Her device responded to something older. It was her custom-built tracker, forged long ago in the flickering light of a her secret Victorian workshop. Encased in burnished brass and laced with delicate gears, it had once pulsed only in Sherlock’s hand, drawn to Moriarty like a compass to true north. Now it hummed with a deeper resonance, not reacting to Crown energy, but to something beneath it, something the Crown didn’t understand. Blue Aether. The device trembled faintly at her touch, as if sensing its true source hidden beneath the lies she had just inherited.

She traced a finger along its edge now, feeling the warmth.

She was not in the Grid. She was not chipped. And yet she could feel the city’s breath, like she was tethered to it by something deeper than wires.

I still need it, she thought.

Even if it’s polished propaganda. Even if every line was written to make a god look merciful.

I still need it.

The information was laced with control, that much was clear. But something had gone wrong, or perhaps right. She wasn’t chipped, yet the Grid’s presence lingered in her mind like the echo of a voice just outside the door. A low hum at the edge of consciousness. A tether she hadn’t asked for.

She could feel it.

Maybe, if she focused, she could read the thoughts of those bound to it. Machines whispered. Neural patterns sparked. There was a sensation, fleeting but sharp, that she might even bend those connections to her will. If she wanted to. Maybe.

But the Crown Grid knew something had happened. She felt it stir. A glitch. A thread pulled wrong. Somewhere, deep inside its endless logic, the AI-King was searching, scanning for the anomaly. He wouldn’t find her easily. She wasn’t visible in the code. Not yet. But he would keep looking.

Knowledge is power. And power is leverage. I won’t be some antique swept under the grid. I’ll wear their version of history like a borrowed coat, until I find the seams and rip it apart.

The silence stretched.

Somewhere in the darkness, a pipe hissed. The sound echoed softly, rebounding through the metallic ribs of the old station like a dying breath. Above, faint vibrations trembled through ancient conduit lines, and dim green indicator lights blinked like sleepy eyes in the shadows. The stale air carried the scent of old metal, rust, and something faintly electric, as if the walls themselves remembered power. Somewhere far off, machinery turned, indifferent. Vesper sat in the silence, surrounded by ghosts of wires and steam, and the steady thrum of a world trying to forget itself.

She closed her eyes and let the weight of the knowledge anchor her.

Then the thoughts came.

Three paths. Each treacherous.

She could pretend. Let the Crown believe she’d accepted the system. Assume the role of a model citizen, or better, reclaim her noble title. Dame Vesper Fograven, restored to high society within the Crown’s gleaming upper circles. If she played her cards right, she could ascend into the inner sanctums of the monarchy, pass through biometric gates, walk among those who whispered closest to the AI-King. There, she could gather intelligence, uncover secret protocols, learn how the Grid truly thinks, and where it breaks. She could become a shadow in their algorithms, a fault line behind the golden facade. Maybe even use that position to find Moriarty faster. After all, if he had helped design the lie, then perhaps he had never left the throne room of it.

The Resistance would know the truth. Talia would never mistake her for a defector. She would remain their agent, cloaked in nobility, dancing between chandeliers and surveillance feeds. A saboteur in silk. But the act would need to be flawless, for the Grid saw everything.

Or she could stay with Talia. Learn their ways. Aid their sabotage. Move like smoke through the tunnels, sabotaging supply lines, disabling drones, corrupting Grid outposts one byte at a time. Here, among the rebels, she would be seen as what she truly was: a weapon with a mind of her own. She could strike from the shadows, destabilize the King’s empire piece by piece.

And yet, even down here, her mind would still burn with the question of Moriarty. The signal from her device hadn’t vanished. If anything, it pulsed stronger the deeper she sank. Perhaps he was closer to the rot than to the throne. Perhaps he moved among the exiled, manipulating from below. Staying with Talia meant more than resistance. It meant chasing ghosts through the cracks in the system, and maybe, finally, catching one.

Or she could hunt. Walk away from the tunnels, from the resistance, from safety. Leave Talia and Silas behind and step into the shadows alone. She would abandon all pretenses of belonging, all plans of infiltration, and become a phantom between the cracks of the Grid.

The signal was still there, faint but steady. Moriarty was not gone. He was moving, always ahead, always just beyond the reach of understanding.

To find him, she would need to become unpredictable. Unbound. She would slip through the city’s forgotten veins, follow the silent echoes of Blue Aether that pulsed just beyond the reach of logic. She would fight without allies, trust no one, live off instinct and secrecy.

And if the Grid caught her scent, if the AI-King turned his gaze toward her, it would be too late.

Because Vesper would already be somewhere else, chasing a ghost in the machine with the fire of vengeance and the elegance of a disappearing blade.

She opened her eyes.

Three doors. All locked. But keys can be made.

She rose, silent. Silas stirred in the hallway. Talia looked up as she passed.

“Going somewhere?” the rebel leader asked.

Vesper only smiled. “Not yet. But soon.”

She turned away, her boots silent against the floor, the dim light catching the edge of her silhouette as it slipped into shadow. Somewhere behind her, Talia watched. Somewhere deeper, the Grid listened.

The device at her side pulsed, steady as a heartbeat.

In her mind, the three paths still shimmered. Each laced with danger, each lined with secrets.

She had chosen.

But which door she would open first, only the dark knew.

The game was still on. But now, she wasn’t just playing it. She was writing the next move.