By the time he reached the fringes of Raffles Place, the Veil’s density had intensified to the point where the towering skyscrapers seemed to groan audibly under some invisible burden, their glass facades reflecting the violet haze in distorted, wavering patterns.
His left arm dangled limp at his side, a dead weight unresponsive to commands.
Motor cortex bypass has been initiated, the AI whispered internally, its voice now resembling the scrape of dry parchment over rough stone. I am rerouting your neural impulses through the secondary spinal node to compensate. This pathway is... inefficient. You will experience a consistent 0.4-second delay between cognitive intent and physical action.
"How long can this hold before it becomes critical?" Zero asked, leaning heavily against the cold glass of a luxury storefront, his breath fogging the pane in shallow bursts.
In a high-velocity engagement scenario, the AI replied matter-of-factly, you are effectively already deceased. The lag will compound under stress.
Zero forced himself forward, his gait a haunting, mechanical lurch that drew uneasy glances from passersby.
He resembled a man mid-stroke or perhaps a malfunctioning automaton stumbling through the crowd.
The commuters rushing past, briefcase in hand, faces pale and eyes bloodshot from the Veil-induced migraines, gave him a wide berth, their own discomfort mirroring his.
Whispers of "another one" floated in the air, as if the city’s collective unease had a voice.
Suddenly, the AI’s visual feed cut out entirely, plunging Zero into absolute darkness despite his eyes being wide open, straining against the void.
"Elias! I’m blind, complete blackout!" Zero hissed into the comms, his voice tight with controlled panic.
"It’s not your organic optics failing, Zero!" Elias responded urgently, accompanied by the frantic clatter of his keyboard. "The AI is diverting critical power reserves to sustain your cardiac rhythm against the escalating frequency bombardment. Hold position, I’m uploading a 'Sensory Echo' patch right now. It won’t restore full light perception, but it’ll give you motion-based detection, like biological echolocation."
The patch integrated with a faint neural tingle, and Zero’s vision snapped back, not as the vibrant, detailed world, but as a stark orange wireframe grid overlaid on blackness.
People manifested as glowing heat blobs pulsing with movement; buildings reduced to skeletal frameworks of lines and angles; vehicles traced as streaking vectors.
Within this abstracted grid, four figures stood out immediately, advancing with perfect, synchronized fluidity.
They lacked the warm thermal signatures of living humans, instead, they appeared as cold, ethereal blue-white ghosts, spectral anomalies in the machine.
The Architects, the AI warned, its tone laced with a new undercurrent of digital unease.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
They are not mere Hounds.
These are advanced neural-linked units, their brains distributed and processed by the same central mainframe that governs my operations.
They can anticipate your thoughts before you fully form them, drawing on predictive algorithms tied to the Veil.
Zero ducked into the nearest MRT station entrance, hoping the dense press of bodies and electromagnetic clutter from the underground network would obscure his signature.
The escalator carried him downward into the depths, the hum of machinery vibrating through the steps.
But midway down, his legs seized up entirely, locking mid-stride. He became a frozen statue, helplessly conveyed toward the platform below.
One of the Architects materialized at the top of the escalator, a silhouette against the violet-tinged light filtering from street level.
He didn’t bother drawing a firearm.
Instead, he simply raised a gloved hand, palm outward, and Zero felt an immediate surge in his chest, his heart rate spiking erratically, ventricles contracting in painful, irregular squeezes.
Critical failure detected: Cardiac arrest is imminent, the AI screamed in his mind, alarms flashing across the wireframe.
"Elias, they’re… they’re in my systems…" Zero gasped, his chest constricting as if gripped by an invisible giant’s hand, ribs creaking under the pressure.
"Sever the link, Zero! Go completely off-grid!" Elias shouted back, his voice cracking with desperation. "The AI is the vulnerability, they’re using it as a backdoor to your autonomics! Shut it down now!"
"But if I shut it down… I won’t be able to walk, my motor functions…"
"Then crawl if you have to! It’s that or they stop your heart remotely!"
Zero delved inward, the sensation akin to thrusting his hand into a swarming hive of angry bees, buzzing chaos and stinging resistance.
He located the Primary Neural Tether, the core conduit binding the AI to his consciousness, and with a mental roar of pure agony, he severed it clean.
The orange wireframe grid vanished in an instant.
His heart slammed back into a steady, natural rhythm, free from the external manipulation.
But without the AI’s support, his body collapsed like a marionette with its strings sliced through.
He tumbled down the remaining escalator steps in a painful heap, rolling end over end, bruises blooming across his ribs and shoulders.
He lay sprawled on the cold, grimy tiles of the MRT station platform, the world still shrouded in overload-induced blindness, not from the AI now, but from sheer neural exhaustion.
Heavy, rhythmic footsteps echoed from the escalator above, the Architects descending with unhurried precision.
No AI prompts.
No Deep-Layer overlays to guide him.
He was reduced to just Zero, the man born in the backstreets of Singapore, trained in raw survival long before Elias’s upgrades turned him into something more. Or less.
The floor vibrations told him everything: the Architects were ten feet away, closing methodically.
Zero fumbled in his pocket and retrieved a small, manual smoke pellet, primitive tech, no chips or sensors to jam.
He smashed it against the tiles with all his remaining strength.
Thick, choking grey smoke billowed outward in a dense cloud, overwhelming the high-tech sensors embedded in the Architects’ visors.
Alarms blared faintly through the haze, their augmented reality feeds scrambling.
In the ensuing confusion, Zero dragged himself across the platform on his elbows, inching toward a maintenance hatch he remembered from his childhood days exploring the city’s underbelly, a rusted shortcut into the disused tunnel system below.
He pried the hatch open with bleeding fingers and rolled into the yawning darkness just as a hail of suppressed gunfire shredded the smoke where he had lain moments before.
Paralyzed from the waist down, his tech offline, the Samiti forces swarming above, but for the first time in years, his head was blissfully quiet, free from the constant digital chatter.
"Now," Zero whispered into the void, his voice echoing off the tunnel walls, "we do it my way."
- ?? 0.4s lag warning: “In high-velocity engagement, you are effectively already deceased”
- ??????? Orange wireframe echolocation, Architects as cold specters anticipating thoughts
- ? Cardiac remote spike: ribs creaking, invisible giant grip
- ?? Mental roar, tether severed, agony hive-sting, collapse into human ruin
- ?? Smoke pellet primitive salvation, crawl through childhood hatch
- ?? Quiet head, tunnel echo: “Now we do it my way”
- Was severing the tether salvation… or the Samiti’s ultimate victory in forcing Zero to amputate his own edge?
- When the AI’s voice scrapes like dry parchment and then dies silent, does Zero reclaim his humanity… or lose the only thing that kept him alive this long?
- Did crawling on elbows through smoke prove raw survival instinct trumps augmentation… or show how hollow the “upgrade” always was?
- With the head finally quiet and “my way” whispered in darkness, is this Zero’s rebirth as a man… or the beginning of his end without the machine?