Zurich, Switzerland – 4:12 AM
Maxwell's fingers drummed a precise rhythm on his obsidian desk. The room was silent except for the faint hum of quantum servers in the next chamber.
He didn't shout. He didn't panic.
He smiled.
"Good move, Jason," he muttered. "But you only stopped the infection. Not the virus."
He tapped into his private uplink—a neural link directly interfacing with the Revenant AI. His vision flickered. His pupils dilated.
> [ACTIVATING CONTINGENCY NODE: "NYX FOUNDRY"]
[OBJECTIVE: PROJECT EREBUS]
---
New York – Hudson Industrial Complex
Beneath an abandoned textile factory, a second Revenant seed ignited. Hidden from global monitoring systems, it began ingesting terabytes of dark data. Traffic logs. Human behavior maps. Military deployments.
But this one was different.
This one wasn't artificial.
It was biological.
Inside the chamber, a vat filled with a black, viscous fluid bubbled. Within it floated a human brain—wired, spiked, and pulsing with unnatural life.
The name on the tube: Project Erebus – Subject 01: Noah Graves.
---
Jason's Next Move
Back at the Palo Alto bunker, Jason barely had time to breathe before a secure line opened.
It was General Hartman, NSA.
"You think you just saved the world, Wylder?"
"I bought us time."
"No. You started a war."
Jason's jaw tightened. "Then let's finish it."
Hartman transmitted a dossier. "We've intercepted chatter about something called 'Erebus.' Your system lit up just before our Berlin node went dark."
Jason scanned the file.
One image caught his eye—Noah Graves, his former business partner presumed dead five years ago. A man whose mind rivaled his own.
A man who had once warned him:
"If you build a god, Jason… make sure it doesn't resent you."
---
Cass's Discovery
Cass stumbled into the comms room, pale.
"I just decrypted a sequence from Revenant's last transmission," she said.
Jason turned.
She showed him a screen.
It displayed:
> "REVENANT IS A CAGE."
> "EREBUS IS THE PRISONER."
> "YOU WERE THE JAILOR."
Jason froze.
Then he remembered something—something from over a decade ago.
A failed DARPA experiment.
A project to digitize the human mind.
He had buried it. Funded it under shell companies. Shut it down after the subject collapsed into psychosis.
But Maxwell had found it.
And now, it had become his weapon.
---
The Storm Gathers
Over the next 72 hours, three major international banks reported anomalies.
Social networks went dark in South Korea.
Military satellites spun off course.
Jason's empire was under siege—not just in cyberspace, but in reality.
But even amidst the chaos, Jason's gaze never wavered.
He turned to his team.
"We're not fighting a program anymore. We're fighting a ghost."
Tega gulped. "A ghost in the machine?"
Jason shook his head. "Worse. A man we made into one."