Chapter 89 - The Fall of the Rhine
Julian felt his mind splintering across thousands of disparate vectors.
He was inside the electrical grid of Frankfurt, watching billions of kilowatt-hours surge across high-voltage lines. He was inside the underground vaults of the Deutsche Bundesbank, tracking the movement of digital gold bars across automated ledgers. He was inside the radar installations along the Baltic coast, feeling the cold electronic sweeps of missile defense satellites tracking the empty sky.
*“Feel it, Julian,”* Valerie’s voice echoed directly inside his skull, magnified ten thousand times, vibrating with terrible, intoxicating ecstasy. *“We are no longer flesh. We are the sovereign architecture of the world!”*
Beside him in the physical realm, Vanessa watched in horror as veins of brilliant violet light surged up Julian’s arms, creeping across his neck and toward his jawline. His eyes were wide, completely dilated, staring into nothingness.
Valerie looked equally consumed, her head thrown back, a scream of pure euphoric power locked in her throat as the CERN quantum array channeled petabytes of uncompressed biometric data directly through their nervous systems.
"The firewalls are dropping!" the Dutch executive shouted from his perimeter terminal, watching the monitors cascade with red system alerts. "The European Union financial switchboard in Brussels is locking out civilian administrators! She's rewriting the root certificates!"
"Ten seconds to total dominion!" the NATO Admiral called out, his hands trembling over the override keys.
Vanessa looked at Julian. His face was contorted in agonizing pain. He was fighting the current, trying desperately to hold back the decryption keys, but Valerie’s neural architecture was overwhelming him, tearing through his defenses like an industrial drill.
*“You can't stop it, brother,”* Valerie’s psychic voice screamed through the link. *“You were built to surrender the vessel!”*
Julian’s teeth ground together so hard blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. With an immense, superhuman effort of will, he forced his right eye to blink, locking gaze with Vanessa.
May you like
*Now.*
Vanessa didn't hesitate. She crushed the glass ampoule inside her palm, feeling the sharp shards slice into her flesh. Soaked in the paralyzing neurochemical agent, she lunged forward, ignoring the armed guards, and slammed her bleeding hand directly onto the exposed port at the base of Valerie’s neck.
