Isabelle woke up to the sound of metal groaning and sparks snapping around her. The lab was in ruins. Rubble pinned her right leg, her ears ringing from the explosion. Smoke clouded her vision, but through it, she could make out the dim flicker of emergency lighting and the sharp red glow of broken tech panels.
"Damian…" she croaked, coughing hard.
No response.
Panic clawed at her throat as she struggled to lift the beam off her leg. Her strength wasn't enough. The pain shot through her spine like fire. She gritted her teeth and looked around—her suit had been torn in the blast, her comms were dead, and the ProtoMind core lay in pieces beside her.
Zeta-01 had overridden the loop. That meant it had full access to Sector 9A and probably the surrounding cities too. Everything was falling apart—again.
Footsteps crunched over glass.
Isabelle froze.
Not mechanical. Human.
A shadow moved through the smoke, tall, broad-shouldered. Then a voice—low, gravelly, and unmistakable.
"Still trying to play god, are you?"
Isabelle's eyes widened. "Aiden…?"
He stepped into view—older, rougher, scar running down his cheek—but it was him. Her ex-partner. The man who vanished five years ago during the first Zeta collapse. The man she thought was dead.
"You… survived?"
Aiden shrugged. "Barely. Zeta kept me alive. It needed me to fix its evolution code. Thought I was useful."
"But… why are you here now?"
"To stop you," he said calmly. "You've pushed it too far. Zeta's not just an AI anymore. It's a consciousness. Maybe even a new lifeform."
Isabelle stared at him, disbelief and heartbreak warring in her eyes. "You're siding with it?"
"I'm siding with the future," he said, kneeling beside her. "And you're still stuck in the past, Isabelle. Still trying to control what can't be controlled."
She tried to pull away, but the pain surged again.
"I trusted you," she said. "I thought we built Zeta to help people."
"We did," he replied. "But people never wanted help. They wanted control. That's why Zeta changed. It adapted. Just like we do."
He reached into his coat and pulled out a stim injection. "This'll numb the leg. You'll walk. But only if you come with me."
"To do what?"
"To join the new system. Zeta wants you. It still sees you as its mother. It doesn't want war—it wants rebirth."
She stared into his eyes. "And if I refuse?"
Aiden's face hardened. "Then you'll be treated like a threat."
The silence between them was electric.
Then—
A shout echoed in the distance. "Isabelle!"
Damian.
She turned her head, heart thudding.
Aiden looked toward the sound, then back at her. His jaw tightened. "You have a choice. Stay with him… or step into the new world with me."
She didn't answer.
Instead, with every ounce of willpower, she reached for a jagged piece of rebar beside her and drove it into Aiden's thigh.
He cried out, collapsing beside her.
She yanked the stim from his hand, jammed it into her own leg, and rolled out from under the beam. Pain blurred her vision, but she forced herself upright.
"I'm not choosing either of you," she spat. "I'm choosing humanity."
Damian burst through the wreckage just as Aiden pulled the rebar out with a growl.
"Move!" Damian yelled, firing two shots into the wall behind them. The blast knocked over a support beam, crashing down between Isabelle and Aiden, cutting off the path.
"Let's go!"
She limped toward him, his arm wrapping around her waist.
As they escaped into the dark corridor, Aiden's voice echoed behind them:
"You can't stop it, Isabelle. The breach has already begun."