The air inside the executive boardroom was filtered to surgical sterility, calibrated to a precise temperature. It was, like everything else in Korvin's inner sanctum, engineered to perfection. The walls shimmered faintly with reactive smartglass, shifting in tone to match the ambient light pouring in through the panoramic dome above. From this height, the sprawl of Revel City looked like a living circuit board.
Emrik sat near the lower end of the elliptical table. He had not spoken since taking his seat. His eyes drifted casually across the room, taking mental snapshots. The water carafes had biometric lids, the chairs embedded with pulse readers, the sound dampeners timed to each breath. Nothing here was ornamental.
A soft digital chime sounded overhead as the set of doors at the end of the boardroom were opened up by a pair of security guards. The first to enter was a woman in a cobalt sheath dress, her heels clicking with authority. Her eyes scanned the room, barely glancing at Emrik as she took a seat two places to his left in front of a small placard on the table which read: Naomi Yurev, head of infrastructure analytics.
Next came Dr. Harlan Vox, the pale, bespectacled chief of cognitive systems. He paused just inside the doorway, blinking as if adjusting to the room's equilibrium before sliding into his seat with a kind of mechanical grace. Emrik caught the slight tremor in the man's fingers.
Then came Jun Seo, overseeing Korvin's Pacific tech corridor. She walked in mid-conversation with Victor Telsen, a blunt-featured man from applied weapons research. Their voices dropped the moment they crossed the threshold, reduced to murmurs and then silence, as if speaking too loudly in this room might offend the walls. The last of the senior executives trickled in over the next minute—five in total. Not one of them made small talk. Their expressions were completely neutral.
Then came a tangible change in air pressure. The double doors at the head of the room parted one last time with a hush. Mendez entered the room, flanked by a man whose presence dominated the atmosphere. He was a balding, middle-aged African American man with sharp cheekbones and a square jaw softened only slightly by the faint creases of age. He wore a dark charcoal suit that caught the light like wet stone, the single button of his jacket left undone, revealing a matte black tie over a shirt of pale steel gray. His only visible accessory was the Korvin serpent pin glinting from his lapel—a coiled ouroboros forming a perfect ring. All of the other executives stood up in unison as he entered, and Emrik quickly followed suit.
"Fellow board members and distinguished guests," Mendez addressed the room as he circled around to the far end of the elongated table. "May I introduce Thaddeus Burnside, Chief Executive Officer of Korvin Enterprise."
Burnside took his place at the far end as Mendez sidestepped to the seat that was nearest to his right hand. He gave a single nod to the rest of the room, and then everyone took their seats again as the security guards closed the doors and took up positions on either side.
Burnside wasted no time. "I appreciate your punctuality," he said, his voice low and commanding, with the cadence of someone who'd spent years in boardrooms where words could forge or fracture alliances. "Let's proceed."
A gentle chime pulsed from the embedded table interface as Burnside tapped the surface. The lighting in the boardroom subtly dimmed, and a portion of the smartglass wall behind him shimmered into a soft blue glow before blooming into a dynamic three-dimensional display. Suspended in the center was a slowly rotating construct—a dense, multifaceted sphere laced with rings of shifting energy and prismatic micro-circuitry.
"This," Burnside said, "is the Genesis Engine." A few of the executives leaned forward. Even Emrik allowed his gaze to linger a moment longer than necessary. The structure was beautiful in a cold, arcane sort of way. It seemed almost too advanced for its own aesthetic.
Burnside continued, "You've all read the redacted briefs. Some of you have seen its limited live simulations. But this is the first time the full architecture has been displayed outside of the vault."
The display zoomed in slightly, revealing a lattice of interwoven cores nested within one another, like a recursive nervous system.
"The Genesis Engine represents a new tier of energy computation. Not just generation nor automation, but pattern awareness, instructional mimicry, and cognitive imprinting. It doesn't run off stored fuel or even external transfer methods like fusion or wireless siphoning. It functions off of proximity to command-level intent."
"Intent?" Dr. Vox blinked.
Burnside nodded. "In layman's terms, it responds to the will, once it's been calibrated, qualified, and encoded. It obeys input that is more than just code. It is identity."
The room went still.
"Of course," Mendez added quickly, "that input still requires an interface. And calibration protocols ensure that it cannot simply be hijacked by stray thoughts or ambient emotion."
Burnside tapped the table again. The projection shifted to a recorded test sequence, consisting of grainy footage of a humanoid drone unit moving through an obstacle course. The footage displayed a latency near zero, target acquisition in microseconds, and impossible agility, as if the subject was adapting to unpredictable hazards in ways that mimicked human instinct, yet with something akin to superhuman precision.
"What you are seeing are adaptive threat dynamics," Burnside said. "It doesn't wait for orders. It interprets them as they're forming. Where other systems react to events, the Genesis Engine anticipates them."
"How scalable is the unit?" Victor Telsen spoke up.
"Considerably," Mendez jumped in. "From reconnaissance satellites to high-output chassis units and even stationary surveillance. Any application that requires multi-tiered response capabilities. Think of it as more of a spine than a heart."
Jun Seo tilted her head. "And the ethical protocols?"
Burnside smiled faintly, but there was no warmth in it. "Korvin doesn't build ethics. We build frameworks. It's up to our clients to determine the standards they hold."
Emrik kept his face unreadable, but internally he filed every detail away. The Genesis Engine was more than mere innovation. It was the nervous system of a coming age weapon that didn't just react to the world, but reshaped it in advance. And somewhere in all that complexity, he could feel the whisper of something else. Something older than machines, hidden behind the polished chrome and sterile lighting.
As the meeting passed, Burnside thanked each department for their "continued excellence," though his tone made it clear that excellence was the minimum expectation, not a praise-worthy feat. Everyone rose in perfect synchronization. As the executives filed out, Emrik lingered at the end of the queue. He nodded to Mendez, who gave a perfunctory nod in return, his expression unreadable. Burnside didn't look in his direction at all.
Once the hallway cleared, Emrik turned away from the main corridor, bypassing the lift that would return him to the public-facing levels. Instead, he followed a service route—a maintenance spine lined with low, flickering floor lights and matte-black wall panels. He descended three levels on foot, avoiding cameras where he knew they were blind and masking his ID badge with a localized scrambler built into his cufflink. At the far end of an unlit corridor, he reached a small utility junction sealed by a nondescript hatch. He tapped out a quick command on a concealed pad. The hatch blinked green and released with a hiss.
Inside was a cramped access chamber cluttered with dormant servers. Emrik removed a black coin from his coat pocket and pressed it to the center of the room. The device clicked softly, then pulsed once in a silent burst. All surveillance, thermal mapping, and audio tracking systems within a five-meter radius of himself suddenly went dark.
He exhaled, and then he tapped the micro-communicator that was concealed behind his left ear. Static clicked once, then cleared into a flat, feminine voice.
"Receiving."
"It's me," he said, his Swedish accent switching effortlessly to his native British voice.
"Arden? You're early."
"Things moved along more briskly than anticipated," Arden replied. There was a pause, then the voice on the other end sharpened.
"You were in the meeting?"
"I was," Arden said. "The Genesis Engine isn't theoretical. Not anymore. It's real. It's functional. It's operational enough to run adaptive live trials. I'm talking full interface acquisition. Anticipatory targeting based on neural signature proximity. It isn't just reacting. It thinks."
"So the data leaks were accurate."
"They weren't complete. What I saw today confirms a deeper fear. Burnside called it command-level intent. They've linked the core's operational matrix with its own identity. This can only mean one thing."
"Our contract has been breached," the woman on the other end finished for him. "They're using the power source for advanced weapons development."
The voice on the other end fell silent for a moment. Arden could hear the faint clicks of a keyboard in the background, likely encrypted uplinks firing in real time. When she spoke again, her tone was colder.
"Then it's time to accelerate."
Arden exhaled slowly. "You're sure? If we move too soon—"
"It's already too late," she cut in. "We always knew this was the risk. Korvin has gone well beyond the parameters of our agreement. We initiate Phase Three at once. You'll need to confirm hardware specs from inside the vault. We'll reroute the relay path for the uplink within the next six hours. Can you access the lower strata?"
"Yes. If I time it during the evening maintenance cycle, I can get to Level B-9. Beyond that, I'll need a keycode."
"We'll handle that. And Arden…"
He paused. "Yes?"
"We go dark on this end once you're in the vault. After that, you're on your own. You know what that means, don't you?"
"I've been training for this for years," Arden replied confidently. "I can handle it."
The line went dead.
Arden remained still for several seconds. His pulse was steady, but his mind was not. Then, without a word, he deactivated the scrambler, restored his ID loop, and slipped the black coin back into his pocket. The lights returned with a soft hum. The walls felt colder now. The clock was ticking.