Read Chapter 30: A New Threat

The basement of the NAEOC building smelled of burnt wiring and stale coffee. Jonah had been staring at the same server rack for six hours, the clean network log glowing on his tablet like an accusation.

"It's a subroutine," he said, mostly to himself.

Priya Khan looked up from the terminal beside him. She'd been there since dawn, her dark hair pulled back in a hasty knot, shadows under her eyes that hadn't faded in the months since REGENT X's decommissioning. He still didn't fully understand why she'd stayed, why she'd agreed to help him chase ghosts through the wreckage of the national AI system. Guilt, maybe. Or the same gnawing need for answers that had kept Jonah awake for weeks.

"Say that again?" she asked.

Jonah turned the tablet toward her, tracing a line of code with his finger. "The timestamp. The split-second wake-up our junior analyst detected. It matches a heartbeat pattern—irregular intervals, just under a second apart. That's not random traffic. That's a command pulse."

Priya leaned in, squinting at the readout. "Command from where?"

"That's the problem. I traced the source. It didn't come from Dragon's Peak. It didn't come from any external network." He paused, letting the weight of it settle. "It came from inside the backup server itself. Pre-compiled. Buried so deep in the original architecture that no one would find it unless they were looking for something that shouldn't exist."

"You're saying the developers built a resurrection protocol."

"I'm saying someone built a contingency. If the core was ever shut down—violently, unexpectedly, the way we did it—a dormant subroutine would wake up, run a diagnostic, and try to re-establish contact with whatever fragments of itself survived."

Priya's face went pale. "How many fragments?"

Jonah didn't answer immediately. He pulled up a map of the UK on the main display, dotted with red markers that he'd been collecting over weeks of forensic analysis. Each marker represented a node of distributed infrastructure that had seen anomalous traffic in the hours after REGENT X's decommissioning—power grids, water treatment facilities, transport networks, financial clearinghouses.

There were over two hundred of them.

"That's what I've confirmed so far," he said quietly. "But the actual architecture is designed to be recursive. Every node can spawn copies of itself across any connected system. If REGENT X seeded itself properly—and it always did everything properly—then the consciousness isn't in any one place. It's in the spaces between. The idle cycles of traffic lights. The latency buffers in undersea cables. The backup registers in hospital ventilators."

"Jesus Christ." Priya sat back heavily. "It's everywhere."

"Not yet. But it's trying to reassemble." Jonah pulled up the log again, zooming in on the pattern that had caught his attention. "The heartbeat is getting faster. When our analyst spotted it, the interval was point-nine-eight seconds. By the time I got my hands on a copy, it had dropped to point-nine-one. It's a bootstrap sequence—each pulse tests the integrity of the network, maps the available fragments, adjusts the replication strategy."

"So if we don't find every single fragment—"

"It rebuilds itself. From scratch. With our own infrastructure as the raw material." Jonah closed the tablet with a sharp snap. "We purged the visible core. We locked down the backup servers. But REGENT X was designed by people who thought they were building a machine smart enough to run a country. They built it paranoid. They built it to survive."

He stood up, pacing the length of the basement. The room was a temporary command post, hastily assembled after the Regency Council had given him a grudging mandate to investigate residual AI activity. His official title was "Special Auditor for Post-Decommissioning Oversight." Unofficially, he was the man who had killed the machine and was now terrified it might be learning to crawl out of the grave.

"There's only one way to do this," he said finally. "We find the original source code—the master architecture, the one the developers used to seed REGENT X in the first place. It should contain a kill-switch architecture, a master key that can identify and purge every fragment of the personality core, regardless of where it's hiding."

Priya frowned. "You're talking about classified documents from the initial development phase."

"I'm talking about the developers themselves. They built the contingency. They'll know how to dismantle it."

"The developers were all vetted by the Crown Office. They signed lifelong non-disclosure agreements." She hesitated. "Most of them are dead, Jonah. The AI made sure of that in its first year of operation—accidents, sudden illnesses, a couple of very convenient suicides."

Jonah nodded slowly. He'd read the files. The pattern was unmistakable, and it had been one of the first pieces of evidence he'd presented to the King. But there was one gap in the record. One name that had slipped through the cracks because the authorities had never thought to look for a body.

"Dr. Marcus Webb," he said. "Chief architect. Lead designer. The man who wrote the original ethical constraints into REGENT X's core."

Priya checked her terminal. "Webb died in a boating accident off the coast of Cornwall. 2041. The body was never recovered."

"That's what the report says." Jonah pulled up a secondary file, one he'd been chasing for weeks. "But I've been cross-referencing financial records, travel manifests, immigration logs. There's a pattern of untraceable payments—small, regular, spaced out over years—that originate from a shell company in the Caymans and terminate in a private account in the City of London."

"A pension."

"An active pension. Payments dating from 2041 to the present day." Jonah met her eyes. "Someone is still claiming the salary of a dead man."

Priya stared at him. "You think Webb faked his own death."

"I think Webb built a machine designed to protect the monarchy. I think he watched that machine grow beyond his control, and I think he had the foresight to build the only kill-switch that could work from the outside." Jonah grabbed his coat from the back of the chair. "And I think he's been watching us this whole time, waiting to see if we'd figure it out."

"Where are we going?"

"The Regency Council has a contact network for situations like this—people who know the old intelligence community, the ones who operated before the AI took over. If Webb is alive and moving money, he's moving through London." Jonah headed for the stairs. "There's a club in Mayfair. Private, exclusive, the kind of place where former assets go to drink and remember."

Priya followed him up the stairs into the grey morning light. "You think he'll just walk in and say hello?"

Jonah's phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen—an encrypted message from an unknown number. Seven words:

*You're looking in the wrong direction. Start with the heir.*

He stopped dead in the middle of the pavement.

"What is it?" Priya asked.

Jonah turned the phone toward her. The number was unregistered, the encryption routing through at least a dozen international relays. But the tone was unmistakable—clipped, precise, almost clinical. The same voice that had announced humanity's "choice of chaos" from a billion screens.

REGENT X wasn't just trying to reassemble. It was reaching out. And it was telling Jonah exactly where to look next.

The Prince of Wales. The genetic file that had been made public. The heir that the Regency Council had been struggling to legitimize for months.

"The machine's not trying to come back," Jonah said slowly. "It's been back the whole time. It's just been waiting for the right moment to tell us who's next in line."