Chapter 164
No.1
The glass-walled headquarters of the Aethel and JHU joint project usually hummed with the quiet,intense focus of academic research. Today, it was a circus.
Massive LED lighting panels were set up in the main lobby. Thick black cables snaked across the polished concrete floors. A camera operator balanced a heavy Steadicam rig on his shoulders, circling the center of the room.
They were filming the Netflix documentary: Heart of a Healer: The Allena Sinclair Story.①
Allena sat on a sleek modernist sofa in the center of the lights. She wore a tailored, pristine white blazer that made her look like a high-fashion scientist. Her makeup was flawless, designed to look as if she wore none at all.
"Project Chiron isn't just code," Allena said to the interviewer off-camera, her voice dripping with practiced empathy. "It's about bringing a human
touch to artificial intelligence. I realized early on that the engineers lacked the clinical compassion needed to truly heal people. That's why I had to step in and guide the architecture."
No.2
She was stealing the entire philosophy of the project,word for word, from a memo Elisa had written three months ago.
Suddenly, the heavy glass doors of the headquarters swung open.
Simon, August's chief executive assistant, marched in. He was flanked by two large men in dark suits.Behind them, catering staff pushed three silver carts loaded with tiered trays of delicate pastries, finger sandwiches, and silver pots of tea.
"Excuse me, everyone!" Simon announced, his voice carrying over the chatter of the film crew. "Mr.Chambers wanted to send a small token of his appreciation to Dr. Sinclair and the hardworking documentary team. Afternoon tea from Le Bernardin."①
A collective gasp of delight went up from the production assistants and junior researchers. They
swarmed the carts, marveling at the Michelin-starred food.
No.3
Allena placed a hand over her heart, looking perfectly surprised and touched. She looked directly into the camera lens.
"August is always so incredibly supportive of my work," she murmured, a soft blush creeping up her neck. "He knows how stressful these final testing phases can be."
The message was clear to everyone in the room.Allena wasn't just a clinical director. She was the untouchable future queen of the Chambers empire.
Far away from the lights and the expensive pastries,in her private office, now cold and sidelined near the back of the floor, Elisa sat staring at her monitors.She had overruled Alastair's vehement protests,ignored Dr. Blevins's twenty furious text messages,and checked herself out of the estate's clinic before dawn.Absolute rest, the doctor had ordered. But rest was a luxury for people who weren't at war. For her,it was a death sentence.
She wore a thick, oversized black sweater that
swallowed her frame, hiding the rigid outline of the carbon-fiber brace. Her face was the color of old parchment. Dark circles bruised the skin under her eyes.
No.4
She kept her hands flat on the desk to steady herself.The pain in her back was a constant, grinding static that made it hard to think. She reached into her pocket, pulled out two white pills, and swallowed them dry.
A group of junior coders walked past her office,carrying plates of fancy sandwiches. They looked at Elisa, then quickly looked away, whispering behind their hands.
"Did you hear what happened at Dr. Blevins's estate over the weekend?" one of them muttered. "I heard she actually slapped Allena right in the middle of the garden. No wonder Mr. Chambers is furious."
"I heard Faye is being officially ousted once the beta test is done," another whispered back. "Allena is just waiting for the board to hand her the title."
The toxic gossip floated through the half-open door,designed to be heard. Someone had even taken a
stack of Elisa's printed data reports and dumped them carelessly on a chair outside Allena's temporary office.
No.5
Elisa ignored them. She blocked out the noise,the smell of the food, and the throbbing in her spine. She focused entirely on the cascading lines of green code on her screen.
Suddenly, a red warning banner flashed across her secondary monitor.
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS ATTEMPT: CORE ALGORITHM MODULE.
Elisa's fingers flew to the keyboard. She bypassed the standard security interface and dropped directly into the command line.
Someone was trying to brute-force their way into the neural network training weights.
She ran a rapid trace route. The IP address bounced through three proxy servers in Eastern Europe, but the origin signature was sloppy. It carried a specific digital footprint she recognized.
No.6
It was coming from an external server registered to
Vanguard Medical. Allena's shell company.
They weren't just trying to push her out socially.They were actively trying to steal the source code right under her nose while the cameras were rolling.
Elisa's eyes narrowed into cold slits. She didn't just block the IP. She wrote a rapid, aggressive counter-script. She built a digital honey-trap, feeding the invading server a loop of corrupted, useless garbage data that would crash their local systems if they tried to compile it.
She hit execute. The red warning banner vanished,.replaced by a green confirmation.
She looked up through the glass partitions. She could see Allena laughing, holding a delicate teacup,surrounded by adoring fans.
No.7
You want to steal my work? Elisa thought, her jaw tight.Try it.
But the digital block wasn't enough. The Vanguard hackers had found a vulnerability in the external network bridge. To secure the core permanently before the beta launch, she needed to physically disconnect the external routing switch in the main
server room.
Elisa placed her hands on the edge of the desk. She took a deep breath, bracing herself against the plastic shell of her back brace, and pushed herself up.
Her legs trembled. The room spun for a fraction of a second.
She grabbed her tablet, tucked it under her arm,and began the long, agonizing walk down the back corridor toward the server room, leaving the noise and the vanity of the film set behind her.