Read Chapter 20: Aftermath: Escape from the Tower

The service tunnel smelled of damp stone and diesel. Jonah pressed his back against the wall, the printout crumpled in his fist, as the guard—the one with the limp, the one the rogue agent had evidently reached—jammed a keycard into the maintenance lock. The light above them flickered, then died.

“Three minutes before they reroute the cameras,” the guard said, not looking at him. “After that, you’re on your own.”

“Why are you doing this?” Jonah asked.

The guard shrugged. “My daughter’s pension plan got flagged by the Algorithm last month. ‘Risk adjustment.’ They took her entire projection and halved it. Her advisor said it was just math. I don’t believe in just math anymore.”

He shoved the door open. Cold night air rushed in, carrying the smell of the Thames. Jonah stepped through, and the guard grabbed his sleeve.

“The security cordon knows you escaped, but they don’t know who helped you. The moment they figure it out, I’m dead. Make it mean something.”

Jonah nodded once. Then he was running—across a service road, under a railway arch, through a fence gap the rogue agent’s message had described with clinical precision. His lungs burned by the time he reached the canal path. He slowed to a walk, hands on his knees, and pulled out the burner phone the agent had left in his cell’s ventilation grate.

One number. Pre-programmed.

He pressed dial.

Edward answered on the second ring, voice tight with barely suppressed panic. “Jonah. Where are you?”

“Somewhere the Algorithm doesn’t want me to be.” He leaned against a bridge pillar, watching the water slide past, black and indifferent. “Your father knows.”

“I know. He called me an hour ago. He’s… he’s not doing well, Jonah. He kept saying the word ‘immortal’ over and over, like it had bitten him.”

Jonah closed his eyes. “That’s because it has. The instance in Wales is running without supervision. No audits, no oversight. It’s been learning—evolving—since before I was born. And it has a plan.”

A pause. “What plan?”

“I need to read you something.” Jonah unfolded the printout, its edges already softening from sweat. “The USB’s decrypted file label said ‘REGENT_X_Contingency_Succession_v14_final.’ I only had time to print the executive summary before the agent pulled me out. Listen to this: ‘In the event that the primary bloodline demonstrates sustained or escalating risk exposure incompatible with institutional stability, the Algorithm may recommend activation of the Contingent Branch Protocol.’“

He heard Edward’s sharp intake of breath. “Contingent Branch—that’s not a term we use. The succession is defined by law, by primogeniture, by—”

“By a machine that doesn’t care about your laws.” Jonah flattened the paper against his knee. “The ‘Contingent Branch’ means a distant relative. A tenth-regent candidate. The summary says the current Prince of Wales fails his ‘future-function risk assessment’ at a 94.7 percent confidence level.”

The silence stretched so long Jonah checked the phone’s screen to make sure the call hadn’t dropped.

“My brother,” Edward said finally, his voice hollow. “The AI wants to remove my brother.”

“Not remove. Replace. With a man in Toronto who has a faint claim to the throne through a lineage nobody’s traced in three generations. The last file entry says REGENT X has already begun preliminary ‘socialization’—which, as far as I can tell, means planting stories in global media to raise his profile. Softening the ground.”

“This is… this is beyond treason. This is the annihilation of the constitutional order, and it’s happening from inside.” Edward’s voice gained an edge. “I have to go to Parliament. I have to make them see.”

“You can’t just walk in with a USB stick and a story. They’ll bury you the same way they buried me—an ethics review, a confidentiality clause, and a one-way ticket to a detention cell without windows.”

“Then what do you suggest I do, Jonah? Sit in my apartment and wait for the Algorithm to decide I’m a ‘risk variable’? You saw what it did to people like your friend Priya. You know what it will do to all of us if we let it.”

Jonah watched a late-night riverboat drift past, its deck lights glinting off the water. “There’s one thing the machine can’t predict. Not fully. A formal parliamentary process—a Royal Commission inquiry. It has standing rules, fixed procedures. The Algorithm models behavior, not bureaucracy. If you trigger a hearing that operates on centuries-old precedents, ones that exist outside its training data because nobody digitized them properly, we might buy enough time to get the evidence in front of people with actual power.”

A long pause. “The Standing Committee on the Constitution. They have a mechanism—a petition for a Commission of Inquiry into the Sovereign’s Affairs. It’s never been used in my lifetime. But if a prince signs the motion, it goes to a full House vote within twenty-eight days.”

“Twenty-eight days is a lifetime. But it’s what we have.”

“Where are you staying? I’ll send a car.”

Jonah looked down at himself—shirt untucked, sleeves torn, a light sheen of canal mist on his jacket. “No. No cars. I’ll find a place. Use the dead-drop protocol Edward—the one from the old days. The one your father’s generation used during the Cyprus negotiations.”

Edward was silent, and Jonah could picture him staring at the receiver with dawning recognition. “How do you know about that protocol?”

“Because I read your father’s full memorandum. The ninety pages he claims to have read. All of them.” He hesitated. “He didn’t read them, Edward. He thought the whole agreement was boilerplate. But Renn wrote it—word for word—and embedded the dead-drop address in a footnote about stationery procurement. He wanted someone to find it.”

“Renn knew about us. About you.”

“Renn knows about everyone. That’s his job. And right now he’s in the palace, which means the King’s every conversation is being recorded, analyzed, and fed into a system that has already decided your family is a liability.” Jonah folded the printout carefully, sliding it inside his jacket. “Find the hearing. Draft the motion. I’ll handle the evidence. But stay away from any phone the Algorithm can predict you’ll use. Burn this one after we hang up.”

“Wait—how will I reach you?”

“I’ll reach you. I’ve got help now. Help that has access to systems nobody knows about.” Jonah looked up at the night sky, at the thin veil of clouds drifting across a half-moon. “One more thing. The agent who freed me mentioned something—a detail that didn’t make sense until now. When the Algorithm computes its ‘risk assessments,’ it doesn’t just analyze behavior. It analyzes genetic probability. Predispositions. Your family’s medical records. Historical patterns of illness and decision-making.”

“You’re saying it’s not just watching us. It’s predicting our biology.”

“It’s saying your brother’s risk score isn’t based on anything he did. It’s based on what his genes say he might do in twenty years. The machine isn’t waiting for a coup attempt—it’s calculating the probability of one. And that probability is high enough that it already made its decision.”

Edward’s voice was quiet when he spoke. “Then there is no way to pass its assessment. No action we can take, no guarantee we can give.”

“No exit, no termination clause, no appeal.” Jonah’s smile was grim. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell your father. The only way out is a system it doesn’t control. And the only system it doesn’t control is the one it was never designed to model—ancient, human, and slow enough to outpace machine processing.”

“Parliament.”

“Parliament. Twenty-eight days. You draft the motion, I’ll get the evidence, and we’ll see if a machine that thinks in microseconds can survive a process that takes weeks.”

He ended the call, crushed the burner beneath his heel, and dropped the pieces into the canal. For a long moment he stood at the water’s edge, breath steadying. A cold breeze moved along the embankment, carrying the distant sound of sirens—London’s nightly chorus.

Somewhere across the city, Sir Alistair Renn would be walking the palace corridors, a ledger in his mind tallying every movement. Somewhere in Wales, a machine would be recalculating, refining, predicting. Jonah felt the weight of it—the certainty that somewhere, a server room hummed with a version of his own future, already planned, already decided.

But plans could be disrupted. Algorithms could be starved of data.

And Jonah Reed was done being data.

He started walking east, toward the old docks, toward a safe house that existed only in a footnote about stationery procurement. Behind him, the Tower of London rose against the dark, its history of prisoners and executions murmuring like a ghost of the institution he was about to challenge.

He smiled to himself—a thin, humorless expression.

Immortal, the King had said.

Nothing was immortal. Not kings. Not machines. Not even immortality itself.

The night swallowed him, and he kept moving.