Flair's fingers danced across the holographic grid, city sectors pulsing in muted shades of amber and steel, laying out before her like a 3d map.
"Recon's uneasy," she began, eyes locked to the moving threads. "Sector 1 through 3's drone traffic is up—low altitude, erratic patterns. Scouts, not heavies. Which means they're sweeping for heat, movement, and residual nanite signals from your suit."
She flicked through layers of encrypted overlays. A central tower blinked red, "That broadcast node's barking every five seconds across five zones. Whoever's running their intel net is looking for biometric residue, not ID tags. That's not standard practice. That's paranoia."
She zoomed in on a feed showing faint motion on rooftops and alley corridors.
"Underground's quiet. Too quiet. They're redeploying grid coverage without broadcasting route changes. That's containment behavior—locking sectors without alerting civilians. If they pin down our position, we won't have a clean exit."
Tito scoffed from the corner. "Sounds like they're scared."
Flair tapped her screen, pulling up a flickering pulse near the far east gate. "They're not scared. They're surgical. They didn't expect what you did to those bots. Whatever kind of upgrades you triggered during that fight—they're tracing residual tech footprints. You're not flagged by name Nyx. You're flagged by how you move" She paused, glancing briefly toward him before continuing. "The suit's masking systems held—for now. But the longer we stay still, the clearer the data bleed becomes. They'll compare fight footage. Combat signatures. Trajectory models."
She leaned back, breath sharp.
"Chaos gate's cooling. We've got forty minutes before they reassign the perimeter grid. After that, our best option is vertical exit—sky routes, stealth pulses, tether lines across blackout zones." She looked to Nyx with that weight she always carried—strategic, composed, but never blind.
"So if you're not packing anything I should know about, we move before they stop assuming."
Nyx leans back, resting his head on his fist as he goes over the information in his mind. There is one master tower in each sector of the city, then a lesser tower for each district of that sector, thus there are 7 towers in total for each sector, higher altitude would take a bit but even without the nanites to act as grapples he could use a different means so he didn't leave a signature. "Its not paranoia, they know now that I don't have an ID tag implemented into my spine. If we decided to go higher, do you think we could permanently take control of the tower to help mask our location? Underground sounds like a trap, but don't rebels use it enough to mask themselves" Questions Nyx, looking at the template screens.
Flair rotated slightly in her wheelchair, tossing Nyx a look halfway between respect and concern. "You're right. Underground's a trap—but only for people who treat it like a shortcut."
She pinched the grid, isolating the central tower and highlighting its communications lacing.
"That main node controls signal routing for every drone, scan pulse, and recognition sweep across six districts. If we hijack it, we can reroute traffic, scrub traces, even fabricate new tags. But full control? It's volatile. You'd need deep access—not just the feed. I mean tap into the routing logic and rewrite the system from inside."
Flair flicked to a new screen, this one fuzzy—encrypted static overlaying a skeletal network map.
"Rebels use the underground because it's noisy. Every data ping that passes through it gets drowned in digital whitewash. We'd look like broken packets mid-transit—scrambled, misfiled, never flagged."
She leaned closer to the mirror display, eyes catching reflections of deep green code. "But if you're planning to reach that tower and override, there's a catch. No nanite grapples means brute route: old lifts, manual climbs, booster launches. And once you're up there…" She paused. "Every signal spike you make echoes across the entire grid. We'd need decoys feeding noise to multiple sectors—Tito, maybe Axel—if he ever stops chewing."
The rocking chair creaked as Nyx leaned forward.
"I don't mind difficult," he said. "I mind being hunted."
Flair nodded once, already drafting preliminary scaffolds across the interface. "Then we'll make them blink first."
"Why not just hack from here? You have that insane enhancement that allows you to transfer your mind into cyberspace right? Then we can just relax a bit more" comments Tito as he continued to play his game, his eyes still glued to the screen.
Flair didn't blink. She just kept working, her fingers sliding across the air like she was stroking the edge of a storm. "I can transfer in," she replied, "but only if you want me fried like cheap circuitry in two minutes flat."
She spun the central tower's overlay—six satellites blinking around its signal spine. "This isn't some slum-run network with broken encryption and vintage porn ads. It's old-corps tech, repurposed and layered. Every node's wrapped in cognitive barbs—system defenses designed to overload neural enhancers like mine."
Tito groaned, controller beeping in protest. "So dramatic."
Flair turned slightly, tone dry. "Tell you what. You plug your brain into a mesh that thinks in fractals and eats emotion for fuel, and I'll call you dramatic when your nose bleeds out your memories."
Nyx, still reclined, opened one eye. "She's not wrong."
Flair swiped open a new interface, this one sculpted like a puzzle cube. "I need a localized data spine to ping first—something noisy enough to hide me in the noise, long enough to slip into one of the outer tower threads. A live infiltration like that takes timing, distractions, and a failsafe that doesn't involve bleeding out through my eardrums."
She looked at Tito again. "So yeah. No, Tito. We can't relax."
The light from the holograms flickered over her face, equal parts exhaustion and resolve. "You want this tower cracked? You give me five minutes of chaos. After that—I'll give you keys."
Nyx stretches in his chair, a small grin behind his mask. "Both of you are pretty impressive though, one going inside cyberspace and the other controlling it like magic."
"How does that work exactly Flair, like…what does it feel like when you transition into the cyberspace?" asked Tito, feeling curious as how it works.
Flair continued working, not saying a word as Nyx could tell that she was deep in thought, perhaps remembering the first time she had transitioned. Flair then spoke, her voice sounding almost surreal and distant like its origin came from the past. "My vision is the first to…disorient. It becomes blurry and after my body just kind of slacks, it stops responding, then reality is peeled away like someone peels the skin of a potato. Then I hear nothing in the physical world. I feel seized but its meaningless to me, a pulse, then vertigo, then nothing, then everything. There's a black void that's hardly seen because its covered by a thousands of millions of threads, going everywhere and nowhere at once as they vibrate with invisible commands like a train carrying cargo. To be honest I'm probably not explaining it very well, its one of those things that you have to experience like life, or religious faith. It reshapes you, even when you return." she continued, earning a hum from Tito, Nyx seeing that he had even paused his game until the end of Flairs story, while Nyx himself listened intently.
"By the way Flair, do you think some of these nanites would help you in taking control to the point we're permanently in their system? I'd like to see if there's other nanites out there I could steal" Nyx says, his inner thief showing its greed in wanting to enhance 'his' tech.
Flair's fingers hesitated mid-gesture, her eyes flicking toward Nyx with calculating yet curious eyes as she thought out his words.
"You're not wrong," she said, voice cool. "If I paired the right nanite strain with my neural interface, I could anchor deeper—stay inside longer, maybe even rewrite core protocols without triggering purge cycles."
She tapped the side of the screen where a faint spiral of data fractured and reformed. "But that's theoretical. Most of what we've seen in your suit is military responsive-class nanotech—adaptive, reactive, symbiotic on some level. The kind that learns through stress." She leaned forward slightly, resting her elbows on her knees. "If I had a sample—one that wasn't tied to your specific build—I could fuse it with my processor and build a scaffolding. Something stable, that'd let me root into corps-level architecture without burning out."
Tito didn't even pause his game. "So you do want magic fingers."
Flair ignored him. "I would need a code base I can stitch. Something not too…possessed."
Nyx's grin flickered beneath the mask. The hunt for nanites wasn't just greed—it was momentum now.
Flair glanced at him again. "If you find more, don't hoard them. I'll know. And if you want permanent access to their grid…" she started, her smile faint yet full of mischievousness. "You'll need help from someone who doesn't just break in… but belongs there."
Nyx kept his grin measured, even behind his mask; his imagination played her hijacking the system like Megaman. He couldn't remember the last time he had imagined something so ridiculous yet funny, even her double entendre was amusing, how she felt she belongs in cyberspace.
"I brought some of the nanite research papers," he said, handing them to Flair casually, like they meant nothing. "Could be the groundwork for something more tailored. You'll need your own code base eventually."
Flair took them without comment, flipping through the jagged diagrams and chemical lattice notes. Her sharp eyes reading though it quickly.
"If you come across a decent nanite cache," Nyx added, "log it. We'll need material before we get anywhere near the tower."
Tito didn't look away from his game. "You two haven't said much about that office intel. Top secret or just boring?"
"No," Nyx replied, his tone flat and unreadable, suggesting that they hadn't forgotten, just focused on more important topics.
Flair glanced at Nyx before responding. "The system's a behavioral override. Global net. The chip in our spine's just the conduit. Once it's active, it filters thoughts, actions, choices...basically mind control on a global scale."
Tito scoffed. "They want full puppets. That's sick."
Nyx remained silent, mentally tracing the outlines of population clusters and power grids from the information he had downloaded into his mind. The documents he'd stolen had no maps, no coordinates—but they had enough to understand the tech, how it linked, how it spread. Enough to imagine cities blinking out under a single master thread.
Flair held up one page, her eyes scanning the dense glyphs. "This format… it's modular. If I restructure it, I could mimic their code base—maybe even corrupt it. I'll need more samples to make it scale."
Nyx nodded, she was talking about both making nanites for herself and to destroy the machine that would take control of anyone with a chip inside them.
Tito tossed his controller aside with a groan. "Can we not talk extinction before dinner? I snagged some crispy regret ribs from Rock's dive, and I'd like to die happy if the chip goes rogue."
Flair didn't respond. Nyx watched Tito walk out, his mind wondering if perhaps the reason these were 'regret ribs' was because its came from a brothel type of restaurant.
Flair went back to her work on her chrono-screen, that sat on her desk. "Let me know if you fine any solid clues on the location of nanites, even if there not strictly to your specifics, they may be helpful for the distraction while we take the security tower" says Nyx, settling in his chair for a nap. "We'll head out as soon as the plan is set"
Flair nodded without looking up, already immersed in the fragmented research papers on the nanites splayed across the table. Glyphs from her holo-screen blinked against the page like dormant warning lights, waiting to be lit.
"Even low-grade caches can be weaponized," she murmured, almost to herself. "If we push the right trigger during tower breach, even decoys could split their firewall into nonsense."
She paused, glancing at Nyx—already reclining, eyes half-shut, expression unreadable.
Tito tossed a blanket over Nyx as he walked by, unceremoniously, his other hand holding a plate of ribs. "We'll wake the cryptid when the plan's sharp enough to bite," he joked.
Flair didn't respond. Her fingers were already assembling the foundation—snippets of code, prediction models, instability patterns. All built from Nyx's first batch. If he brought more, she'd have a framework nasty enough to make both the harmonizer stutter and the security towers obsolete to where she could go in by herself.
In the quiet hum of the hideout, a plan was taking shape, infiltration, and infection.
"By the way, wasn't the original reason we did all this, because the information to hide our base from the chancellor and his Conceal on those files?" questions Tito, whose only response was Flairs head falling on her desk. "What would you do without me" jokes Tito.