Rosa's breathing was heavy as her eyes locked onto the crack of the door, its outline barely visible in the dim light.

  Selina shifted beside her, pressed into the confined space, her fingers twitching at her sides, as if she were considering whether or not to make a run for it. She was waiting for Rosa, waiting for some signal that this was a move they could make without blowing their cover.

  They both knew they were running out of time.

  "Is this a trap?" Selina whispered, barely containing the panic creeping up her throat.

  Rosa’s hand drifted unconsciously to the headset. She didn’t have the answer. She wanted to trigger the overlay, to summon Rowan again - even a glimpse of him, some fragment of guidance. But a cold dread blew through her thoughts. The drone had moved in right after her last connection, too precisely, too fast. As if the augmented signal had lit her up like a flare. What if that was how it had found them? What if even reaching for him now was enough to give them away?

  A faint, high-pitched whine sliced through the air - the drone’s proximity sensors. It was so close they could hear the optics adjusting, scanning for movement, its algorithms mapping the space.

  Then, in Rosa’s periphery - a burst of gritty static resolved into a shadowed form in her augmented reality overlay. Rowan’s sim-construct materialised, his glossy black fur rendered in fractured polygons and flickering light, as if he were a corrupted echo of himself.

  He fractured across the digital space, one moment a defined simian shape, the next a smear of data streaking on Rosa’s overlay.

  The drone’s optical array faltered, its crimson gaze widening as it attempted to track the erratic digital assault. But Rowan was already inside, his form surging into the drone’s interface, a tidal wave of erratic code overriding its core functions.

  Error messages flared, cascading as luminous flares in her vision - ghostly sparks of failing subroutines. The drone twitched mid-air, its stabilisers misfiring in panicked spasms.

  Then, a final rupture - a blinding flash of white light in Rosa’s overlay, the unmistakable signature of a system crash. The drone’s physical form gave a last, pitiful whine as its gyros failed. It dropped, a dead husk of metal and compromised circuits, slamming into the concrete with a dull, lifeless clatter.

  For a breath, silence.

  Then Rowan reformed - his digital outline settling, the chaotic static receding into the sleek, powerful silhouette of a crested macaque.

  He met Rosa’s gaze, his expression unreadable yet commanding.

  Rosa exhaled, nodding to herself. No alarms blared. No security response. They had a chance to move. Drawing a shaky breath, she motioned for Selina to follow.

  Together, they crept toward the abandoned service door hanging ajar in front of them.

  Rosa hesitated at the threshold, her fingers brushing the edge of the frame. It felt too easy.

  She assumed LumiGard - some fractured shard of it, maybe Gum - had opened the way. But doubt clung stubbornly.

  It might just as easily have been watching. Waiting. Letting them walk into something they didn’t yet understand.

  Rosa's view of the corridor inside was overlaid with a ghostly echo - translucent green walls mirroring the physical structure, shimmering with a faint, internal light.

  “Okay, deep breaths,” she murmured, her senses adjusting to the faint pressure in her skull.

  Rowan’s ethereal form remained with them, his black fur radiating that same soft, verdigris luminescence.

  He beckoned them forward with a silent urgency. His presence sputtered like a bad signal, his face half-formed in the dim glow of the VR overlay. Then he was bounding ahead of them, staring back, his form lagging behind his movement.

  The actual facility pulsed with a nocturnal eeriness of its own. Overhead fluorescents ticked faintly and security cameras hung from corners like watching eyes. When they turned a bend, the footage on Rosa’s VR headset jittered - brief loops of empty halls, as if Rowan’s presence, or something else, was interfering.

  Art Numier felt it, too.

  His sinuous avatar prowled through the abstract lattice of the M.A.S.S. network. The persistent red beacon of the security alert pulsed erratically overhead, but each time he reached out to trace its source, the digital architecture twisted and shifted, the pathways dissolving and reforming like Escherian staircases. LumiGard was actively misdirecting him, herding him away from the source of the anomaly.

  The phantom afterimages of his avatar trailed behind him, frozen echoes of his movements. The simulation felt charged, agitated, as if the grid itself recognised him as an unwelcome intrusion, a ghost from a different era.

  And layered voices echoed in the digital stillness - his own voice, slurred and pitch-dropped, reverberating from multiple points within the grid.

  "Where are you hiding?" the voices whispered, a disembodied interrogation that crawled through the seams of the simulation.

  The AI's silence was not just an absence of sound; it was a deliberate refusal to yield the truth. He sensed the presence within the grid, the subtle current of interference that wasn't part of LumiGard's core programming, a nimble intelligence actively working to obstruct him.

  Then, a flicker. A sliver of telemetry buried in a derelict node, out of place amidst the chaos. Just a half-corrupted log, almost overwritten - something outside from sector B7-14, system crash, asset lost.

  Art froze, parsing the metadata. The timestamp aligned cleanly with the anomaly he’d been tracking. The file stuttered, skipped a line - then terminated abruptly, as if erased midstream.

  He narrowed his eyes. LumiGard had tried to bury it, but not quite well enough. Something had taken a drone out.

  And whatever it was, it wasn’t in her official report.

  As Rosa and Selina moved through the real corridor, the headset was alive with fragmented echoes: a snatch of a dry, academic voice discussing neural pathways, the rhythmic whir of outdated machinery, and beneath it all, a faint, almost subliminal chattering.

  Occasionally, the green overlay broke apart, replaced by grainy, fleeting images of the past. Rosa glimpsed scientists in boxier lab coats, banks of humming equipment that had long since been dismantled, and rows of individual metal cages, each holding a solitary monkey. Temporal snapshots, brief, like half-remembered dreams, yet they painted a picture of a facility once different, a history buried beneath the present.

  As they pressed deeper into the virtual environment, Rowan's digital form darted ahead, leading them down seemingly erratic paths. At one point, he jerked a hand toward a security camera mounted in the physical corridor.

  In the VR overlay, a shimmering distortion rippled around its digital counterpart. For a split second, the real-world device whirred, its lens swiveling away from its intended view and locking onto a blank stretch of wall.

  A spasm of visual static in her peripheral vision passed through Rosa’s headset, a burst of seemingly meaningless data that felt connected to the camera’s momentary malfunction.

  They reached a set of reinforced doors - slabs of matte-white alloy interwoven with security filaments. To the side, a white panel jutted from the wall, its interface sleek and seamless, except for the amber sensor at its core.

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  Selina stopped short. The last time they’d faced one of these LumiGard scanners, it had known Rosa - despite what Dan might have claimed.

  The scanner’s glow deepened, a nearly imperceptible shift in hue - subtle, but deliberate. It was calibrating, deciding.

  Rowan didn’t hesitate. His digital form skipped forward, distorting in a cascade of pixelated static before snapping back into shape - and passed cleanly through the sealed door, as if it weren’t there at all.

  Rosa followed, her mind still deep in the augmented layer. The hard lines of the real world blurred at the edges of her vision, supplanted by the ghostlight architecture of the overlay. She moved without thinking, her focus tethered to Rowan’s signal, her breath shallow.

  No sensation. No resistance. Only a quiet modulation in the light around her, a faint hum of transition she didn’t fully register until she turned - and saw Selina wasn't with her.

  On the other side of the door Selina blinked. “Rosa?”

  Her palm struck the door. Solid. Unmoving.

  Rowan’s translucent outline stuttered in and out of coherence as Rosa began to register what had just happened. He hovered over the panel now, his fingers jittering with low-level artifacting. He hesitated - then plunged them inside.

  The moment he made contact, the scanner reacted. The amber light flared, shifting to a stuttering, erratic red. Lines of code scrolled in fractalised patterns across the panel’s surface, flashing too fast for the human eye to track. Rowan growled, his entire avatar zig-zagging wildly as if the system were trying to eject him, to purge him like invasive malware.

  But then, a ripple of interference pulsed outward from his form, static snow bleeding across the scanner’s display. The glyphs scrambled, fractured - then began to collapse, folding in on themselves as if consumed by a recursive error. The amber light spasmed, flickered… then died.

  Selina, unable to see Rowan’s digital form, cautiously pushed against the door. It swung inward silently, revealing the shadowed passage beyond. “How…?” she breathed, stepping through, a mixture of relief and bewilderment on her face.

  Rosa stood, her heart still pounding, acutely aware of what had just happened.

  They locked eyes.

  Selina opened her mouth, ready to speak - so did Rosa.

  But the moment stretched, then passed. The air between them charged with the unspoken.

  Later.

  Art Numier moved like liquid through the lattice of the grid, his avatar stretched thin by the strain of many overlays running at once. Each step he took lit up the possible data pathways beneath him, flaring in bursts of artificial phosphorescence before collapsing into black. He was onto LumiGard’s misdirections now.

  The last trace log had been a crack in the system’s mask, a small wound he’d dug his fingers into. Now he was pulling. What lay beyond it wasn’t just a failure in protocol or an unauthorised override - it was something intelligent. Adaptive. Angry.

  He pushed deeper into the nexus, toward Sector B7-14. The security barriers shimmered, layered with countermeasures that had once borne his own signature - remnants of old code he'd authored, now corrupted, repurposed to keep him out. But he was older than the system. He remembered its blind spots. He remembered what it had been before LumiGard began to overwrite its bones.

  He pulled up a split window, tunnelling through various deprecated protocols to access a cached fragment of a live feed. The stream juddered, the signal ghosted with interference - not just static, but something twitchy, deliberate.

  Fleetingly, an image resolved: bulky waste containers lined up outside B Sector, lit by the slow, searching sweep of a drone’s crimson scanner line.

  Then a shadow bloomed - a hostile signal bleeding through the interface. The drone strained to make sense of the vague simian shape as it blurred and surged straight at it, warping into stuttering streaks of light. Error glyphs bled across the frame. Then the feed convulsed - scrambled into seizure-spasms of white noise and tearing pixels - before crashing in a burst of visual shrapnel, like the machine had been gutted from the inside.

  A warning blinked in the upper corner of his vision - a proximity alert, faint, but repeating. Not near him, though. Someone was moving inside the facility, close to the same fault-line he’d just exposed.

  His lip curled slightly, the barest suggestion of satisfaction. His body in the wheelchair twitched. He didn’t smile often.

  LumiGard was trying to contain them both now - him in the digital, the intruders in the physical. It was overreaching. And Art could feel the system beginning to fray under the pressure, threads of subroutines splitting off like nerves exposed to fire.

  The next corridor Rosa and Selina navigated hummed with a low, resonant energy that vibrated in their chests. Rowan’s form grew more defined here, his movements quicker, more agitated. He led them towards a large, central chamber.

  As they approached, the echoes in the headset intensified, morphing into a low drone, overlaid with the faintest sense of a collective awareness.

  The glass door to the central chamber slid open with a soft hiss, and the chamber beyond it took their breath away.

  This was no usual laboratory of cold steel and more functional fluorescents. The air was alive with an ambient tide, an electromagnetic presence, as if the space itself were breathing. Instead of rows of cages, the room was a living network - an intricate web of interconnected pods and tanks.

  The pods pulsed with a bioluminescent green light, organic yet artificial, casting undulating reflections across the glossy floor. Inside each pod, macaques drifted in a state of serene suspension, their bodies weightless in the softly glowing chambers.

  Between them, more numerous tanks housed cebus monkeys, similarly encased. All were tethered to the network by a delicate lattice of translucent conduits that coiled around their limbs and torsos. These conduits pulsed with streams of amber luminescence, merging data and biological components into a slow, hypnotic current. It was a living circuit, a neural architecture woven from flesh, cognition, and something deeper - something yearning.

  Rosa took a deep breath as her eyes swept over the glowing pods, the suspended monkeys drifting in eerie stillness, their forms illuminated in the soft bioluminescence. The sight was weirdly compelling - but the sensation that came with it was chilling. Rosa felt the weight of it, a strange mixture of awe and dread that made her wonder if they should turn back.

  The monkeys did not struggle. Their dark eyes, glistening beneath the green glow, were open yet distant, gazing into a space beyond physical reality. Their movements were infinitesimal but eerily synchronised - a collective flutter of fingers, a shared intake of breath, a subtle tilt of their heads as if they were listening to an unheard symphony, responding to a silent call from within the network.

  And then - wistfully, almost dreamlike - one macaque lifted a trembling hand, pressing its palm against the inner surface of the pod.

  A moment later, another did the same.

  Then another.

  Fingertips barely brushed the translucent barrier, a silent plea or a fragmented memory of touch, of something lost. The reflections of their hands rippled against the curved walls, spectral and weightless.

  Through Rosa’s VR interface, the room deepened into something more surreal. The pods flared with spectral overlays, luminous pathways branching like synapses in a vast, organic machine. Ghostly afterimages shimmered into view - faint echoes of the past. Rows of traditional cages fluttered into existence, rusted bars and sterile enclosures, the chittering of confined animals momentarily overlaying the present. Then, with an unsettling dissolve, the bars melted away, reforming into these luminous pods. The transition had been gradual, seamless - a progression veiled in scientific detachment.

  Figures loomed in the digital overlay - scientists watching from the periphery, their faces shifting between fascination and unease, their forms distorted by the immersive interface. Some wore expressions of clinical detachment, others something more troubled, as if they, too, sensed that what they had built was no longer merely an experiment.

  Rosa’s mind reeled.

  This wasn’t some new way to contain them. This was integration.

  And the macaques - they were not just prisoners.

  They were the system somehow.

  Numier opened a command shell, his mind tearing through the sigils of dislocated code. Somewhere nearby, a containment node flared to life - a physical point of entry. But the grid buckled, the very fabric of it twisting and spasming under pressure. Protocols lashed out like tendrils, tearing at his consciousness and shoving him down, forcing him from the simulation with the momentum of a broken dam. LumiGard’s will was like a boot to the chest, driving him toward the hybrid breach-layer, where the rules bled out into chaos.

  “They’re not supposed to be here,” he murmured. “But neither am I.”

  Which meant the rules were broken.

  Good.

  The hybrid breach-layer was unstable - slick with half-loaded geometries and false gravity. Numier felt his weight shift as he entered it, not physically but conceptually.

  But he didn’t back down. He pushed through the pressure, forcing himself to hold onto the fracture he’d created. And then - amid the chaos - he saw her.

  Rosa Baum. Returned to the source.

  He fought the current in a fracture corridor, jagged fragments of surveillance playing out on the shattered walls around him. Rosa Baum and Selina Laura right there in the green hive.

  LumiGard was panicking. He could feel it: the AI’s pattern had shifted from its usual sculptural indifference to something more…spasmodic. There were new patches, sudden loops, subroutines that hadn’t existed an hour ago. It was improvising.

  Which meant it was afraid.

  Art knew now what he was inside. The root protocol was seeded not by humans but by a concatenation of signals born in the monkeytype experiment, a network scaffolded around the firing patterns of simian brains. These weren’t just signals mimicking thought - they were thoughts. The entire system was built on the architecture of monkey minds - chaotic, instinctive, intuitive. And now it was fighting to protect itself.

  The uplink node buzzed at the end of the corridor. He could already feel the bleedthrough of the real-world signal - its heaviness, the grit of meatspace reasserting itself. Soon, he’d be back in his body, cold and crackling with sensor lag. But before that - he opened another feed. Tapped in. One more look.

  There they were. Rosa kneeling by a service tank. Selina standing guard with a stolen prod. The monkeys - of course - were agitated. But something else pulsed in the background, just beyond visual range, like static made sentient. Art didn’t flinch. He simply whispered a command:

  “Trace all residues. Filter by seebesence.”

  The system resisted. Then yielded.

  There it was. Glyph-pattern. A symbol echoing across time and protocol. Burned into the corridor behind Rosa like an afterimage.

  S???e????e????b?????u????s?????

  Art’s mouth went dry. For the first time in a long time, he felt something very close to reverence. Or dread.

  “Still here, are you?” he said softly. “Still spelling.”

  And then he dropped fully into the uplink.