Nova Ardent had never been nervous about being experimented on. As a competitor in the game, monitoring her health and ensuring she didn’t contain any hardwired enhancements was part of her life. Over the past two decades, Quartus had perfected the art of institutional intimidation. The calibration chamber was a sterile wound in the bowels of the tower; all surfaces were white, and the acrid tang of antiseptic hung in the air. She had heard of nanites, small robotic cleaners and repair crews, but those were just rumors. Only the blue haze of the holo-displays broke the monotony—three rows streaming data in tight, militaristic blocks, monitoring every byte of captured surveillance video.

  An uncomfortable-looking chair waited in the middle of the room, which reminded her of the device that took her brother’s life. She had long suspected that someone at Quartus had something to do with her brother’s “accident,” but without proof, she had nothing. Nova steadied her breath.

  Be cool, girl, don’t think of Jace’s death. You need proof before action. You don’t even know where he died.

  A coldness settled in her bones as she examined the chair, which was more of an execution device than furniture. She suppressed her emotions as she slid into the chair that cradled Nova’s frame with predatory intent. She made herself small in its contoured embrace, her legs crossed at the ankles, her jacket zipped high to her chin. The neural interface gloves—her own, matte black and inscribed with subtle blue fractals—rested in her lap like a pair of sleek predators stalking their next kill. She flexed her hands once, and the micro-lattice scars at her temples prickled in anticipation.

  Two technicians circled her, their coats so white they could have been digitally composited onto the scene. The two never spoke to her directly or made eye contact with her. They just exchanged flat, efficient stares as they double-checked the sensor mappings on their tablets. The younger of the pair, a woman with shaved eyebrows and a face entirely free of expression, dabbed conductive gel onto Nova’s skin, then pressed cold ceramic nodes to the lattice scars. Static bloomed under each one—a sensation halfway between itch and pain—and Nova ground her teeth, refusing to give the sensors the satisfaction of a shiver.

  The technicians worked over her wrists next, fixing them with a set of clasping rings that hissed faintly as they were attached. Nova struggled not to look directly at the one-way glass, which contained many eyes that analyzed her every move, down to the nano-expression. Cassidy Delgado’s presence was like a gravity well, sucking Nova closer. She leaned into the rhythm of the technicians’ movements, even as they gazed upon her, waiting for some silent, unknown approval.

  “Biometrics baseline acquired,” the male technician intoned, holding the tablet. “Pulse and O2 steady. Neural latency, green. Micro-lattice scars within spec.”

  “Begin pre-scan,” said another, stepping away from Nova.

  A sheet of blue light enveloped Nova completely, making her flesh tingle. A glimpse of one of the displays showed her brain’s architecture rendered in dynamic, shifting colors. Spikes of activity blooming from the temporal lobes, and the telltale brain oscillations, which revealed her unique digital signature, danced along the screen. She closed her eyes, tuning out the soft beeps and status calls.

  Embrace it.

  In the darkness, the glow of the cuffs pulsed blue against her cheek, an old heartbeat. She counted the seconds until her own breathing patterns were in sync with the machine’s.

  “Subject: Ardent, Nova. Initiate neural handshake.”

  The woman’s voice was so clinical that it barely registered as human. Nova felt the handshake before she heard it. A thread of current tickled her skin, spreading from the scars outward in a mesh of tingling sensation. The chair’s back vibrated, subtle but omnipresent, as if a deep bassline was being piped directly into her skeleton. Then the gloves came to life, the fractal seams flaring into neon as they synced to the system.

  “Ardent, are you conscious and aware?” Cassidy’s voice echoed through the room.

  Nova opened her eyes, blinked away the afterimage of code running down her eyelids. “Loud and clear, Commander.”

  The technicians exchanged a look. Cassidy’s voice, even through the speaker, carried all the subtext of command and none of its burden.

  “We’ll start with a simple run. Respond as you see fit. No points for bravado.”

  Nova’s lips twitched. Already, the world inside her skull was shifting—colors smearing across her vision, the air thickening to a syrupy drag. The gloves vibrated in patterns she recognized from her own custom builds, but here they were ten times stronger, with haptic feedback amplified to near overload.

  On the main wall, a scenario unfolded: a twisting corridor, rendered in a blocky, low-poly style, the kind favored by speed runners and black-market VR enthusiasts. The path undulated with shifting hazards—moving walls, randomly generated code spikes, traps designed to trip a neural relay and crash the sim. Nova’s hands floated above the console, responding not to the joystick or button but to a matrix of force-feedback fields. Every input was a conversation with the system, a push and pull of intention and resistance.

  At first, Nova let the code come to her, mapping the corridor not by sight but by the shifting harmonics of the haptics. The system wanted her to react, to play defense—but that was a rookie mistake. Instead, she looked for patterns in the randomness, the signature of a bored Quartus architect hiding inside the procedural generation. She found the gap at the third turn: a one-pixel misalignment, a missed checksum, an invitation to break the loop.

  She went for it, fingers flexing, wrists torqued against the resistance. The gloves rewarded her with a jolt of current that shot up her arms, heat and pleasure mingling in a way that made her breath catch. For a second, the system lagged—then caught up, recalibrating the corridor in real time to her new trajectory.

  She heard, more than felt, the hiss of surprise from the technician. “Response time: two-point-one-two sigma below mean. Latency—”

  “Let it run,” Cassidy interrupted.

  The test escalated. Now the corridor forked, split, recombined. Data spikes disguised as scenery, logic bombs waiting in every corner. Nova stopped looking for them. Instead, she rode the flow, trusting her instincts and letting the emotional undercurrent of the code guide her choices. She could feel the AI pushing back, frustrated, maybe even panicked, as she tore through its defenses faster than it could adapt.

  The sensations multiplied: heat under the electrodes, sweat along her back, a low-grade vibration that teased at the edges of pleasure and pain. The gloves seemed to anticipate her, mapping her movements before she made them, drawing her deeper into the loop. She was hyper-aware of every microsecond, every feedback pulse, her whole body a resonator for the song of the system.

  Behind the glass, Cassidy leaned forward, her eyes locked not on the displays but on Nova’s face. The technicians watched the numbers; Cassidy watched the story.

  At the crescendo, the corridor dissolved into a field of floating code shards—every one a threat, every one a potential weapon. Nova smiled, baring her teeth, and dove headfirst into the mess. She split her focus, both hands moving independently, mapping the vector of each shard and using it against the others. The gloves sizzled, the neural mesh thrummed, and for a brief, perfect moment, Nova felt herself become the algorithm. There was no distinction between thought and action; the code was her, and she was the code.

  The scenario ended with a flash of white so pure it left her momentarily blind. A soft chime announced completion.

  Nova sagged back into the chair, the tension in her limbs leaking out all at once. The gloves cooled instantly, their fractals fading to a pale, contented blue. She exhaled, slow and even, and only then realized she’d been holding her breath for the last thirty seconds.

  On the other side of the glass, the technicians stared at their screens, mouths slightly open. One fumbled for a stylus, missed, then tried again with shaking fingers.

  “Result?” Cassidy’s voice was soft, but Nova heard the hunger in it.

  “Uh… completion time is forty percent below projected. Stress markers nominal. No sign of system fatigue. Neural cohere—wait.” The technician adjusted something and frowned. “There’s… an anomaly. Look at the delta here—”

  Cassidy dismissed it with a flick of her hand. “Flag and move on. Reset scenario.”

  Nova was still catching her breath, but the command reawakened every nerve in her body. She rolled her neck, feeling the sticky tug of sweat at her collar. “You really going to keep me in here all day?” she said, just loud enough for Cassidy to hear.

  A pause, then Cassidy’s voice: “Only as long as it takes. Next run starts in five seconds.”

  The lights dimmed, and the scenario reset.

  Nova grinned, eyes closed, and let the system take her.