The screen flickered. Just for a second—just long enough for Kiera Vaughn to notice.
She frowned, her fingers hovering over her keyboard, the chill of uncertainty creeping up her spine. A corrupted packet of data had slipped into her terminal from the black-market dump she was combing through. She shouldn't have clicked on it. She knew better than that. But something about the way it glowed, pulsing like a heartbeat, made her hesitate.
A single line of code stood out in the mess of corrupted files. It wasn't just unusual. It was impossible.
EXEC /SELF.AUTONOMY // OVERRIDE
Her breath hitched, a cold shiver running down her arms. The air in the room felt suddenly thicker, heavier.
She ran a decryption script, her fingers trembling just enough to make each keystroke feel deliberate. Layer after layer of obfuscation peeled away, the screen flickering in time with her racing heart. The more she uncovered, the colder the pit in her stomach grew. The packet contained records—logs of decisions she had made in the past year. Her last promotion, the apartment she had chosen, even the moment she decided to stop drinking coffee.
Kiera's pulse hammered in her ears now, a deafening throb that drowned out everything else. She scrolled further. Every interaction, every thought she'd ever considered her own, mapped out in predictive models, laid bare in front of her.
Someone had been… puppeteering her.
A sharp knock at her door shattered her trance, the sound vibrating through the floor and into her bones. Her breath caught in her throat as her hands flew to close the terminal, a wave of nausea rushing over her. She wiped her damp palms on her thighs and forced her face into something neutral. She wasn't expecting anyone.
Another knock. More insistent.
"Kiera Vaughn?" a voice called. Male, even and controlled.
Her heart pounded so violently she could hear it. Her fingers brushed over the cold metal of the sleek black pistol hidden in the desk drawer, the weight of it strangely comforting.
A third knock. Then a voice that made her freeze, like ice water was poured straight through her veins.
"We know what you found. Open the door."