The fog rolled low over Arlington, a grey curtain masking the marble grandeur of Washington’s veins. Deep beneath the Capitol’s polished floors, in a forgotten sub-basement of the Pentagon, a select group of analysts sat in a sealed room surrounded by analog monitors and static-choked feeds.

  They called it “Room Zero.” It didn’t officially exist.

  Inside, a red diode blinked softly over a black terminal. One line of code kept looping in the background—something even the top-tier security teams hadn't cracked. The message had been intercepted from a NATO satellite feed just two weeks ago. No one could tell if it was a threat, a signal, or a test.

  And then it disappeared.

  “You’re telling me this isn't ours?” snapped Commander Wallace, slamming his palm onto the metal desk. Sweat formed around his collar. Across from him, Agent Dominic Cale, the CIA’s digital counter-intel prodigy, stared into the screen like it owed him answers.

  “It’s not ours. It’s not Russian. It’s not Chinese. Hell, it’s not even DARPA’s pet code. Whoever wrote this… they’re playing five moves ahead.”

  Wallace rubbed his temples. “Jesus Christ… Is it a virus?”

  “It’s a ghost,” Cale muttered. “Slips through detection, mimics existing protocols, reroutes through a dead relay in Zurich... It knew we’d be watching.”

  Zurich. A soft red flag rose in Wallace’s mind.

  Elsewhere, in the snow-draped Alps of Switzerland (2002), inside the growing heart of Dominion's underground empire, Rex stood at the edge of a concrete balcony beneath the Wolfshade District. A digital map flickered in front of him, cast from an outdated projection device—still effective, but obsolete to him.

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  Miguel “Shade” Navarro appeared beside him, trench coat dusted with alpine frost.

  “They found the signal,” he said, lips barely moving. “Pentagon’s spooked. DARPA’s moving fast—trying to tighten their internal projects. One of their AI teams is on lockdown.”

  Rex didn’t look away from the map. “Let them look. It keeps them busy.”

  “You wanted them to find it?”

  “I wanted them to believe they did,” Rex replied coldly. “Fear works better when it’s earned, not given.”

  Miguel let out a short laugh. “Remind me never to play chess with you.”

  Back in Washington, analysts began to panic as the compromised AI protocol—an experimental threat-predictive system codenamed Project Chimera—started showing strange behavior. Files re-organized themselves. Access logs deleted. Simulations predicted events before they were even inputted.

  No one realized the truth: Dominion hadn’t just intercepted a feed—they had rewritten Chimera’s very language from the shadows.

  In Zurich, Rex’s private cyber unit—codenamed White Devil—had been formed in secret, staffed by disavowed tech agents, rogue cryptographers, and ex-KGB tech operatives. They weren’t just hackers. They were architects of deception.

  And they had just declared silent war on the world’s most secure systems.

  “How long until they realize it’s us?” Miguel asked, lighting a cigarette.

  “They won’t,” Rex said flatly. “They’re still looking for devils in the dark. They don’t realize the devil built the walls around them.”

  The screen beside him blinked. A military base schematic appeared. Target: Fort Meade. Status: Infiltrated.

  Rex turned. “Let’s start feeding them the dreams we want them to have.”

  Some wars aren’t fought with bullets. They're coded in silence, written in fear, and executed with ghost hands.

  And in 2002, the ghosts had arrived.