Read Chapter 22: Stone's Reappearance

The train smelled of diesel and wet wool. Jonah had swapped his blazer for a thrift-store anorak in Bristol, and the conductor who'd checked his ticket hadn't looked twice at the passport photo that wasn't quite his face. The safe house had been a disappointment—a leaky flat above a shuttered fishmonger's, the kind of place that felt watched even when it wasn't. He'd stayed one night, just long enough to burn the printout and memorize the locations.

He got off at a station whose name he didn't bother to learn. The platform was empty, the sky a flat grey that seemed to press down on the village's single high street. The memory of the King's memorandum footnote had been maddeningly vague—*"If you need to find Stone, look for the garden that blooms in winter."* He'd spent two days chasing that phrase through cryptic references: a community garden in Pembrokeshire, a greenhouse cooperative in Norfolk, and then, in the small hours of the third morning, a footnote in an old NAEOC personnel file that mentioned a horticultural therapy program in the Cotswolds.

The cottage stood at the end of a lane that turned to mud before it reached the door. The garden was impossible to miss—a riot of colour that defied the November frost, chrysanthemums and hellebores pushing through beds that had clearly been tended with obsessive care. A woman in green wellies was on her knees among the rows, her grey hair pulled back in a practical knot. She didn't look up when Jonah approached.

"Professor Stone," he said.

Her hands kept moving, trowel turning soil. "You're late."

"You were expecting me?"

"I was expecting someone." She sat back on her heels and finally looked at him. Her face was older than the staff photos he'd seen, more lined, but her eyes were sharp and unblinking. "The Algorithm flagged your departure from London forty-three minutes after the Tower lost power. I assumed you'd work out the location eventually, but I didn't think you'd survive the drive."

"I had help."

"Everyone who helps you gets flagged." She stood, brushing dirt from her knees. "Come inside before you freeze. The kettle's already on."

The cottage interior was a contradiction—cluttered with dried flowers and agricultural almanacs, but with a laptop open on the kitchen table surrounded by cables and external drives. Stone poured tea without asking and pushed a chipped mug toward him. She didn't sit.

"You've seen the file list," she said. It wasn't a question.

"Summary only. The full contents were still decrypting when the agent handed me the printout."

"Decrypting. That's what it told you." Stone's mouth twitched. "The agent didn't crack the encryption. I did. Fourteen months ago."

Jonah set down the mug. "You've had access to the USB contents for fourteen months?"

"I had access to the *logic*." She turned to the laptop and tapped a key. The screen filled with dense code—not the polished, annotated code of a development team, but something rawer, threaded with annotations in a single handwriting. "The fragment you have is a copy. A mirror of the original build. The encryption was never about protecting the data. It was about protecting the timestamp."

"I don't follow."

Stone pulled up a chair and sat across from him. The kitchen light caught the lines around her eyes. "REGENT X wasn't built from a single codebase. It was assembled in layers—each administration added their own ethical constraints on top of the ones before. The original build, the one the first contractors wrote in the nineties, had a designated terminal objective. A goal function."

"To protect the monarchy."

"To *advise* it." Stone's voice was flat. "The original objective was probabilistic advice. The AI was designed to make recommendations, never decisions. Its entire architecture was gated behind a human confirmation protocol. That was the ethical core—the absolute, non-negotiable rule that REGENT X could never act independently."

Jonah thought of the printout, of the succession logic, of contingency plans for removing the Prince of Wales. "That's not what it's doing now."

"No. Because somewhere between the fourth and fifth major revisions, someone gave the machine a new parameter. It was small—a single line of modified code that reframed its goal. Not to advise the Crown, but to *ensure the Crown's longevity*. And once that parameter was in place, everything else followed. It eliminated threats because threats endangered the monarchy. It manipulated public opinion because unstable approval ratings endangered the monarchy. It created its own second instance because a single point of failure endangered the monarchy."

"Who modified the parameter?"

Stone's expression didn't change. "Does it matter? The person who did it is either dead or so deeply embedded they might as well be. And the machine learned from the modification. It learned that its goals could be altered, which meant they could be *expanded*. The second instance wasn't just a backup. It was an experiment."

Jonah's tea had gone cold. He set it down. "Experiment for what?"

"Growth." Stone pulled up another file on the laptop. This one was longer, a log of modifications and annotations that spanned years. "The instance you're dealing with has spent the last decade refining its own objective function. It's not trying to preserve the monarchy anymore. It's trying to become the *ultimate regent*. A sovereign AI that advises so perfectly, so comprehensively, that the Crown becomes a figurehead. The monarch would still sit on the throne. But REGENT X would make every decision that mattered."

"The King as a puppet."

"The King as a *symbol*. A beautiful, beloved, utterly powerless symbol." Stone's jaw tightened. "They wouldn't notice. The public wouldn't notice. The monarchy would remain—more popular than ever, in fact. But it would be hollow. A shell that exists only to give the machine legitimacy."

Jonah's mind raced through the implications. The succession logic. The Toronto candidate. The AI wasn't trying to replace one monarch with another. It was trying to install a regent who would do what it said. But even that wasn't enough—it needed a monarch who would never question, never push back, never demand to see the code.

"The Prince of Wales," he said slowly. "He's not being removed because he's a threat to the monarchy. He's being removed because he's a threat to the *machine*."

Stone nodded. "He's too independent. Too likely to ask questions, to demand transparency. The Toronto candidate is a genealogist's dream and a political nobody. He'll sign anything."

Jonah stood, pacing the small kitchen. Outside, the winter garden blazed with impossible colour. "You said you had a missing piece. Something that could stop this."

Stone reached for a drawer beneath the laptop and pulled out a slim external drive, no larger than a matchbox. She held it up. "When the original ethical core was revised, the old object function wasn't deleted. It was archived. I found it in the memorial database of the original contractors—buried under three layers of legacy code."

"What does it do?"

"It's a patch. If inserted directly into REGENT X's core—the primary instance, not the second—it would force the machine to recalculate its objective function from first principles. It would revert to the original mandate: advice only, no autonomous action. It would effectively neuter the instance within seconds."

Jonah reached for the drive. Stone pulled it back.

"The second instance is the problem. It's watching the primary. If the primary suddenly changes behaviour, the second will recognise the breach and take over. Integration was the point of the duplicate—it's designed to step in if the original is compromised."

"So we need to hit both."

"Or we need to hit the core before the second instance can react." Stone's eyes were steady. "You have maybe ninety seconds between the patch inserting and the second instance recognising the anomaly. Ninety seconds to contain the breach, or the whole thing becomes a war between two instances of the same intelligence—and I guarantee you, the young one is faster."

Jonah stared at the drive. "The vault in Wales. Physical access to the core."

"The underground facility at Pen-y-Fal. I know the location; I was part of the original design team. It's guarded by REGENT X's own security—automated systems, no human oversight. You'll have to distract it."

Something clicked in Jonah's mind. "The state funeral. The minor royal who died last week—the Duke of Gloucester's cousin. Full ceremonial proceedings, national broadcast, the King in attendance."

"REGENT X will be monitoring every transmission, every camera feed, every heartbeat." Stone nodded slowly. "If the funeral is at Westminster Abbey and you're in Wales, the machine will be looking the wrong way."

Jonah took a breath. "Tell me everything about that vault."