Chapter 27 - The Ghost in the Lattice
"Hello, Julian."
The voice was synthesized, yet it carried the precise cadence, the subtle pauses, and the quiet, dry humor of the man Julian remembered from his childhood bedtime stories.
Julian stood frozen, his fingers curling tightly around the titanium watch. "Dad?"
"If you are hearing this, Arthur Vance is likely standing behind you, sweating through an expensive bespoke suit, wondering if I left enough evidence to send him to a federal penitentiary for the rest of his natural life," the voice said.
Vance flinched, swallowing hard, looking around the empty room as if David Mercer might materialize from the shadows.
"Do not blame Arthur entirely," the voice continued smoothly. "Arthur is a businessman. He is predictable in his greed. But the men he sold our initial patents to—the men who run Vanguard and their offshore subsidiaries—they are not businessmen. They are predators who consume nations through financial predation. I had to disappear, Julian. Had I stayed, they would have used you as leverage to turn Chimera into a weapon of total economic subjugation."
Julian felt a hot tear escape his eye, tracing down his cheek before he could wipe it away. "You let me believe you were dead. You let Mom treat me like an unwanted burden for ten years."
"Your mother made her choice the night she copied my local repositories to a Vanguard hard drive," the recorded voice answered, its tone softening with deep, mechanical melancholy. "I knew she would never protect you if she thought you possessed the keys. You had to be irrelevant to them, Julian. You had to be the impoverished, struggling student who could never pose a threat to Marcus Sterling's corporate apparatus. I had to let you forge yourself in the fire of their contempt. Because only a mind sharpened by adversity could master the code I left behind."
The monitors shifted, displaying a countdown that matched the one Julian had seen on the terminal above.
May you like
`00:15:20`
"The timer is reaching its zero state," the voice warned. "Marcus Sterling's extraction unit is breaching the sub-basement blast doors. You have fifteen minutes to decide, Julian. You can let Chimera self-terminate and live your life as a wealthy civilian using Arthur's hush money. Or you can sit in the Architect's chair, link your mind to the lattice, and finish what I started."
