Chapter 9 - The Voice in the Wall
“Who are you?” Evan demanded, stepping closer to the speaker grille despite Miller’s restraining hand on his shoulder. “How do you know about the gas?”
“My name is Maya,” the voice replied, tinny and distorted through the speaker static. “And I’ve been sitting in Sub-Level Four for three years, waiting for someone to finally break the floorboards in Room 204. You’re the first ones to make it past the initial testing phase.”
Mrs. Gable crawled up beside them, her face streaked with soot and tears. “Three years? Child, what are you talking about? Who put you down there?”
“The same people who wired your classroom, Mrs. Gable,” Maya said bitterly. “The Board of Education is just a shell company for Apex Behavioral Dynamics. They use public schools as live-fire laboratories to test how children adapt to authoritarian environments. Every locker shift, every desk track, every psychological quiz—it’s all feeding a master AI that designs compliance models for corporate housing blocks.”
Miller’s face hardened into a mask of pure fury. He slammed his fist against the metal wall near the speaker. “Where is the physical terminal for this AI? Where is the core server?”
“Right beneath the gymnasium floor,” Maya answered instantly. “In the old fallout shelter from the Cold War. They upgraded it with quantum processors last summer. If you can reach the manual override switch inside the server room, you can kill the power grid for the entire complex. But you only have about four minutes before the security system resets the access tunnels.”
“We’re going,” Evan said firmly, looking up at Miller. He didn't feel afraid anymore; the sheer scale of the deception had burned away his fear, leaving behind a cold, sharp determination.
Miller nodded slowly. He holstered his heavy flashlight, pulled a multi-tool from his pocket, and jammed it into the control panel beside the Omega-1 opening, sparking a wire to force the biometric lock open manually.
“Stay behind me, kids,” Miller said, ducking his head into the narrow, sloping tunnel of Omega-1.
The descent was steep, smelling of damp earth and hot copper. They slid downward for several yards, gravity doing most of the work until they dropped out of the metal pipe and onto a cold, hard concrete floor.
May you like
The air here was freezing. Towering racks of server units stretched out into the gloom, their thousands of tiny blue and red indicator lights blinking in unison like a digital graveyard. At the far end of the vast underground room stood a massive steel vault door, its digital keypad glowing with an intense, blood-red light. And standing right in front of the vault door, holding a heavy-duty assault rifle, was a man in a crisp corporate suit.
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