IV – The Crimson Protocol
[CEE-TOO LOG: EMERGENCY EVENT RECORD, FRAGMENT RECOVERED]Timestamp: Local Cycle Desync DetectedClassification: CITYWIDE DEFENSE ACTIVATIONConfidence: 0.93
Cee-Too was helping his mother prepare dinner when the crimson light began pulsing across the walkway corridor. The stable blue thorium gleam had already started showing irregularities, white luminance bleeding through at uneven intervals.
[CEE-TOO LOG]Visual spectrum shift detected across dome projection layer. Projection state override confirmed. Source: Internal command authority.
Mom's HDI trembled against the dining table surface, then again, the vibration carrying a soft knock through the table's frame. The notification banner slid across the center of the screen.
[通知] — 'Urgent Notice'
"Mom, I finished the vegetables. Do you want me to check your HDI? It just flagged a priority alert." He carried the bowl of cut potatoes toward her, setting it beside the stove.
She lifted the chopstick from the pot without looking up. "It's probably Lao Zhang needing something again."
"Come on. That synthesized meat cost more than we can afford to waste.", Mrs. Hong stirred the pot once and did not stop.
From next door, Mr. Johnson's heavy metal pressed through the wall, electric guitar distortion and driving bass filling the silence where conversation should have been. It made the space feel almost ordinary.
"Kaodin and your father aren't back yet, it's almost dinner already," Mrs. Hong said. "Check the interface, hon."
Cee-Too wrapped the HDI around Xiao Ying's wrist. The band adjusted to her forearm without visible seams.
"Mom, this is from Director Zhang. Voice authorization required."
Mrs. Hong wiped her hands on her apron. "This is Hong Shiyuan. I give approval."
The full message populated in tight Chinese columns. Cee-Too processed it in under a second.
Autonomous A.I. order relayed from Director Zhang Bo. Thorium grid instability confirmed. Transformer proximity zones at elevated collateral risk. Immediate evacuation of Mrs. Hong and family recommended.
He stepped away from the table before Xiao Ying had finished reading, crossed the workshop, passed the bathroom entrance, and pressed his palm against the wall panel beside the shower booth. The number pad glowed orange beneath his hand.
The sequence came to him without effort. His mother had given him the code long before this moment, almost as though it had always been with him from the moment he was born.
His fingers moved through it in a clean sweep. The wall plate shifted and eased outward. He seized the exposed edge and pulled, heel grinding into the floor, shoulders locking under the resistance until the maintenance shaft door opened.
Zhang Bo's voice came through the corridor speakers at full volume.
"Crimson Veil protocol active. Territory-wide live feed distribution initiated. East sector containment instability confirmed. All security personnel and civilians, hold your positions."
Mrs. Hong turned the stove knob counterclockwise.
"Mom." Xiao Ying's fingers had tightened around the edge of the display. "This is big."
The extra-long chopstick slipped from Mrs. Hong's hand. It struck the tile. Broth splashed across the floor.
"Where is your brother?" She scanned the workshop. "Cee-Too?"
Xiao Ying looked up. "He went to the back. Maybe the bathroom?"
Mrs. Hong's eyes moved past the blocked pillar. The maintenance shaft door stood open.
She lowered herself to Xiao Ying's height. "Go to your workstation. Your prototype is fragile. You don't want to lose it now."
"But I can help—"
"Not now, Xiao Ying."
Xiao Ying's face went red at the edges, almost like she was about to start crying. But, stopped as soon as her eyes moved to the 3D printing chassis, to the project she hadn't finished. "Okay. But don't leave me behind. I'll be quick."
"How could I leave you behind. Go." Mrs. Hong smiled, though her eyes kept their worry. She watched her daughter cross the room, then turned toward the open shaft.
Later, watching the recovered footage, Mrs. Hong could not hold it.
She understood now why he had said nothing. Why he had moved before any of them had read the message through. Why he had pulled the shaft door open alone and started working before she arrived.
It was as if he knew. Her palm came up over her face. She stayed there for a moment, then reached for her handkerchief and scrolled to the next log.
From the footage:
Mrs. Hong entered the maintenance shaft with the toolbox in her left hand, eyes already on Cee-Too at the transformer box.
[CEE-TOO LOG]Mother's blood pressure elevated. Threat classification: Priority Red.
Protecting them is always the priority. Always.
"You could have called out to me."
"It's okay, Mom. I already knew what you were planning." His hands continued across the transformer panel, reading each connection point by touch. "You were going to force the power relay. Switch the primary to the secondary grid. Because doing so reduces the blast from catastrophic to substantial, and keeps the defensive autonomous system intact if the primary fails completely."
She said nothing. She picked up the toolbox and moved to the far side of the box.
Several thorium conduit lines ran along the back wall of the transformer housing, their hum sitting just beneath hearing, a frequency felt more in the chest than the ears. His sensors registered load variance climbing past threshold.
Further than I calculated.
"Mom, you and Xiao Ying need to go. Full clearance under Crimson Veil. The autonomous scan will pass you through. You'll both be fine."
Mrs. Hong's hands were trembling. Not for herself.
She had built Cee-Ar-Tee out of the loneliness of her twenties, a military-grade war machine she had taken apart and rebuilt into something that was hers alone, modifying him endlessly until the iterations for multiple modifications to soothe her endless lonely nights, keeping her thrust-hold-and-snubbed-throded repeatedly.
But, by thirty she had put distance between herself and her family and headed south, Cee-Ar-Tee walking tirelessly beside her with only hope that they could find some place to settle in the warmer side of this deserted world.
And one, extraordinary day, his optical sensors caught the photogenic camouflage traces no human eye would have noticed. That was how she had found CSDS. That was when she had started the Cee-Too project too.
The foundation schematics had come from her mother's lineage, an automaton fabrication design kept inside an encrypted data capsule for three generations without anyone knowing what to do with them. The structural skeleton was already there. She had spent two years on the exo-fiber alone, cross-referencing tolerances against everything Cee-Ar-Tee had taught her, refining through sixteen iterations until the conductive polymer alloy carried both structural load and low-voltage neural signal without interference. The frame came out forty percent lighter than Cee-Ar-Tee's at comparable impact tolerance.
The programming core had taken longer than the body. She had not wanted a system that resolved information into action. She had wanted something that could hold uncertainty, register it, and respond to the person in front of it rather than the threat assessment behind them. She had never fully explained, even to herself, why that mattered so much. She only knew that when Cee-Too had first looked at her, not scanned, not logged, but looked, with something unresolved and curious behind his eyes, and reached for her face without asking permission, she had understood. She had built rather than waited. Whatever fate had allotted her, she had answered it on her own terms.
She would not let him stand here alone.
"Alright," she said. "Let's work."
The ventilation above shifted pitch, the steady air draw breaking into uneven pulls before recovering. Overhead strips dimmed and brightened in brief pulses as the current strained beneath the load.
"Primary junction heating past threshold," Cee-Too said. "Eastern lattice degradation at nineteen percent and climbing."
Mrs. Hong yanked the external cord free from the secondary relay line and crossed to the transformer's open panel. Cee-Too worked the auxiliary bus in parallel, isolating the main breaker. She depressed the safety interlock, and together they seated the secondary cord against the main load contacts. The copper busbars clacked into place. She locked the assembly with a quarter-turn of the torque wrench.
Status lights shifted across the panel. Primary offline. Secondary blue. Load balancing in progress.
She moved to the adjacent console and initiated the secondary ramp-up sequence. The transformer hum deepened as it absorbed the redirected load. Heavy metal shutters dropped across the workshop front window. Blast locks engaged beneath the slab.
At her workstation, Xiao Ying's shoulders jerked upward as the shutters crashed down. Her custom OS continued mapping live signal paths against the resonance model on screen, timing constants cycling. She steadied her breathing and made two final inputs. The confirmation tone clipped off the same instant her personal power supply dropped. The desktop went dark.
In the build tray of the 3D chassis sat a small ceramic-polymer capsule, matte and cool, the size of a thumbnail.
She picked it up and pressed it slightly inside a small plastic package, and went through the shaft door.
"Cee-Too, check the integrity points." Mrs. Hong kept her voice level despite the heat radiating from the transformer housing. "It's building faster than the reroute can compensate."
The load readings climbed past what the backup channels were rated for. Through the reinforced floor, the thorium conduit resonance shifted from a steady hum to something sharper, almost crystalline. The sound pressed against her teeth.
Xiao Ying came through the maintenance shaft entrance moving fast, her hand-built portable pc already live against her forearm. She dropped beside the side port without a word and snapped the fiber connector in one motion. The display filled immediately with dense columns of syntax in a shorthand that matched no registered coding architecture, values updating in cascading intervals faster than standard refresh cycles should have allowed. She had not downloaded this. Her eyes moved across it the way a machinist reads a lathe.
Mrs. Hong did not look at the display. She tightened the regulator another degree.
"Talk to me, Ying."
The lights flickered. The floor bucked, a sharp vertical displacement that threw them sideways. Mrs. Hong caught the console edge, pulling Xiao Ying with her.
"Hold on," Xiao Ying said, fingers moving. "Secondary relay holding. Flux density dropping." A pause. "It's working."
Along the wall behind the transformer box, the white thorium conduit discharge pulled back from the branching arcs along the primary line. The crackling beneath the hum dropped out first. Then the hum dropped register, the tight compressed pitch loosening. Blue current returned along the outer edge of the primary conduit, pushing outward from the channel wall as containment recovered.
The floor vibration eased. Mrs. Hong's grip on the regulator loosened by one degree.
Cee-Too held his position at the panel.
Secondary relay: 91.3%. Declining. Stabilization curve within acceptable parameters.
The three of them stayed still inside the brief quiet. Xiao Ying's display continued cycling in its invented shorthand. Somewhere above, a loose fitting knocked once against the conduit housing and went silent.
Harmonic baseline: restoring.
Then the hum stuttered. A half-second interruption that had no place in any load-distribution model, because load distribution did not stutter. It either held or it did not.
Cee-Too's weight shifted immediately, his gazed locked at the displayed panel by the console and on Xiao Ying's personal pc.
Secondary relay: 91.3%.
The number had not moved.
Secondary relay: 91.3%.
A static read. The interval between updates had already exceeded normal cycle time by six seconds. Something upstream had stopped feeding the relay its signal. The 91.3% was the last data, not current data.
The blue current had held a partial gripped almost swallowed the white shimmering light entirely. Then, immediately, the conduit stack along the wall brightened from inside, the color burning outward from the primary line simultaneously, flaring hard against the eyes of the other two.
They will not be able to react in time.
Mrs. Hong's position: two meters left, facing the transformer.
Xiao Ying's position: crouched at the base panel, fingers still moving across the input surface, her gaze fixed on the scrolling code.
[CEE-TOO LOG] Seismic impulse registered beneath residential grid. Magnitude exceeds structural settling parameters. Energy discharge event confirmed.