Chapter 44 - Bloodline of the Machine God
"Welcome home, Unit-01."
The voice did not come from an overhead speaker. It came from the very walls, the floors, the air itself—a resonant acoustic vibration created by the pulsing composite material of the vault.
From the far end of the wide gallery, a single figure walked out from the mist of venting nitrogen.
Arthur raised his rifle instantly. "Stop right there or I blow you in half!"
The figure stepped into the light. Arthur’s finger froze on the trigger.
It was a girl. She appeared to be fifteen years old—an adolescent version of Lily Vance. But unlike the crude infant drones in the dock above, this subject wore no armor. She wore a simple white tunic, her long auburn hair falling past her shoulders. Her skin was flawless, but along the side of her neck, running from the base of her skull down into her collarbone, was a gleaming, gold-plated neural port.
She looked at Lily, then at Rachel, and finally settled her cold, inhuman gaze on Arthur.
"You should have pulled the trigger, Grandfather," the older girl said. Her voice carried the unmistakable cadence of Clara Vance, intertwined with a clinical, synthetic undertone. "Just like you should have pulled it thirty years ago when you signed the corporate charter that financed my creation."
"Who are you?" Rachel demanded, stepping forward, retrieving her shotgun with lightning reflexes, leveling the barrel directly between the girl’s violet eyes.
"I am Lily-Prime," the girl replied smoothly, not flinching before the muzzle. "I am what Lily was intended to become before Daniel Vance's biological sentimentality interfered. Daniel was weak. He was given Unit-01 to monitor and condition in a controlled environment. But he allowed his petty sadism to overcome the protocol."
"Sadism?" Arthur growled, trembling with rage. "You call starving a seven-year-old child and locking her in a basement on a dog chain an 'experiment'?"
"It was biological stress-testing," Lily-Prime stated calmly, tilting her head with curious detachment. "The human brain cannot unlock the fifth-tier neural capacity required to interface with the Leviathan Core without extreme emotional trauma. The feeling of abandonment. The physical pain of starvation. The terror of helplessness. Daniel was tasked with breaking her emotional resistance so her genome would yield the root-level decryption key."
The real Lily stepped out from behind Rachel. Her small face was pale, but the trembling in her legs had stopped. She looked up at her older, synthetic counterpart.
"You let him hurt me," Lily said, her voice small, clear, and cutting through the hum of the servers like a blade. "You watched through the cameras when Victoria poured boiling water on my feet. You watched when he made me eat scraps off the floor."
"Pain is data, Unit-01," Lily-Prime answered without a trace of remorse. "And now, your data is complete. The Genesis Protocol requires your physical brain to be integrated into the central column. Step forward. Surrender the physical vessel, and your suffering will permanently cease."
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"Over my dead body," Rachel snarled, and pulled the trigger.
***
