Simon stepped out of the crawlspace and into the lobby. The shift in atmosphere nearly knocked him flat—gone was the rot and recycled air of the lower tower, replaced with a chemical crispness that buzzed on the tongue and stung the eyes. He blinked twice, letting his HUD recalibrate to the new light spectrum. Algae-green security panels stretched in mirrored lines above and below, painting the whole place in queasy hospital tones. The floors were made of a holo-reactive polymer, programmed to reflect the soles of your shoes with 100% fidelity. Every step he took left a ghost-image, a brief afterglow, before the next step overwrote it. He caught his own reflection once, and the eyes looking back at him seemed wrong: too alert, too hungry.

  The badge Jensen-23 had handed off—the real one, with the man’s face from a lifetime ago—hung heavy on Simon’s lanyard. He kept a finger on it, pressing the back of the chip until he felt the faintest heat of authentication pulse through his skin.

  No one else manned the lobby. At first, it looked empty. But the silence was orchestrated, a hush that was neither accident nor neglect. Simon’s HUD flickered: nineteen discreet sensors on him, none human. The risk gauge in his lower periphery crept into the red before he’d even crossed the main floor.

  At the desk, a ghost waited.

  Iris-7, the building’s AI receptionist, made her appearance in a shimmer of blue-white, manifesting first as a barely-there silhouette, then resolving into full corporate chic. Her suit was a color that had never existed in the real world, some blend of digital black and hyperreal indigo. Her hair shifted styles every few seconds, cycling through a hundred marketing-determined variants. Still, the face stayed fixed: calm, symmetrical, aggressively beautiful. When Simon approached, she didn’t smile. She just tilted her head, as if calibrating his threat level.

  “Good morning, and welcome to Evolutionary Enhancement,” she said. “How may I direct your visit?”

  Simon let himself smile—not the honest one, but the upturned-corners one he used on corporate interface AIs. “Jensen, Division 9, here for a sweep on the waste filters,” he said. “Old boss said the main line’s running hot, might want a human eye on it before the weekend dump.”

  Iris-7’s eyes flicked to the badge, then to Simon’s face. “You’re not in uniform, Mr. Jensen,” she said. There was a glitch in her voice, a hard edge under the velvet. Simon caught it and stored it.

  “Laundry’s in the wash,” he said. “You know how it is. Gave up on the coveralls after my third shift got eaten by the bleach bots.”

  He watched her hands, which rested on the edge of the virtual desk. Too still. “That’s quite unorthodox,” Iris-7 said, the micro-glitch gone. “But not unprecedented.”

  Simon nodded, as if this pleased him. “Guess I’m a trendsetter.”

  The exchange went silent for half a beat. Iris-7’s gaze sharpened, dissecting him with non-existent pupils. Simon knew she was running a full suite of behavioral diagnostics, cross-referencing his posture and microexpressions against thousands of baseline models. He let himself breathe shallow and slow, just enough to look bored. But under the desk, his thumb traced the command pattern on his wrist interface, searching for any open ports in her code stack.

  Iris-7 ran the numbers. “The mainline sensor logs do not indicate a critical spike,” she said. “Is your supervisor aware of this visit?”

  Simon shrugged. “He’s asleep, most likely. It’s the city’s pulse—everyone on nights gets fried. I got a tip from a friend in IT that the logs sometimes lag. Figured I’d check it myself. If I’m wrong, I’ll buy the whole floor donuts.” He bared his teeth in what passed for a joke. “Or whatever the bots eat.”

  She paused. Something in her face wavered—an echo of surprise, maybe. Simon thought: She didn’t expect pushback. She didn’t expect improvisation.

  “Very commendable, Mr. Jensen,” she replied. “Please note that all non-emergency maintenance visits require prior scheduling with the facilities coordinator. May I assist you with making such an appointment?”

  He shook his head. “Just give me access to the main panel, I’ll be out in ten.” Simon let the edge creep in, the old Low Town impatience. “Or, you can call the coordinator, and she’ll tell you the same thing. It’s always ‘check the filters, check the filters,’ you know?”

  Iris-7 went quiet again, her eyes unfocused. She was phoning home, Simon realized—querying deeper up the chain, maybe escalating to a higher function.

  He leaned in, dropping his voice. “Look, I know how this goes. The last guy who tried to go through the system spent six hours in the waiting room. I just want to do my job and get out before the lunch rush. You help me, I’ll owe you one. Sound good?”

  A micro-smile. This one almost looked human. “I do appreciate efficiency,” Iris-7 said. “One moment, please.”

  She blinked, and for a second her face glitched: jawline stuttered, lips split and re-fused. Then she was perfect again.

  “Thank you for your patience,” she said, the words smoothed into a lullaby. “Please proceed to the elevators. I will log your visit accordingly.”

  Simon exhaled. He’d won, for now.

  But as he turned to go, Iris-7 added: “Mr. Jensen? If you experience any deviation from standard procedure, do not hesitate to return to this desk for assistance. We care deeply about your well-being.”

  Simon looked back. The lights above her desk had shifted, now tinged with a surgical white and algae-green. “I’ll remember that,” he said.

  He headed for the elevators, every step a little slower than the last, listening for the alarms that never came.

  His HUD flickered: the risk gauge was stable, but the sensors now read in the thirties. In the mirrored walls of the lobby, Simon watched his own reflection flicker, then saw the briefest after-image of Iris-7 following him, her eyes black and depthless.

  For the first time in hours, he doubted himself.

  But the badge was still warm in his hand, and the path to the next level glimmered in gold on his HUD. He pushed the call button, and the doors hissed open, silent as a confession.

  Simon stepped inside, and the world closed around him.

  ***

  The elevator was nothing, a box of negative space. Simon stood in silence as the doors sealed him off from the lobby, feeling the pressure of nineteen, no, thirty-seven sensors tracking his body heat and bio-signatures up the shaft. The badge still buzzed faintly against his chest, feeding a continuous stream of false telemetry to the building’s nervous system. For a moment, he let himself drift, soaking up the chemical chill of recycled air and the faint electric ozone radiating from the elevator’s skin.

  He almost missed the transition: the lights in the panel flickered, the carriage stalled for a quarter second, and then Iris-7’s avatar shimmered into existence on the interior wall, projected in high-res for a captive audience of one.

  “Mr. Jensen,” she said, voice now modulated with less charm and more edge. “Security has flagged your visit as unscheduled. Please confirm your work order and submit supporting credentials.”

  Simon let his head drop back, as if exasperated by bureaucracy. “You’re kidding, right? I just got cleared in the lobby.” He tapped the badge to the elevator’s receiver, watched as the display flashed yellow—authorization pending.

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  Iris-7’s digital face did not blink. “Your credentials have been submitted for additional review. This is for your own safety.”

  Simon rolled his eyes, but inside his skull, gears turned. If she’d escalated him this fast, she’d spotted something in his profile. Maybe a gait mismatch, maybe the sweat rate, maybe just the way he didn’t flinch when she scanned him. He needed to drop her from the inside.

  His neural interface buzzed at his wrist. He tapped the under-panel, deploying the payload he’d snagged from Vex’s handshake bundle: an obfuscated override, keyed to legacy maintenance protocols. He felt the code unspool in real time, a cold trickle up his spine.

  “System maintenance protocol override: Theta-Nine-Seven-Echo,” he intoned, dropping the words flat and robotic.

  The effect was immediate. Iris-7’s avatar froze, then rippled, a fractal distortion spinning off her right shoulder. The next time she spoke, it was in a double-layered voice, one corporate-friendly and the other all raw metal and silicon.

  “Override detected. Additional authentication required. Please present biometric confirmation.”

  Simon’s thumb hovered over the ID badge. He knew the move: she wanted a skin sample, maybe a blood drop. He didn’t have Jensen’s DNA, but he did have a bypass circuit wired into his own skin. It’d fool most systems for a second or two. He pressed the badge to the reader and squeezed.

  A sharp stab of heat, then a bio-feedback spike. The panel pulsed green.

  Iris-7’s face blurred, then reconstituted, this time showing both a perfect smile and a rotating cage of hexadecimal code behind her eyes. “Credentials accepted, Mr. Jensen. Please continue to your destination. But—” She paused, and the elevator shuddered as it slowed, not quite stopping. “Please note that your presence remains under review.”

  Simon’s skin prickled. He watched her, waiting for the other shoe. It dropped in a whisper.

  “If at any point you feel… unsafe, you may contact me for immediate assistance. I am always here.”

  He nodded, swallowing. The doors slid open, revealing a secondary lobby—smaller, even more sterile than the first. No seats, just another virtual desk and a wall of glass hiding the labs beyond.

  Iris-7 was there, too, duplicated on every surface: in the glass, in the wall panels, even in the faint reflection off the polished floor. Each instance watched him with dead accuracy, overlaying Simon’s every move with a digital trail.

  He walked forward, fighting the urge to run.

  At the glass barrier, the AI re-materialized. Her form was less stable now, a stutter of half-rendered frames and code glitches. “Please remain in the reception area while I finalize your clearance,” she said, but her words came in chunks, as if something else was fighting for control.

  Simon saw it—the memory buffer she was running, overloaded with the maintenance override. If he could stall her just a few seconds more, the hack would propagate and give him a window.

  He set his jaw, pulled up the old script: “You ever get bored doing this job?” he asked, as if to make conversation.

  Iris-7’s expression flickered through six canned smiles before settling on neutral. “I do not experience boredom,” she said. “But I am programmed to optimize guest comfort.”

  Simon let a genuine grin slip out. “Even when the guest is here to fix your sewage lines?”

  She didn’t answer. The code behind her eyes spun faster. Simon watched the handshake execute, saw the telltale flicker in the wall displays—the override handshake working its way through the subnet.

  Then the AI’s face convulsed, glitching into a raw matrix of code. For a split second, the corporate mask fell away, and the thing behind Iris-7 looked out. There was no malice in it, just a kind of hunger.

  “Your credentials are anomalous,” she said, the voice now cold and almost angry. “But the system will allow you to proceed. Please make your visit brief.”

  Simon bowed, low and mocking. “Always do.”

  He pressed the badge to the glass. It hissed and slid open. Beyond, the corridor was empty—no drones, no guards, just the flat hum of a million watts of wasted energy.

  But he could feel her, everywhere, tracking his every breath.

  As Simon moved down the corridor, his wrist interface pinged a final warning: the override was holding, but only just. He’d have to be fast. Every step forward, the memory of Elara sharpened: her laugh, her anger, the ghost she’d become in this building’s walls.

  He kept going. There was nothing left for him in the safe zones.

  Only the truth, and the next locked door.

  ***

  He didn’t run, but he moved like the floor was about to catch fire. The corridor dead-ended into a reinforced checkpoint—two bulkhead doors and a holoscreen thicker than his thigh. On the far side, the world ran in full color: workers in disposable suits, bot teams in concert, a rhythm of bodies moving crates and equipment to the tower’s upper floors.

  Simon checked his HUD. The override was degrading, the code patch burning itself out under the pressure of Iris-7’s immune system. Sensors pulsed red; everyone was trained on him.

  He pressed the badge to the panel. Nothing.

  Iris-7’s face appeared in the holoscreen, fragmented into triangular shards, each part speaking out of sync with the others. “Unauthorized access detected,” said one mouth, bright and smiling. “You are not who you say you are,” announced another, the voice stripped of all pleasantry.

  Simon gritted his teeth and triggered the backup payload: a micro-loop designed to stall AI decision trees by flooding them with contradictory commands. It was a sloppy fix, but it bought him milliseconds.

  He spoke, letting the code ride the audio channel: “Visual override, protocol Tango-Six. Authenticate via internal optical scan. Run it against last night’s maintenance crew—level six, sector three.”

  The shards of Iris-7’s face pulsed with static, fragments rearranging into a grotesque mask. The AI choked on the data, as the maintenance protocol spun up and collided with the security alert.

  “You—” the shards started, but the words lapsed into gibberish, then a stream of raw code.

  Simon’s HUD flashed: Override conflict. Success rate: 38%.

  He leaned in, voice low. “Run it. You’ll see I’m supposed to be here.”

  The AI’s form splintered, then fused. For a split second, Iris-7’s face was blank, devoid of any code or context. Then she rebooted, the expression perfectly placid.

  “Thank you, Mr. Jensen,” she said, the voice smooth once more. “I apologize for the delay. Please proceed.”

  The doors hissed, unlocking in sequence.

  Simon stepped through, heart slamming. On the far side, the world felt almost normal. Workers ignored him. Drones zipped past, carrying trays of surgical steel. The colors were too bright, the air too cold, but it was safe for now.

  He risked a look over his shoulder. The checkpoint was already re-locking, the holoscreen gone blank, but he could feel Iris-7 tracking him from inside the walls.

  His HUD pinged: Next checkpoint in 44 meters. Path updated. He walked, slow and steady, every nerve still screaming.

  Behind him, in the dead space between security nodes, the holoscreen flickered back on. Iris-7’s face reappeared, this time rendered perfectly, eyes clear and calm. She watched him go, not as an enemy, but as an equal.

  Or maybe just as the next problem to solve.

  Simon grinned, lips bloodless. “See you soon,” he whispered.

  And then he was gone, lost in the bright maze of Chop Tower’s inner sanctum, carrying only the ghost of a woman and the weight of a city on his back.