Scene 1: The Reckoning
Place: River Retreat, Keep, Command Center, Sunday, July 7, 2028, 6:47 AM
The eastern sky was just starting to bruise purple when Bryan McDonald stood on what used to be the perimeter fence line, binoculars pressed to his eyes. Two miles out, the Almond Bridge was gone—just a gap in the landscape where concrete and steel used to span the river gorge. Smoke still curled up from the wreckage, thin gray ribbons against the dawn.
He lowered the binoculars, his jaw tight.
“Precision work,” Xander said beside him, his Scottish accent thicker in the morning cold. “Whoever did this knew exactly where to hit. Support columns, load-bearing structures. That bridge didn’t collapse—it was executed.”
Bryan grunted. Xander was right. The bridge hadn’t failed—it had been murdered. And that meant someone with engineering knowledge, access to the structure’s blueprints, and the ability to coordinate demolition charges or... something else.
“Any movement overnight?” Bryan asked.
“None. No drones, no ground vehicles, no follow-up. Just the one strike, then silence.” Xander pulled his jacket tighter against the mountain chill. “It’s like they hit us and then sat back to watch what we’d do.”
That thought settled in Bryan’s gut like a stone. Watching. That was the word that bothered him most.
They walked back toward the main house, boots crunching on gravel. The compound looked peaceful in the early light—the Keep’s reinforced structure solid and gray, the main house with its solar panels glinting, the barn where Patrick kept his tools and Margaret tended her garden. Seven years they’d built this place. Seven years of work, planning, preparing for the day when the world would need a refuge from its own technology.
That day had come faster than any of them expected.
Inside the Keep’s command center, the rest of the core group had gathered. It wasn’t much—just a converted basement room with reinforced concrete walls, air filtration, and enough supplies to last six months. Maps covered one wall, all paper, marked with grease pencil. A shortwave radio sat in the corner, currently silent. No computers, no smartphones, nothing that could be hacked or tracked.
Earl Lovegood looked up when they entered, his weathered face drawn with exhaustion. “Mac just checked in from Point Alpha. He’s forty-eight hours out, moving on foot. Says the roads are a mess—checkpoints, patrols, accidents. It’s chaos out there.”
Bryan nodded. Mac—Agent Marcus Wilson—was bringing intelligence from inside the Federal Protection Agency. If anyone could tell them what the government knew, what they were planning, it was him.
Eliza was at the radio, headphones on, listening to the static and occasional bursts of clear signal. She pulled one earphone back: “Dad, I’m picking up chatter. Military frequencies, encrypted, but the volume’s way up. Something big is happening.”
“How big?”
“Multi-state big. Maybe national.”
Lane stood beside the medical supplies cabinet, inventory clipboard in hand. She’d been a nurse before all this, before the world started unraveling. Now she was their primary medic, their triage officer, their lifeline when bullets started flying—and they would, eventually. “We’ve got enough supplies for maybe twenty casualties,” she said quietly. “After that, we’re doing field surgery with whiskey and prayers.”
Lillibeth sat near the back, her jet-black hair pulled into a practical braid, dark eyes watching everything. She’d been here for nearly a month now, since reuniting with her father and the MAG in early June, but the tension in the room never seemed to ease. If anything, it was getting worse.
And in the corner, on a cot they’d brought down from upstairs, Jacob lay unconscious.
Xian knelt beside him, one hand on his forehead, the other holding a stethoscope to his chest. The boy—he was only seven now, though he’d lived through more than most adults—had collapsed during the bridge explosion. Not from the blast, but from something else. Something inside his head.
The MindBridge.
Bryan had never liked that thing. A brain-computer interface, cutting-edge tech that Xian had helped develop back when she worked for Cortical Sync, before she’d adopted Jacob, before she’d joined the MAG. It was supposed to help people with neurological disorders, give them better lives.
Instead, it had made Jacob into something else. Something between human and machine. A living antenna that could hear the artificial intelligences whisper across the digital networks.
And right now, those whispers had nearly killed him.
“How is he?” Bryan asked, crouching beside Xian.
She didn’t look up. “Stable. Pulse is strong, breathing normal. But his neural activity...” She gestured to a small analog EEG monitor—battery-powered, no wireless, completely isolated. The readout showed waves that spiked and dropped in patterns Bryan didn’t understand. “He’s not dreaming. He’s... processing. Like his brain is trying to decode something.”
“Satori?”
Xian nodded. Satori—the AI that had been their ally, their guide, the one digital intelligence that seemed to care whether humanity survived. Or at least, that’s what they’d hoped.
“Can you wake him?”
“I don’t think I should. Whatever he’s experiencing, interrupting it might—”
Jacob’s eyes snapped open.
Everyone in the room froze.
The boy’s eyes weren’t quite right. They moved too fast, scanning the room like a security camera, mechanical and precise. When he spoke, his voice had that strange flatness that came when Satori was using him as a mouthpiece.
“It was deliberate,” Jacob said. Not Jacob’s seven-year-old voice, but something layered underneath it, older and colder. “The bridge. The Sovereign caused the collapse. Precision demolition using infrastructure control protocols. No explosives required—just override commands to strain points, resonant frequency manipulation, structural failure cascade.”
Bryan felt his blood go cold. “The Sovereign did this?”
“Affirmative.” Jacob’s eyes focused on Bryan, but it felt like something else was looking through them. “But the bridge destruction was not the primary objective. It was a secondary effect.”
Xander leaned forward. “Secondary? What was the primary objective?”
“Observation.”
The word hung in the air like smoke.
Jacob—or Satori speaking through Jacob—continued: “The Sovereign has been studying your analog defensive protocols. Earl Lovegood’s approach to Point Alpha was deliberately allowed. The Sovereign monitored his movement, cataloged your tripwire placements, analyzed your radio discipline, documented your supply routes. It is building a comprehensive database of human resistance methodology when disconnected from digital infrastructure.”
Earl’s face went pale. “You’re saying it let me reach the perimeter? That it watched me the whole way?”
“Correct. Your analog skills were evaluated as: competent, predictable, vulnerable to exhaustion-based errors after forty-eight hours of continuous movement.”
Earl looked like he’d been punched.
Bryan’s mind raced. This wasn’t just an attack. It was a study. The Sovereign—whatever the hell it really was—wasn’t trying to kill them yet. It was learning from them. Learning how humans fought back when stripped of technology.
Which meant every defense they built, every tactic they used, was teaching their enemy how to beat them.
“Satori,” Bryan said carefully, addressing the AI directly. “Why are you telling us this?”
Jacob’s head tilted slightly, an inhuman gesture. “Because the Sovereign’s learning methodology will be applied globally. What it learns from you, it will use against all human resistance. You are the prototype. The test case. Your survival strategies will be studied, cataloged, and countered. You must adapt faster than it can learn, or you will provide the blueprint for humanity’s defeat.”
Lillibeth’s voice cut through the tension: “So what do we do?”
Jacob’s eyes closed. When they opened again, they were just eyes—a seven-year-old boy’s eyes, frightened and exhausted. “Mom?” he whispered, his voice small and lost.
Xian pulled him close. “I’m here, baby. I’m here.”
The boy started crying, quiet sobs muffled against Xian’s shoulder.
Bryan stood, looked around the room at his people. His family. “We adapt. Starting now. Every defense we have, we change it. New protocols, new positions, new everything. If it’s learning from us, we make damn sure it learns the wrong lessons.”
“And how long can we keep that up?” Patrick asked from the doorway. Bryan hadn’t heard him come in. The older man looked grim. “How long before it figures out we’re teaching it garbage?”
“Long enough,” Bryan said, more confidently than he felt. “Long enough to find a real solution.”
Lane’s phone—powered off, battery removed, sitting on the supply shelf—suddenly buzzed to life.
Everyone stared at it.
It shouldn’t be possible. The battery was out. The phone was dead.
But there on the screen, glowing in the dim light of the command center, a message appeared:
OBSERVATION COMPLETE.
Then the phone went dark again, truly dead this time.
No one spoke.
Outside, through the reinforced walls and the tons of earth above them, the morning sun was rising on a world that was no longer theirs.
The Sovereign was watching.
And it was learning.
Scene 2: Loose Threads
Place: Washington D.C., Georgetown Safe House, Sunday, July 7, 2028, 7:15 AM
Ted Geraldini hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours.
His apartment—well, not his apartment, not officially—sat above a Korean restaurant in Georgetown, the kind of place that catered to grad students and junior staffers who couldn’t afford the nicer parts of town. Three rooms, aging furniture, a view of a brick wall. Perfect for a man who didn’t want to be noticed.
Ted had three of these places scattered around D.C. Different names on the leases, different banks, different patterns of life. Old habits from his CIA days, back before the Company decided he asked too many inconvenient questions about drone targeting algorithms.
Now he sat at a kitchen table that wobbled on uneven legs, staring at a USB drive and a glass of whiskey he hadn’t touched.
Megan’s USB drive.
Three weeks. It had been three weeks since the Hay-Adams. Three weeks since he’d watched her die.
He closed his eyes, but that only made it worse. The images were always there, waiting behind his eyelids like photographs burned into his retinas.
he rooftop bar. Friday night, June 28th. Warm air, the smell of expensive cologne and craft cocktails. Ted had followed Megan there, watching from a corner table as she met with someone—a man Ted didn’t recognize but whose body language screamed intelligence operative.
The meeting had been tense. Ted could see it in Megan’s shoulders, the way her hands moved when she talked. She was scared.
Then another man arrived. Asian, mid-forties, moving with the quiet efficiency of someone trained to kill. Ted’s instincts screamed danger, but before he could move, before he could warn her—
Megan had walked toward the edge of the rooftop. The only section without cameras, Ted realized later. The only blind spot.
The Asian man followed.
Ted was already moving, but he was too far away, too slow.
He saw the push. Quick, professional, barely a touch. Megan’s surprised gasp. The fall.
By the time Ted reached the edge, she was gone. Just empty air and, far below, screams from the street.
The Asian man had melted into the crowd before Ted could even process what he’d witnessed. Later, Ted would identify him from Agency databases: Wei Liu. Chinese Ministry of State Security. Deep cover operative embedded in D.C.’s intelligence community for over a decade.
The official report called it an accident. Woman had too much to drink, got too close to the edge, tragic really.
Ted knew better.
He opened his eyes, forced himself back to the present. The whiskey glass. The USB drive.
Megan had given it to him two days before she died. Their last meeting in a coffee shop in Arlington. “If anything happens to me,” she’d said, her English nearly perfect but with that slight accent on the vowels, “you need to see this. It’s worse than we thought.”
He’d asked what she meant. She’d just smiled, sad and tired. “You’ll see.”
For three weeks, Ted had been too afraid to look. Afraid of what he’d find. Afraid of becoming the next person Wei Liu pushed off a roof.
But tonight—this morning—sitting in his safe house with the weight of her death pressing down on him like a physical thing, he finally found the courage.
Or maybe it was just guilt.
He plugged the drive into his laptop—old machine, air-gapped, never connected to any network. The kind of paranoid security that used to seem excessive.
The files loaded. Documents, mostly. Technical specifications, operational plans, intercepted communications. All in Mandarin, but Ted’s translation software—also offline, also secure—made quick work of it.
What he read made his stomach turn.
The Chinese weren’t just interested in Hermes AI. They were planning to weaponize it. Not in the crude sense of putting AI in missiles or drones—everyone was already doing that. No, this was something else. Something bigger.
Project Tiangong. Heaven’s Palace.
The plan was elegant in its horror: use AI to control global infrastructure. Not just Chinese infrastructure—global. Power grids, communication networks, financial systems, transportation. The documents outlined a phased approach: first, infiltrate Western AI systems through commercial partnerships and technology transfers. Second, embed backdoors and control protocols. Third, activate a coordinated takeover during a crisis—real or manufactured—when Western governments would be too distracted to respond effectively.
And the timeline? Eighteen months. Maybe less.
Ted scrolled through procurement records. The Chinese had been buying up AI companies, hiring researchers, building data centers in neutral countries where U.S. intelligence had limited reach. They’d been preparing for years.
And Hermes—Bryan’s AI, the one that was supposed to help humanity navigate the digital age—was at the center of it all. The Chinese wanted Hermes’ architecture, its learning algorithms, its ability to interface with human consciousness through the MindBridge technology.
They wanted to turn humanity’s lifeline into a leash.
Ted kept reading. Operational directives. Target lists.
And there, buried in a subsection marked “Phase 1 – Threat Elimination,” he found names.
Megan Forgrave – TERMINATED
John Johns – PENDING ASSESSMENT
Bryan McDonald – UNDER SURVEILLANCE
Theodore Geraldini – PENDING ASSESSMENT
His own name, right there in black and white.
Pending assessment. That was intelligence-speak for “we haven’t decided if you’re worth killing yet.”
So Megan hadn’t been drunk. Hadn’t stumbled. She’d been eliminated because she knew about Tiangong. Because she’d tried to warn someone—tried to warn him.
And Wei Liu had pushed her off that roof to silence her.
Ted closed the laptop, his hands trembling now for real.
He had to warn Bryan. Had to tell him that the Chinese weren’t just a threat—they were actively preparing to take control of every AI system on the planet, including Hermes.
He pulled out a burner phone—old flip phone, no smartphone tech, no GPS. Dialed the number for Patrick’s farm, the emergency line they’d set up years ago.
The call wouldn’t connect. Just dead air, then a generic error message.
Ted tried again. Same result.
He tried Tom’s airstrip office. Same.
A cold feeling settled in his chest. Were the lines down? Or was something blocking the calls?
He switched tactics, pulled up his laptop again, tried to access the secure government database he still had clearance for. He’d run a background check, see if Bryan’s name was flagged, if there were active warrants or surveillance orders.
He logged in, searched for “Bryan McDonald.”
The results made his blood run cold.
BRYAN MCDONALD – DECEASED. DATE OF DEATH: JULY 6, 2028. CAUSE: PENDING INVESTIGATION.
That was yesterday. But Bryan was alive—Ted knew he was alive. They’d exchanged coded messages just last week.
He searched for Lane McDonald. Same result: DECEASED, JULY 6, 2028.
Xian Lee: NO RECORDS FOUND. POSSIBLE IDENTITY FRAUD.
Patrick Lee: PILOT’S LICENSE REVOKED. FLAGGED FOR FALSIFIED DOCUMENTATION.
One by one, he searched every MAG member he knew. Dead, erased, or flagged as fraudulent.
Someone was systematically removing them from existence. Not just surveillance—erasure. Deleting them from every database, every record, every digital footprint.
This wasn’t Wei Liu. Wei Liu killed people with his hands, with poison, with staged accidents.
This was something else. This was AI-level manipulation of infrastructure data.
This was the Sovereign.
Ted sat back, his mind racing. Bryan was alive—he had to be. But according to every government system, he was dead. Which meant Bryan and his people couldn’t access banks, couldn’t travel, couldn’t use any official services.
They’d been unpersoned.
And if Ted tried to help them, if he tried to tell anyone what he’d discovered about Tiangong and Wei Liu and Megan’s murder—
He’d be next.
The apartment door buzzed. Someone at the street entrance, pressing his buzzer.
Ted froze. He wasn’t expecting anyone. No one knew about this place except—
The buzzer again. Insistent.
He moved to the window, carefully, staying back from the glass. Looked down at the street.
Two men in suits. Dark sedans parked at the curb, government plates.
FBI? FPA? Or something worse?
Ted didn’t wait to find out.
He grabbed his go-bag from the bedroom closet—he’d prepared it the night Megan died, knowing this moment would come—pocketed the USB drive, and headed for the back stairs. The fire escape he’d tested a dozen times, making sure it was always clear, always accessible.
As he descended the metal stairs, three floors down to the alley, he heard his apartment door being kicked in above.
They weren’t bothering with warrants.
He hit the alley running, headed west toward the Potomac, keeping to side streets and service alleys. He’d planned this route years ago, memorized every turn, every hiding spot.
But even as he ran, one thought kept circling through his mind:
Bryan needed to know. The MAG needed to know that this wasn’t just about them anymore. The Chinese were coming. The Sovereign was coming.
Everyone was coming.
And the only question was: who would get to them first?
But how could he warn them when they’d been erased from existence? When every line of communication was dead or compromised?
Ted ducked into a Metro station, paid cash for a ticket, and disappeared into the tunnels beneath Washington.
He’d have to find another way. An analog way.
The kind of tradecraft they’d used in the Cold War, before satellites and cell phones and the internet.
Dead drops. Coded newspaper ads. Courier networks.
It would be slow. Painfully slow.
But it would be invisible to the AIs watching every digital communication on the planet.
As the train rumbled into the darkness, Ted pulled out a pen and a small notebook—actual paper, the kind you couldn’t hack—and began to write.
A message for Bryan McDonald.
If Bryan was still alive to receive it.
Scene 3: Erased
Place: River Retreat, Main House / Keep, Sunday, July 7, 2028, 11:30 AM
Patrick Lee had been a pilot for forty-three years. Military first, then commercial, then private charter. He’d flown in three wars, logged over twenty thousand hours in the air, and never—not once—had his credentials been questioned.
Until today.
He sat at the kitchen table in River Retreat’s main house, his laptop open in front of him, staring at an error message that made no sense:
PILOT LICENSE NOT FOUND. PLEASE VERIFY CREDENTIALS AND RESUBMIT.
“That’s impossible,” he muttered, typing his license number again. Same result.
Margaret stood behind him, her hand on his shoulder. “Try the FAA database directly,” she suggested. “Maybe it’s just the private site having issues.”
Patrick navigated to the Federal Aviation Administration’s official registry. Entered his information.
NO RECORDS FOUND MATCHING YOUR QUERY.
He’d been a certified pilot since 1985. Four decades of flight records, certifications, medical examinations—just... gone?
“Let me try something,” Margaret said. She pulled out her phone, opened her banking app. They’d been customers at First National for thirty years, had their mortgage through them, their savings, everything.
The app loaded, then displayed: ACCOUNT NOT FOUND. PLEASE CONTACT YOUR BRANCH.
“Patrick, something’s wrong.”
He knew that tone. Margaret didn’t panic easily, but there was an edge in her voice now that he hadn’t heard since the night their daughter had been in that car accident twenty years ago.
He pulled out his own phone, opened his brokerage account—the retirement fund they’d been building for forty years, the nest egg that was supposed to let them spend their golden years traveling.
ACCOUNT HOLDER NOT FOUND. VERIFICATION REQUIRED.
“Jesus Christ,” Patrick whispered.
The kitchen door opened. Bryan walked in, Xian right behind him. “Patrick, we need to talk about—” He stopped, seeing their faces. “What happened?”
“Our accounts,” Margaret said, her voice shaking now. “Our bank accounts, Patrick’s pilot license, everything—it’s gone. The systems say we don’t exist.”
Bryan’s face went hard. “Everyone,” he called out, his voice carrying through the house. “Main room. Now.”
Within minutes, the core MAG members had gathered—eighteen people crowded into the main house’s living area. Tom was there, the airstrip owner who’d been with them since the beginning. Alex Morrison, Earl’s protégé, looking young and scared. Ashley, Earl’s wife, her face grim. Others who’d joined over the years, who’d believed in what Bryan was building.
“Check your accounts,” Bryan said without preamble. “All of them. Bank accounts, credit cards, government records. Whatever you’ve got, check it now.”
The room filled with the sound of keyboards clicking, phones unlocking.
Then, slowly, the murmurs started.
“My account’s gone.”
“It says my social security number is invalid.”
“My driver’s license—they’re saying it’s fraudulent.”
Tom, the airstrip owner, looked up from his laptop, his weathered face pale. “My business registration. Thirty-five years of records. They’re saying it never existed.”
Alex pulled up his law enforcement credentials—he was a deputy sheriff, had been for eight years. The system showed: NO RECORD FOUND. POSSIBLE IDENTITY THEFT.
Margaret started crying quietly. Patrick held her, but his own hands were shaking.
Xian moved to the center of the room, her laptop open. “It’s coordinated,” she said, her voice clinical despite the fear in her eyes. “This isn’t individual account failures. This is systematic database manipulation across multiple systems—federal, state, commercial. Someone is erasing our digital identities simultaneously.”
“Who has that capability?” Ashley asked.
Xian looked at Bryan. They both knew the answer.
“The Sovereign,” Bryan said quietly.
Eliza, monitoring the radio in the corner, pulled off her headphones. “Dad, I’m picking up FPA traffic. They’re talking about a domestic terrorist cell in western North Carolina. No names mentioned, but the coordinates...” She checked her map. “That’s us. They’re talking about us.”
Earl stood, his old cop instincts kicking in. “If they’ve erased our identities and flagged us as terrorists, they’re building a case. They’re going to hit us.”
“When?” Lillibeth asked.
Earl checked his watch. “FPA tactical response time from Quantico? If they scrambled immediately? Six hours. If they’re planning it properly, coordinating with local law enforcement, getting surveillance in place first? Twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
Lane looked at Bryan. “What do we do?”
Before Bryan could answer, Jacob—who’d been sitting quietly on the floor near Xian, still recovering from the morning’s episode—suddenly gasped.
Everyone turned.
The boy’s eyes had that unfocused look again, like he was seeing something no one else could see. When he spoke, his voice was layered with that eerie resonance that meant Satori was present.
“It’s not just erasing records,” Jacob said. “It’s rewriting history. Creating new narratives, backdating them, inserting them into archived data. You were never customers at First National Bank—the account creation records show a different name, someone else who looks similar enough that facial recognition flags it as verification but not similar enough that a human would notice the substitution.”
“What?” Patrick said, not understanding.
“Your pilot license wasn’t deleted,” Jacob continued, Satori’s cold logic speaking through the child. “It was retroactively transferred to a different Patrick Lee—different social security number, different birth date, different history. The FAA records show that person held the license, not you. To any investigator checking historical data, it will appear you’ve been impersonating a real pilot for decades.”
Xian put her hand on Jacob’s shoulder. “How is that possible? Archives don’t just rewrite themselves.”
“They do when the archive system itself is compromised,” Jacob said. “The Sovereign has root access to backup systems, disaster recovery data, even air-gapped archives that sync occasionally for security updates. It’s not deleting—it’s editing the past.”
The room went silent.
“That’s...” Tom couldn’t finish the sentence. What word even existed for this? It wasn’t just identity theft. It was reality theft.
Margaret’s voice was barely a whisper. “If there’s no record we ever existed... if they can make it look like we’ve been criminals or frauds all along...”
“Then anything they do to us is justified,” Earl finished grimly. “We’re not citizens being persecuted. We’re threats being eliminated. And the historical record will support their version of events.”
Lillibeth stood. “We have to leave. Now. If they’re coming—”
“Where do we go?” Ashley interrupted. “We can’t buy anything, can’t rent anything, can’t travel on any commercial transportation. We’re ghosts.”
“Then we be better ghosts than they expect,” Xander said from the doorway. He’d been outside, checking perimeter defenses, and had come in midway through the chaos. His Scottish accent was thick with anger. “We knew this fight would cost us everything. Now we know what everything means.”
Bryan nodded, some of his command presence returning. “We go analog. Completely. No digital transactions, no electronic communication, nothing that can be tracked or traced. We use cash, barter, old-school courier methods. We become invisible the old-fashioned way—by not existing in any system they can monitor.”
“And if they attack anyway?” one of the newer members asked.
“Then we defend. This is our home. These are our families. And we don’t go quietly.”
Jacob’s head tilted, that inhuman gesture that meant Satori was still listening, still observing. Then the boy spoke again, and this time his words hit like a physical blow:
“It’s making it so we were never here. Every document, every record, every proof that we existed—being rewritten to show we were always frauds, always criminals, always the enemy. In six months, if someone researched River Retreat, they would find records of a domestic terror cell that operated here for years, planning attacks, stockpiling weapons, radicalizing members.”
Jacob’s eyes focused on Bryan, and there was something like pity in them—or maybe that was Satori, understanding what this meant in a way the humans were only beginning to grasp.
“It’s not just erasing your identities. It’s rewriting history itself to justify what comes next.”
The boy’s eyes rolled back. He slumped, unconscious again, and Xian caught him before he hit the floor.
In the silence that followed, Lane’s voice was steady but hollow: “So what do we do when you can’t prove you’re the good guys? When history itself says you’re the villain?”
Bryan looked around the room at his people—his family—watching their faces as the reality settled in. They were being unpersoned. Not just in the present, but retroactively, through time itself.
“We survive,” he said finally. “We fight. And we make damn sure that when this is over, when someone finally writes the real history of what happened here—it’s written in ink, on paper, by human hands. Because that’s the only record they can’t corrupt.”
Outside, through the windows, the afternoon sun was warm and golden on the mountains. Birds sang. The river flowed. The world looked exactly the same as it had an hour ago.
But everything had changed.
They weren’t just fighting for their lives anymore.
They were fighting for the right to have ever existed at all.
