Юлия Авилкина – Survivors Bias (страница 4)

“Blindside them. I need ten minutes. If they lock down the building, I’m dead.”

“Ten minutes is an eternity. I can override the local climate control node. I’ll trigger a chemical hazard protocol—it’ll force every door into ‘fail-safe exit’ mode. But you only get one shot at this. Ready?”

I ducked into a stall and pressed my back against the door.

“Do it.”

Instantly, the office lights flickered and shifted to a frantic emergency orange. Above me, the fire suppression nozzles hissed, but instead of water, they unleashed a thick, white fog. It wasn't gas—just supercooled vapor Leo had pumped through the vents to kill their thermal imaging.

[SYSTEM]: ATTENTION. REFRIGERANT LEAK DETECTED. ALL PERSONNEL MUST EVACUATE SECTOR B-4 IMMEDIATELY.

I bolted from the restroom. The hallway was already a nightmare. Panicked employees were dropping their tablets, shielding their faces. The fog was so dense I could barely see my own hands.

“Elena, go right! Ten feet out, there’s a service stairwell for the cleaning bots. It’s air-gapped from the main net—strictly mechanical locks,” Leo instructed.

I dove through an inconspicuous door disguised as a wall panel. Inside, it was pitch black and reeked of machine oil. I scrambled down the steep steps, hearing Marcus upstairs barking into his comms, demanding they seal the perimeter.

“Where are you, Leo?” I whispered, hitting the thirtieth floor.

“I hijacked a food delivery drone. It’s idling at the tech balcony on twenty-nine. Jump in, Elena. It’s the only transport within a mile that doesn’t run a passenger ID check.”

I burst onto the balcony. The wind from the bay slammed into my face, momentarily clearing the fog in my head. A small, sleek delivery pod with a pizza logo hovered just three feet from the railing, its rotors screaming as they fought the updraft.

I looked back. The balcony door kicked open with a metallic crash. Marcus was there, leveling his pulse-taser at my chest.

“Elena!” he roared. “Freeze, or I’ll fry your chip!”

I looked down. The drop was so steep the cars below looked like ants. Then, I looked Marcus right in the eye.

“Tell Clara,” I spat, “that Lisa is officially back.”

And then, I jumped.

Chapter 4

The drone dumped me into a pile of cardboard boxes in a dead-end alley in Queens, and I couldn't catch my breath for several minutes. The whistle of the wind was still ringing in my ears, and all I could see was Marcus’s face.

“Hey, Ghost. Get up. Straight ahead, green door, sign says ‘Laundromat.’ Get downstairs before the municipal scanners pick up your heat signature,” Leo’s voice in my earpiece didn’t sound so confident anymore. I could hear... nerves.

I shoved the heavy door open. A blast of humid, hot air hit me, smelling of cheap fabric softener and overheated metal. Rows of industrial washers hummed in unison, creating a wall of white noise perfect for masking a conversation.

At the very back of the room, behind a mountain of unwashed linens, a staircase was hidden. I headed down, expecting some high-tech lair with a dozen monitors, but the reality was much more low-rent.

It was a concrete bunker packed with servers that were practically "breathing" heat. In the middle of the room, a guy sat in a beat-up office chair. He was wearing an oversized hoodie, and a laptop covered in “Error 404” stickers was balanced on his knees.

Leo looked younger than his hologram. And paler.

“You’re real,” he said, without turning around. “Up until the very last second, I thought Clara had engineered some perfect AI-simulacrum of my sister and then paired you with it just to see if I’d try to breach the system.”

I walked closer, feeling my knees start to give out.

“I’m not a simulacrum, Leo. And I really did know Maya.”

He turned. His eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep.

“I know. I just ran your jump through three neural nets. The biomechanics of that fall were way too… human. And way too suicidal.”

He pointed at the screen. A live news feed was scrolling by. The headline read:

BREAKING: BALANCE HQ GLITCH—TECHNICAL MALFUNCTION OR CYBER ATTACK?

“Clara won’t tell the truth,” I said, sinking onto an empty equipment crate. “She’ll say I lost my mind. Mark verified my identity. She has my DNA profile on file.”

Leo suddenly froze, his fingers hovering over the keys.

“A DNA profile? Elena, you don’t get it. In 2026, DNA isn’t just some code in a test tube. It’s the key to your digital immortality. If she has your profile, she can spin up a ‘Digital Lisa’—an AI double that will confess to anything. Terrorism, Maya’s murder… you name it.”

He spun the monitor toward me.

“But we have one lead. Before you jumped, I managed to scrape a single file from Mark’s cloud. It wasn't encrypted—it was steganography, hidden inside a photo of Maya.”

I leaned in. The screen showed an old photo: Maya in a park, laughing, wearing a strange pendant—a tiny silver thumb drive shaped like a key.

“Maya knew they were coming for her,” Leo said quietly. “She left a hard-copy backup. But that pendant isn't with Clara. It’s not in the police evidence lockers, either.”

“Then where is it?” I asked, feeling a hunter’s instinct finally override my fear.

Leo looked at me with a bitter smirk.

“It’s in the one place Clara’s algorithms can’t touch. A storage locker at the old Port Authority bus terminal—the one they shuttered for renovation three years ago. There’s no Wi-Fi there. No cloud. Just rusted metal and a mechanical lock.”

“You’re going solo,” Leo said, handing me a worn-out hooded jacket that smelled of dust. “I can’t leave these servers. If Clara traces my node while I’m out for a stroll, we’re both finished. I’ll be your eyes through the old municipal cameras—the ones I tapped into before they were swapped out for ‘Smart Lenses.’”

The old Port Authority terminal looked like the skeleton of a great beast abandoned in the middle of a glowing New York City. There were no neon Balance signs here—only rusted grates and the smell of damp concrete.

I slipped through a hole in the fence, feeling the crunch of broken glass beneath my boots.

“Elena, you copy?” Leo’s voice was breaking up through heavy static in my earpiece. “Straight down the hall, past the empty ticket counters. Sector 4-B. The locker bays should be right there. But watch your step—the motion sensors are still running on an old grid, and I can't fully bypass them.”

I moved through the dark, my fingertips trailing along the cold walls. I didn’t dare turn on my phone's flashlight—it was too big a risk.

“I see the lockers,” I whispered.

Rows of metal cabinets stretched into the gloom, their paint blistered and peeling. I made my way to locker 412—the number Maya had hidden in the photo’s metadata.

The lock was an old rotary dial. I pressed my ear to the cold steel, trying to remember the mechanics from the old movies my father used to watch.

Click. Then another.

The door gave way with a low, metallic groan. Inside, sitting on a dusty shelf, was something else entirely. It wasn't a thumb drive. It was a battered, leather-bound notebook and... a pressurized injector pen loaded with a single amber vial.

“Leo, it’s not a flash drive,” I said, picking up the notebook. “It’s a journal. And some kind of drug.”

“A journal? In the age of cloud storage?” Leo went silent for a beat. “Elena, Maya was smarter than I thought. You can’t remote-hack paper. What’s in it?”

I flipped to the first page. Maya’s handwriting—jagged, frantic, and stained with the ghosts of dried tears.

“If you’re reading this, the Balance algorithm has already flagged me for deletion. Lisa, if it’s you—don’t trust Clara. She’s not just harvesting data. She’s using our DNA to grow 'Digital Twins'—AI replacements for politicians and journalists. The vial in this locker is the only way to break the sync. It’s a virus that doesn't target code—it kills the link between biology and the digital world.”

Suddenly, a blinding spotlight cut through the dark, searing my retinas.

“Put the notebook on the floor, Elena,” Marcus’s voice boomed, calm and cold.

He was standing at the entrance to the sector, flanked by three operatives in full tactical gear. The red HUD lights on their helmets glowed like predatory eyes.

“You really thought we left this terminal unguarded?” Marcus moved toward me slowly, his pulse-taser leveled at my heart. “We were just waiting for you to lead us to whatever Maya stashed away. Clara needs that serum. It’s the final piece of her control system.”

“Elena, run!” Leo screamed in my ear. “I’m blowing the terminal’s main breaker in five seconds!”

“Too late for running,” Marcus smirked. “Your hacker just burned his location by trying to ping the local grid. Boys—two on her, two to the signal coordinates. Move!”

The darkness slammed into the terminal like a physical blow. The second Leo blew the breaker, a deafening crack of electrical discharge turned the hallway into a chaotic mess of sparks and the sharp, ozone stench of burnt rubber.

“Go to thermal! Switch to thermal, now!” Marcus roared from somewhere maybe thirty feet out.

I didn't have thermal vision. All I had were my instincts and the notebook clutched against my chest.