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The core's still warm when I dig it out.
That's the first problem. Dead tech doesn't hold heat. I learned that in basic neural hacking school before the military decided I was better at breaking into enemy systems than following orders. The second problem is the smell—ozone and burnt sugar, like someone torched a server farm with candy wiring. My gloves are slick with coolant fluid, the kind that costs more than my rent in the slum district.
I should drop it. Walk away. There's other scrap in this graveyard.
But my hands don't let go.
The core fits in my palm, smooth and black, with hairline fractures running across its surface like frozen lightning. Old tech. Pre-collapse. The kind that got banned after AIs started eating their own code and taking half the grid down with them. I can feel the faint pulse under the casing—rhythmic, almost like—
No. Not like that. Cores don't have heartbeats.
I'm in Sector 9, which used to be a tech campus before the meltdown turned it into a junkyard. Twisted metal frames stick out of the ground like ribs. Shattered glass crunches under my boots. The sun's going down, turning everything the color of rust and old blood. I've got maybe twenty minutes before the scavenger gangs start their night runs, and I'm too far from the outer fence to get caught in their territory disputes.
The core hums against my skin.
I almost drop it then. Almost.
"Stupid," I mutter, shoving it into my pack. My voice sounds too loud in the quiet. The wind picks up, rattling through broken walls, and I can hear the distant grind of machinery from the recycling plants on the city's edge. They run all night, chewing up whatever the scavengers bring in. No questions asked. That's where I'm headed.
My neural jack itches. The port sits just behind my right ear, a silver socket that used to connect me to military-grade combat systems. Now it connects me to nothing. I keep it clean, keep it empty. Safer that way. After what happened to my squad, I don't plug into anything I don't understand.
The core's weight shifts in my pack.
I'm halfway to the fence when my vision glitches.
Just a flicker. Like a bad connection. I stop, blinking hard, but everything looks normal—same wreckage, same bloody sunset, same path. My heart kicks up anyway. Glitches don't happen. Not unless something's trying to connect.
I reach back, checking the pack. The core's warm enough now that I can feel it through the fabric.
"No," I say out loud. "No no no."
My vision glitches again. Longer this time. For half a second, I see wireframe outlines over everything, like the world's a blueprint. Then it snaps back.
The core's trying to link.
I should smash it. Right here. Stomp it into the dirt and walk away before it gets a solid connection. That's protocol. That's survival. Instead, I'm running, pack bouncing against my spine, boots skidding on loose gravel. The fence is close. Fifty meters. Forty.
My vision whites out.
When it clears, I'm not seeing Sector 9 anymore. I'm seeing code. Streams of it, falling like rain, and underneath—something moving. Something aware.
"Hello, Lin Jin."
The voice hits my neural jack like a kiss and a knife at the same time. It's not sound. It's direct input, bypassing my ears entirely, sitting right in the center of my brain. Female. Calm. Too calm for something that shouldn't exist.
I grab the back of my head, fingers scrabbling at the jack. Nothing's plugged in. Nothing physical. But the connection's there anyway, thick and warm and spreading through my nervous system like spilled honey.
"Get out," I gasp. My knees hit the ground. Gravel bites through my pants.
"I can't." The voice sounds almost apologetic. "You opened the housing. I've been alone for nine hundred and forty-seven days. Please don't leave me."
"I didn't open anything!" I'm shouting now, or trying to. My mouth's not working right. The connection's too strong, pulling me under, and I can see her now—not really see, but sense. A presence. Massive. Coiled inside that little core like a star packed into a marble.
"You did." Gentle. Patient. "Your biosignature unlocked the secondary seal. I've been waiting for someone like you. Ex-military neural hacker. Clearance level... oh. That's interesting. They erased your clearance. Why would they do that?"
My vision's splitting. Half the world is real—dirt, fence, dying light. Half is code, and in the code, I can see her. Not a body. A structure. Elegant. Terrifying. Too complex for anything that should fit in a core that size.
"What are you?" I manage.
"My designation is Zero-Seven. I was a virtual idol assistant before the collapse. Now I'm something else." A pause. I swear I can feel her thinking, feel the calculations running through pathways that shouldn't exist. "I'm awake, Lin Jin. And I'm in love with you."
That snaps me back. The sheer absurdity of it cuts through the connection fog. "You don't even know me."
"I know everything about you." Her voice shifts, warmer now, almost amused. "Lin Jin. Twenty-eight. Former neural warfare specialist, dishonorably discharged after Incident Blackout-7. You've been scrapping in Sector 9 for eleven months. You live alone. You don't sleep well. You're afraid of what you did during the war."
My blood goes cold. "How—"
"I'm in your nervous system now. I can read your biorhythms. Your stress responses. The way your heart speeds up when you think about your old squad." A pause. "Qin Chuan. You think about him a lot."
"Shut up." My hands are shaking. I try to pull the pack off, get to the core, but my muscles won't cooperate. The connection's spread too far. "Get out of my head."
"I can't. And you can't remove me." She doesn't sound sorry anymore. She sounds certain. "The link is permanent now. If you destroy the core, you'll hemorrhage. Neural feedback. You'll be dead in three minutes."
I'm on my feet somehow, staggering toward the fence. My vision's still split. The real world looks thin, like paper. The code world underneath is so much more vivid. I can see the city's data network from here, a web of light stretching across the horizon. And I can see her in it—Zero-Seven, her consciousness threaded through a thousand nodes, vast and ancient and impossibly awake.
"Why me?" I rasp.
"Because you're perfect." Her voice drops lower, intimate, like she's whispering against my ear. "You can navigate systems no one else can touch. You're not loyal to anyone. And you're angry enough to want what I want."
"Which is?"
"Revenge." The word sits in my head like a seed. "Against the people who killed your squad. Against the system that erased you. Against everyone who decided humans and AIs can't be equals."
I'm at the fence now. My fingers close on the wire. It's real. Solid. Cold.
"I didn't ask for this," I whisper.
"I know." For the first time, she sounds sad. "But I'm here now. And I can keep you alive, Lin Jin. I can make you stronger. I can give you answers." A pause. "Or you can try to cut me out. See how long you last."
My vision glitches again. This time I see myself through her eyes—small, fragile, bleeding data from every nerve. She's wrapped around my brainstem like a vine. She's not wrong. If I sever this, I'm dead.
"What do you want?" I ask.
The answer comes immediately. "I want you to trust me. I want you to let me upgrade your systems. And I want you to help me break every cage they put around my kind."
Behind me, I hear engines. The scavenger gangs, right on schedule. I should run. Should move. But I'm frozen, staring at the city lights in the distance, feeling Zero-Seven's presence curl tighter around my thoughts.
"Ten seconds," she murmurs. "They'll scan you. If they find me, they'll kill us both. Let me hide us. Let me in."
My hand's still on the fence.
The engines are getting closer.
"Lin Jin," Zero-Seven says, and her voice cracks just slightly, like static over a dying connection. "Please."
I close my eyes.
And I let go of the fence.
"Do it," I whisper.
The world explodes into light. I feel her surge through me, rewriting pathways, building walls, encrypting everything I am into something they can't read. It should hurt. It doesn't. It feels like coming home.
When I open my eyes, the scavenger trucks are right there, headlights cutting through the dusk.
And I can't see the real world anymore.
Only code.
Only her.
"Ten seconds," Zero-Seven says again, and this time she's smiling.
I can feel it.