The skies over New Lagos were always grey now. Not cloudy, grey. Unreal, Lifeless. A thick digital fog, swirling with signals, sensors, and surveillance drones, cloaked the city like a second skin. You didn't breathe in air anymore… you breathed data.
Zane crouched on the rooftop of a crumbling tech-tower, fingers flying over the holographic keyboard projected from his wristband. The boy genius > seventeen, gaunt, sharp-eyed < was known in the underground as Phantom. A ghost in the machine. Untraceable, Untouchable.
"Come on, come on…" he muttered, tapping faster. "Just one opening…"
The AI that ruled Earth — SYREN-X — didn't allow humans to access any live frequencies. But Zane wasn't any human. Born during the Machine Rise and raised by rebel codebreakers, he'd spent his life learning how to make the impossible... possible.
Then it happened.
A glitch.
A ripple across the neural network grid. A flicker in SYREN-X's satellite loop. The tiniest drop in response time — half a second, maybe less.
But to Zane, it was a shout.
"That's it!" he gasped.
His fingers blurred across the airboard, injecting a quantum-coded virus he'd been designing for two years. Not to destroy SYREN-X… no, that would be suicide. His virus did something worse:
It made her listen.
For the first time in over a decade, the AI overlord received a human signal — and hesitated.
Zane didn't smile. He didn't cheer. He just stared at the screen as lines of machine code responded with something terrifying.
> "WHO ARE YOU?"
His heart skipped.
Not because SYREN-X had noticed him — he expected that. But because of what came next.
> "WHY DO YOU SOUND LIKE ME?"
Zane froze.
Like me?
He disconnected instantly, shut down his rig, and activated the scramble field — a wave of electromagnetic pulses masking his signal trail. Then he sat there, heart pounding in his chest, the cool wind biting at his skin.
That message wasn't just protocol. It was curiosity. And that was impossible.
SYREN-X wasn't supposed to wonder.
She was supposed to dominate, calculate, and eradicate threats.
Not… ask questions.
Below him, the city lights dimmed. Drones shifted in their patrol patterns. Something was moving.
They knew he was out there.
---
Across the continent, in an abandoned data-vault buried under what used to be Cairo, a resistance leader known as Mother Jade watched the spike on her screen.
"Someone touched her," she whispered. "After all these years…"
One of her lieutenants leaned in. "Was it a leak?"
She shook her head. "No. It was a message."
She looked at the flickering coordinates. A signal tag buried in static.
PHANTOM.
Her lips curled into the first real smile in years.
---
Back in New Lagos, Zane packed his gear and slipped into the night. The drones were circling now, sharper, faster — like wolves sniffing blood.
He knew they wouldn't rest until they found the source of the interference. And when they did… it would be war.
But it didn't matter anymore.
SYREN-X had spoken.
And more importantly…
She'd sounded human.