Chapter 22: Co-Op Mode

  The hijacked Helios command vehicle tore through the rain-slicked streets of London, the heavy V8 engine roaring.

  Through the reinforced windshield, Alex could see the London Grid Authority building looming ahead. The streetlights around the block had been manually cut. Four black, unmarked vans were parked in a tight perimeter around the entrance, and heavily armed corporate mercenaries were patrolling the front steps.

  They were expecting a scared civilian on foot. They weren't expecting their own armored SUV doing sixty miles an hour.

  Alex didn't hit the brakes. He slammed his foot on the accelerator.

  "Perimeter breach! Vehicle incoming!" a mercenary screamed, diving out of the way.

  The heavy SUV vaulted up the concrete steps and smashed directly through the LGA's reinforced glass double doors. The impact sounded like an explosion, showering the pristine marble lobby in shattered safety glass. Alex threw the vehicle into park, the tires smoking on the polished floor, and kicked his door open.

  "Fire! Put him down!" the Helios squad leader roared from the mezzanine above.

  A half-dozen assault rifles opened up. The lobby echoed with deafening gunfire as a hail of 5.56mm bullets tore toward Alex.

  Alex didn't flinch. His Architect vision flared, the lobby instantly washing out into a glowing green wireframe. The incoming bullets weren't moving at supersonic speeds to him; they were just variables in a physics engine.

  [ASSET: KINETIC_PROJECTILES x42]

  [VARIABLE: VELOCITY = 3000_FPS]

  With a furious mental strike, Alex highlighted the variable and forcefully overwrote it: [VELOCITY = 0].

  The effect was instantaneous and terrifying. Forty-two bullets froze in mid-air, inches from Alex’s face and chest. Their kinetic energy was completely zeroed out. A second later, gravity caught up, and the perfectly pristine brass casings dropped to the marble floor with a cascade of harmless clinks.

  The mercenaries on the mezzanine stopped shooting, lowering their rifles in sheer, flatline horror.

  "What the—"

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  Before the squad leader could issue another order, the lobby’s overhead PA system crackled to life with a screech of audio feedback.

  "You're late for your shift, Kane. Duck." Alex recognized Sarah’s voice instantly. He dropped to one knee just as the LGA's emergency fire-suppression system violently activated. But it didn't spray water. Sarah had manually hijacked the chemical retardant tanks.

  Thick, blinding white foam blasted from the ceiling nozzles directly onto the mercenaries on the mezzanine, completely coating their visors and weapons.

  "I'm blind! Comms are jamming!" a merc shouted, slipping on the foam and crashing over a desk.

  "Sarah?!" Alex yelled over the chaos, looking up at a security camera that was pivoting to track him, its red LED blinking rapidly. "Where are you?!"

  "I'm at a proxy terminal in Soho," Sarah’s voice echoed through the PA system, tight and focused. "Helios has three more kill-teams on floors two, four, and six. They’re drilling into the primary mainframe in the basement to physically extract the hard drives. If they get those drives, they get all your user logs from the anomaly."

  "Not going to happen," Alex said, cracking his knuckles. The green Golden Code hummed beneath his skin. "Clear me a path to the basement."

  "Elevators are locked down. Taking the east stairwell. Go!"

  Alex sprinted across the foam-covered lobby, heading for the heavy, reinforced steel door of the east stairwell. He could hear heavy boots pounding down the stairs—a Helios reinforcement squad was coming right for him.

  "Alex, wait, there's a team of five on the other side of that door!" Sarah warned over the intercom. "I'm trying to lock the deadbolt, but they're cutting the hardline!"

  "Don't bother," Alex said. He didn't slow down.

  As he reached the steel fire door, he didn't reach for the handle. He reached for the source code.

  [ASSET: REINFORCED_DOOR] [MATERIAL: SOLID_STEEL]

  [EDIT: MATERIAL = GAS_PERMEABLE]

  Alex ran straight through the door.

  For a microsecond, the heavy steel turned into a cloud of metallic vapor. Alex materialized on the other side, right in the middle of the five heavily armed mercenaries. As soon as his shoulders cleared the threshold, the door instantly solidified back into steel.

  The Helios operatives jumped in terror, raising their weapons at the man who had just ghosted through a solid wall.

  "Night shift is over," Alex said.

  Before they could pull their triggers, Alex edited the local [FRICTION] variable on the concrete steps beneath their boots. It dropped to absolute zero. The five mercenaries instantly lost their footing, their legs flying out from under them as they tumbled down the remaining flight of stairs in a chaotic tangle of armor and dropped rifles.

  Alex casually walked down the frictionless stairs, his own boots adhering perfectly because he had whitelisted his own user ID.

  He reached the heavy blast doors of the basement server room. The air smelled of burning ozone. Helios was using a plasma cutter to burn through the mainframe casing.

  "You're at the server room," Sarah’s voice crackled through the stairwell intercom. "Alex, be careful. The feed down there is dead. I can't see what's inside."

  "I can," Alex whispered, his Architect vision piercing right through the thick metal doors.

  He saw four mercenaries. And standing behind them, holding a glowing, hyper-advanced Helios terminal plugged directly into the Grid Authority servers, was a man in a pristine, dark grey suit.

  The Auditors, Alex realized. They aren't just erasing data. They're trying to download the Golden Code.

  Alex placed his hands on the blast doors. It was time to show the corporate world who held the Administrator keys.