PROLOGUE

Can a human bleed green? Of course not.

Then what am I?

What does "I" even mean? Who was I… he? she? it? My thoughts are tangling. My brain is starving for oxygen. Nothing makes sense.

What is this place?

All this transport around us, yet we're rotting alive in this goddamn anthill. How I’d love to breathe fresh air right now…

Hold on… what is this on me? Everything is filthy. Disgusting. Ruined my stockings, too. Damn shame.

The wet fabric clings to my skin, vile. That cursed green slop won’t stop. It keeps oozing from the wound, slow and steady. Maybe I’ll just stay here. Alone. Betrayed and forgotten by everyone. Doesn’t matter anymore.

The only thing that matters is that my messenger catches that creature. It can’t be allowed to escape. It’s like a tumor. Leave even the smallest piece behind, and it all starts over.
He’ll catch it. He has to. Otherwise what was all this for… What’s the point of anything?

I think I hear footsteps... Who’s there?

My vision is failing. Everything blurs and shakes. Something massive and white is advancing out of the dark.

Maybe it’s the angel of death, coming for me. About time…

CHAPTER 1. AN ORDINARY MORNING

[December 2, 2109. The Dome. Upper Levels]

At exactly eight in the morning, the ceiling panels in the residence of the Architect of Consciousness snapped to full brightness. The implant at the base of her skull came alive, pulsing a low-frequency vibration into bone. Helena opened her eyes. Her pupils contracted instantly, adjusting to the focused glare. She pressed her fingers into the hollow of her throat, feeling the hard shell of her voice implant beneath the skin. The device responded with a dry, barely audible crackle, confirming full operational readiness.

On the bedside table lay a wristwatch in a white gold case. An ugly crack across the sapphire crystal split the space between three and nine. The hands had stopped almost five decades ago, when the mechanism was crushed. The Architect ran a fingertip over the sharp edge, trying to recall the face of its owner.

She rose lazily, the fine silk nightgown flowing over her body as if alive. The fabric hugged her stomach, gripped her hips, and clung to her wet crotch. Today was Monday, and Helena was expecting a pleasant encounter. A mandatory morning ritual she never skipped. One urgent matter stood in the way, but that was nothing—she would dispose of it quickly.

She walked over to the wall-mounted console. The smooth surface sparked to life beneath her fingers, projecting the quarantine sector: one of the zones under her direct authority. Currently, it housed men who could theoretically pose a threat—individuals exhibiting nonstandard reactions or behavioral anomalies. Minor infractions, but deviations nonetheless.

Helena scrutinized every detail of their bodies: the defined muscle, the data ports at the base of their necks, the rhythmic rise and fall of their chests. Diagnostics and implant calibrations were complete; the female technicians had lined the wretched bastards up in several rows for final inspection. Helena idly skimmed the telemetry and calibration logs. Utterly tedious...

A man in the third row caught her attention. The scanners flagged a critical anomaly: the Object blinked four-tenths of a second past baseline. The biometric graph on the monitor flared crimson, signaling a microscopic failure in neural synchronization. His implant was unraveling—the third failure this month. Helena accepted it with cold detachment as an inevitable evil. The Dome’s infrastructure was degrading beyond repair.

The Architect dragged her index finger across the display, striking through the unit's serial number. The system logged the command instantly, assigning the Object to reprocessing. Guards shoved the wretch out of formation and hauled him away. The blue status indicator blinked out.

Helena walked to the panoramic glass wall, which opened onto the cavernous abyss of Omega's interior: countless tiers, bridges, the cold glare of the Technosphere. The seamless composite glass cast her pale reflection over the majestic sight below. A short chime flared at the back of her head, signaling the arrival of her personal slave at the chamber doors.

On time, as always...

The middle levels of Omega-01 hummed with the usual morning rush. Thousands of female citizens hurried to their work shifts. Every civic unit bore The Halo implant in the occipital lobe, neutralizing irrational surges of panic or dissent. Holographic ribbon displays ran along the bulkheads, broadcasting endless Dome productivity charts and ideological slogans.

By the panoramic glass of a transit hub stood an eight-year-old girl. Her skin had the sickly, grayish cast typical of children raised entirely under artificial light. Across the platform, four synthaioids marched in rigid cadence, clad in heavy armor. A female officer trailed them, eyeing every passerby with cold suspicion. The child observed the rhythmic, synchronized movements of the biorobots without fear or wonder. Her eyes mirrored only the cold geometry of the city-machine, scrubbed clean of chaos and unpredictability.

Her mother stood frozen beside her. The woman’s face was smooth, unmarred by the fine lines of past emotion. The implants functioned flawlessly, reducing child-rearing to a sequence of biological and civic protocols. She focused intently on a blinking amber light warning of the transit pod's arrival.

"Mother, where is my genetic donor?" the girl asked, her eyes never leaving the silent synthaioids.

The question was delivered like a routine data query fed into a Technosphere terminal. The mother answered instantly without turning, lips barely parting, her tone dead as the rustle of dry paper:

"The Object is contained within the lower levels, assigned to the reactor sector. A profound honor!"

The child simply nodded, accepting the information as an indisputable physical constant requiring no emotional response.

Overhead, an amplified female voice resonated through hundreds of speakers embedded in the reinforced concrete vaults. The morning propaganda broadcast opened with archival footage of the Great Collapse. The populace had lived with these broadcasts for so long that they barely paid attention. The script never varied—simple, unbending truths clear to everyone.

"Citizens of the Omega-01 sanctuary. Turn your gaze upon the origins of our salvation," the announcer intoned. "We are privileged to live in the era following the Wrath. We must remember how the old world choked on its own bile when male biology reached the threshold of terminal entropy."

Archival footage flooded the screens, stripped of sound but brimming with visual horror. Burning cities looked like festering ulcers across the planet's surface. Men, driven by the unchecked impulses of the amygdala, had pounded civilization into rubble. It was the mindless frenzy of primal predators, stripped of a prefrontal cortex.

"The Great Collapse was as inevitable as the fall of an overripe fruit," the voice swelled, echoing louder. "Yet the Seven Architects—our revered Council of Lilith—assumed the burden of radical surgery. They created the Dome. Omega! A hermetically sealed ark where biological failure has no place. Through the Neural Harmony network, they gave us the coveted gift of peace and the predictability of each new day."

The feed shifted to a detailed schematic of The Halo. These neural units were embedded in every citizen across the city. Like invisible iron bands, they clamped down on the wills of thousands of men in the lower levels, keeping women safe and turning vicious beasts into useful labor assets. All women wore implants as well, reducing interpersonal hostility and securing the bedrock of civic peace. At least, that was what the official propaganda claimed.

"Our security rests upon absolute control over the source of instability. The implant is salvation for those who require governance. Through the technologies of the Council of Lilith, male aggression is permanently locked within electronic circuitry. We transformed destroyers into creators, stripping them of the right to err for the sake of your prosperity."

Mother and daughter stepped onto the arriving platform, dissolving into the crowd of identical figures. The transport pod rocketed upward along steel guide rails; another arrived immediately behind it. Streams of citizens navigated the expanse of the colossal Dome according to some higher design. Everything bowed to the grand idea of the seven Architects. Beyond the Dome lay a toxic wasteland, but within reigned immaculate order, built on the foundation of absolute control.

The announcer's voice continued to thunder, vibrating through the steel superstructure. The visuals on the monitors shifted: archival fires gave way to a flawless 3D cross-section of Omega-01.

"Behold the triumph of architectural thought by the Council of Lilith," the voice proclaimed with genuine pride.

The display zoomed in, revealing the Sky Spire as it pierced the toxic smog. The speaker began cataloging the sectors, her words settling into the minds of the citizens like wet cement.

"You live in the most perfect sanctuary ever forged by human will. The Upper Levels: the Technosphere and the residences of the Architects. Here beats the heart of Omega—The Core. The unified central computer orchestrating every process of the Dome. All decisions are rendered without the interference of biological impulse. We supplanted the turbulence of politics with the cold logic of system architecture. Every move you make, every thought within the boundaries of the implant fortifies the collective neural network."

The screen bathed the concourse in a soothing viridian hue as the broadcast shifted to the middle levels. Countless hydroponic farms flickered across the monitors; automated manipulators harvested crops. Female operators in white lab coats entered commands at control consoles, inspected product quality, and sealed it into transparent containers. Their faces glowed in the ultraviolet light of the lamps. No filth, no competition, no scarcity. Only the distribution of resources according to the needs of the population.

"We eliminated the root of all wars: the cursed hierarchical dominance born of the male ego," the narrator continued, and the schematic plunged into the lower tiers. The Depths...

They resembled a massive industrial complex. The blueprints of a nuclear installation flickered across the screen, followed by recycling arteries and workshops producing clothing, dishware, and furniture—an endless industrial maze.

State propaganda delicately sidestepped certain realities of the shelter's operation. Yet every citizen understood that the most grueling and hazardous labor was performed exclusively by men. Nameless, silent, bound by The Halos. They scoured heat exchangers, replaced filters in high-toxicity ventilation shafts, repaired pumping stations, loaded industrial autoclaves, and worked the assembly lines. The female populace found this arrangement entirely natural, revered as ultimate justice. To each their own...

"Your security is guaranteed by The Core. Any flicker of biological rebellion will be terminated through the embedded implants, reducing the aggressor to a docile vegetable. Our common home is a slice of paradise in a hermetically sealed package. Here, sex is a function; love is the total absence of friction in the system. Take pride in your status as a citizen of Omega. You are the vanguard of evolution, cleansed of the genetic garbage of the past."

The reel concluded with the sigil of the Council of Lilith: an ouroboros, the stylized serpent devouring its own tail.

The world was legible and predictable.

In the private chambers of the Architect of Consciousness, the unfortunate Mark was performing his honored duties as a privileged slave. His head was locked tight between his mistress's thighs. She clamped his skull with the crushing force of a hydraulic press, burying his face directly into her pulsing heat. Mark felt a vicious cramp seize his jaw, but he continued to meticulously work her flesh. His tongue drove deep inside, harvesting the sharp, acrid secretions.

The still air reeked of the bitter tang of lust. Helena took lazy, habitual pleasure in the quality of the service. Now and then, a low rasp tore from the voice module in her throat, rising into a resonant hiss. She pinned the slave so brutally he was close to suffocating. Her thighs, pale and taut, shivered with pleasure. To her, he was no man—merely a precision instrument, a biophysical component calibrated for her personal comfort.

With a sudden jerk, Helena broke the position. Releasing the slave's head, she sprawled onto her back, putting her high, heavy breasts and tight nipples on display. Her nakedness in the lilac glow seemed unnatural, mesmerizing in its flawlessness.

"Fuck my mouth, worm," she rasped.

Mark obeyed. As he knelt over her to carry out the order, Helena took up a massive dildo and began masturbating with ruthless hunger. The heavy shaft of black silicone, ribbed with prominent veins, drove into her with a wet squelch. She hammered it inside to the very hilt with the frenzy of an apex predator gorging on long-awaited prey.

The Architect's body arched in violent spasms of release. She drained the last remnants of strength from Mark, forcing him to spill his seed into her throat again and again. The mistress swallowed his semen with the ravenous greed of a parasite siphoning the vital fluid of its host. Mark felt her jaws lock around his cock with dangerous force, felt her suck out every last drop as if it were not mere biological byproduct, but high-octane fuel for her absolute dominion. To Helena, every fresh pulse of semen was a legitimate war trophy claimed in an ancient biological conflict.

She was insatiable. Her rhythm turned feral; the silicone battered her wet flesh with wet, tearing slaps. Digging her free hand deep into the slave's thigh, her sharp nails pierced the skin until blood welled up. The lascivious beast basked in the absolute summit of her power over this pathetic cut of meat.

Deep within Mark, in the smothered recesses of his brain, something wholly alien to his conditioned state began to pool. A heavy, toxic sediment slowly gathered at the floor of his subconscious. The Halo continued to iron out any erratic spikes, keeping his baseline locked within parameters of complete submission. Yet an ancient, animal fury was relentlessly clawing against the implant’s digital firewall.

With every surge of semen he pumped into her mouth, a tearing dissonance fractured his mind. Mark began to recognize that he had been stripped down to a purely utilitarian tool. Each encounter with the mistress erased whatever boundary remained between him and the surrounding furniture. He was an object of exploitation, disposable material churned through the endless cycle of someone else's appetite. And within this slow death of the self, a faint premonition of an irreversible finale surfaced for the very first time. A point past which there would be no turning back.

Sated at last, the Architect shoved him away. She sprawled across the silk sheets in cold satisfaction. After lounging for a moment, Helena cast a look of bored revulsion at the slave, who remained standing by the foot of the bed, trembling with exhaustion. God... he was still here.

"That will do for today. Your capacity is depleted." She gave a dismissive flick of her wrist toward the door, as though shooing away a bothersome housecat. "Until next Monday, darling."

The word darling burned like a brand, but The Halo neutralized the spike instantly—dropping his pulse, easing the tension in his neck, smoothing his breathing back into its flatline cadence. From the outside, the protocol held without a flaw. Mark bowed his head, dressed in silence, and took his leave. His legs carried him toward his primary work post on pure reflex. The implant was functioning within tolerances; only now, between the system's command and his physical response, there hung a microscopic fraction of a second that had never existed before.

The reactor turbine hall on the lowest tier of Omega-01 vibrated with a deep, visceral roar. Massive heat-exchanger columns shuddered, hissing pressurized plumes of superheated steam. At the center of the hall, flanked by a tangled thicket of titanium conduits, silent men were hard at work. Every motion was strictly calibrated; they blended seamlessly into the machine architecture, functioning as organic extensions of endless industrial loops.

The pressure doors hissed apart, admitting a female medic flanked by two synthaioids. Her tailored white coat gleamed under the glare of mercury lamps. Emblazoned across the heavy gray armor of her escorts was the insignia of the Architect of Medicine: the Rod of Asclepius. The woman transmitted a short neural command.

The biomechanical units moved without hesitation, peeling five young men away from the work crew. Prime specimens: broad shoulders, powerful thighs, and clear skin not yet corroded by industrial grit. The machines seized the wretches roughly by the shoulders and shoved them into a line. At the prompt of their implants, the men sank to their knees in unison, snapping into a posture of practiced humiliation.

"Status: biological relief," the medic announced, slipping on a black latex glove that stretched over her hand with a sharp crack.

The selected men submissively thrust out their rears, arching their spines until their pelvises were lifted high into the air. With one violent yank, the synthaioids stripped down the workers' trousers, baring pale flesh. The men shivered at the certainty of what was coming, but the electronic leash of The Halo enforced absolute compliance.

The medic rolled the corrugated plastic sleeve of a semen collection apparatus over the first worker's cock, locking it in place with a pneumatic collar.

Stepping behind him, she slathered the glove in a thick coat of industrial petroleum jelly and drove her hand violently into his rectum. The worker let out a muffled grunt. The medic began stimulating his prostate with punishing, calculated strokes, literally wringing the secretions from deep inside his pelvic tissue.

"Look at him pump," she smirked, glancing back at her silent mechanical escort. "A little more push and this brute clears a double quota. Look, he actually seems to like it. Good little cow."

The reservoir tube filled rapidly with cloudy, milky fluid. The medic operated without a trace of mercy. To her, the procedure was a routine harvest—the extraction of raw resources from livestock stripped of identity and will. Once the cylinder topped off, she wrenched her fist free and moved to the next man in line, not even bothering to wipe the smeared glove.

"Tuck that pelvis up, animal. Don't make me bend down for it," she barked, thrusting her hand deep into the next rectum.

The line of men held their position in dead silence, rears thrust upward, foreheads pressed against the concrete. They were required to hold this posture until every drop of genetic material had been drained and cataloged by the network. The medic worked down the row, punctuating each extraction with cynical assessments of fluid viscosity and genetic viability. The air of the turbine hall hung thick with the reek of machine oil, stale male sweat, and fresh ejaculate.

The procedure advanced strictly by the decrees of the Council of Lilith, reducing human anatomy to a faceless cog in the colossal engine of Omega.

And the notion that this established order could fracture today, of all days, remained utterly unthinkable.

CHAPTER 2. THE BEAST AWAKENS

[December 2, 2109. The Dome]

Mark sat in his personal laboratory on the fifteenth floor of the Technosphere — a rare privilege for a male engineer of the Dome. Complex, multilayered circuit schematics spread across the massive touchscreen display. He finally looked away, rubbed his eyes, and took a swig of synthetic coffee from a large plastic mug. The last virtual test of the device's power system had gone fine, more or less, but his intuition kept whispering: something was wrong.

The lab looked impressive. Metal workbenches lined the walls, buried in synthaioid parts. Everything was here: servo drives with stripped gears, tactile sensors, boards with melted traces, fragments of optical systems, and other junk whose purpose was known only to initiates in the mysteries of necrocybernetics. At the far table sat two assistants, both in gray coveralls, soldering irons in hand. They were picking through the torso of a deactivated combat giant, murmuring to each other as if afraid the cyborg might hear.

Mark was no ordinary slave. He belonged to the narrow caste of engineers who kept the Dome's critical infrastructure running. The selection was handled by the Core itself.

At age twelve, all boys took an automatic test through the implants embedded in early childhood. One in ten received clearance for further education; the rest were not so lucky. They were sent down to the Depths, where the Halo switched into a mode of amplified will suppression, turning its subjects into silent instruments.

Twenty years ago the Core had chosen Mark as the best of his cohort, and it had not been wrong. He was sent to a special school staffed by the Dome's most experienced specialists. The young man showed exceptional aptitude for programming and electronics, and before long he had mastered the repair of the most complex systems, synthaioids included.

These varied machines were human bodies controlled through chips implanted in "dead" brains. Arms and legs were often reinforced with power actuators. Sometimes the limbs were replaced with mechanical ones entirely.

Instead of a heart, these creatures housed a specialized pump that circulated green electrolyte through tissue and brain. There was no consciousness; control was exercised through command protocols of the Architects or officers of the various services, depending on clearance level. Synthaioids knew no fatigue, felt no pain, and were considered Omega's foremost resource.

In time Mark became the best synthaioid repair specialist around and was given his own laboratory. This dedicated workshop serviced the needs of the entire city at once and, in effect, had no direct oversight. Which suited him just fine.

Among other things, a great deal of what was found in rare expeditions beyond the Dome ended up on his doorstep. Parts, boards, broken machinery — all of it went toward keeping the synthaioid fleet combat-ready.

Every excursion was considered an extremely dangerous undertaking. The Wasteland wasn't quite as uninhabited as advertised. Savages, as Omega's propaganda called them, kept trying to break into the shelter-city. They ambushed patrols and search parties. The combat units of the security service, backed by synthaioids, were the only barrier between their stable world and the chaos outside. Though the wild humans became a resource of Omega too. They were often taken prisoner, implanted, and sent down to the Depths to service the life-support systems. In essence, the savages' dreams did come true — just in that particular form.

Among the junk brought back from expeditions, something occasionally turned up more valuable than spare parts and microchips — at least to Mark. Books! Paper ones, yellowed, smelling of dust and memory. In Omega they weren't used and weren't even considered a possible medium of information. All documentation was electronic.

Official history boiled down, one way or another, to a simple formula: wicked men destroyed the world, and the Council of Lilith saved what remained of rational humanity. In the books he found, Mark glimpsed a completely different picture of the past. One without implants. Without Architects.

The incredible adventures of the books' protagonists stirred his imagination. They made mistakes, they loved, and they weren't the least bit afraid of being sent to the Depths. It all left him with a faint ache: why did he live differently?

He managed to read nearly everything before handing the paper over for processing, deliberately dragging out the inventory process. Perhaps those worthless artifacts of the past would end up as toilet paper for Helena to wipe her majestic ass with.

He had met the Architect of Consciousness a couple of years back, and the encounter had changed his life forever, turning it from routine service into an endless nightmare of personal humiliation.

His current mistress had been brought to the lab by Selena, head of Omega's security service. The vicious lesbian warrior was used to commanding death squads but felt like a complete amateur when it came to fine bionics. She had instructed Helena to personally verify the implant of her favorite synthaioid, freshly repaired.

Selena would drop in unannounced and watch, entranced, as the technicians resoldered microchips and swapped cables and tubing in the bodies of mangled biomechanical monstrosities. She clearly had some perverted fetish for it, though she probably couldn't tell a servo drive from a hydraulic cylinder. Helena, by contrast, cared only about the purity of the result, and being a perfectionist to her core, she immediately shooed all the assistants away from the monitors so she could test the control systems personally.

The fearsome cyborg, Selena's favorite, scarred with hideous wounds, comically saluted during the test while balancing on one leg, then performed a backflip. The warrior was as delighted as a child with a new toy, and Helena, glancing over the sync graphs, unexpectedly took an interest in the lab supervisor.

She quizzed him about neurointerface calibrations. Mark discovered, with surprise, that the Architect didn't just speak the professional language — she saw things his own colleagues routinely missed. Errors in pulse synchronization, overloads on the power buses, voltage drops in the feedback circuits. He told her about the delicate process of tuning synaptic connections, without lowering his eyes, which was nearly impossible in the presence of an official of that rank. Mark didn't immediately notice the young woman's gaze growing more and more... intent. As if the subject were not schematics but something far more intimate.

She offered genuinely useful advice, pointing out hidden stability reserves in the code that he himself had overlooked. This intellectual connection lasted nearly an hour, until Selena, bored out of her mind, dragged her volunteer assistant off to inspect other vital nodes of the Dome's defenses. But on the way out, Helena carelessly invited him to her apartments that evening to continue the fascinating conversation.

Mark understood that refusing an Architect was not merely a breach of protocol but outright self-destruction. The implant lodged in his head blocked the very thought of disobedience, triggering a surge of physical nausea. At the appointed hour he arrived at Helena's luxurious residence, feeling the neural network hard-programming his body for deference and readiness for any order.

The Architect greeted him in a light silk robe. Her manner was calm, almost gracious. She didn't move straight to business, offering him instead a glass of liqueur. After the first swallow Mark felt a powerful chemical cocktail detonate inside him, and the woman bluntly ordered him to strip.

Apparently Helena had put something in the drink, because within minutes a fever swept through him, driven by a ferocious stimulant of the peripheral nervous system. The drug triggered an instant, almost painful erection that held for the better part of a day. Mark lost track of time and of the number of acts, becoming a fevered machine whose sole purpose was to sate the insatiable lust of the Architect.

The night turned into an endless, exhausting sexual marathon. He pounded her in every possible hole, over and over, until his head roared and his heart beat so fast it seemed about to tear through his chest.

Nausea hit him, consciousness smeared, and he collapsed onto the bed on the verge of fainting. But the insatiable beast knew no mercy. She climbed onto his face, pressed her wet, steaming slit right over his mouth, and bent down to greedily suck his spent cock. For another half hour the mistress rubbed her cunt against him, latching onto his groin like a leech, squeezing out the last, agonizing drops of semen.

After that first encounter he was in such bad shape that Helena actually excused him from work for two days. In the official order she noted his incapacity and need for rest "on account of required psychological rehabilitation."

Since then he reported to her residence every Monday, performing his new duties as a personal vibrator, the sex toy of the highest leadership. It had become a mandatory line in his work schedule. The morning of the first day of the week was allotted to the service of her lust; any protest was instantly blocked by the Halo at the stage where the thought was still forming.

The depraved mistress used her personal slave with the same merciless efficiency with which he repaired those damned synthaioids. I wonder who services her special needs on the other days of the week?

Mark pressed hard on his temples, trying to squeeze the sticky shreds of memory out of his consciousness. The coffee had long gone cold. In the corner of the huge monitor, a label pulsed insistently: PROJECT: LILAC CALL.

A month ago, he had been assigned to the development of this unusual and extremely complex device. The personal signature of the Chief Architect on the digital requisition. A rare honor — though the top brass's interest in something so mundane was a little strange.

Officially, the unit was registered as an emitter for driving savages away from the Dome's perimeter. Mark was responsible for the heart of the machine — the power system. Everything was on schedule; the tests showed promising results. And yet an irrational sense of doom kept building inside. His intuition kept insisting: something here was wrong.

"Down the rabbit hole again," he muttered.

Officially, full access to the device's databases belonged to only two people: himself and the project Curator. That honored role had, of course, gone to the Architect of Consciousness. His temples ached again. Push the memories away! Time to sink into the work.

Mark pulled a thin neural cable from the terminal. The dry click of the port at the back of his skull was followed by the familiar flash of pain. Reality instantly crumbled into pixels, and a fractal abyss of virtual interface bloomed before his eyes. Having entered his mental passphrase, Mark dove into the architecture of light. Three-dimensional schematics of the device stretched out before him, flickering alongside links to Omega's complete libraries of electronic components. A veritable treasure trove of data.

So what did I do to earn this level of access? Or is the project really that important?

He glided along golden power chains, flew among the shimmering cascades of transformer blocks. For the hundredth time he tested the nodes of the energy system, swapping out components with paranoid obsession at the slightest doubt. Time meant nothing here — only current, only logic, only the endless Lilac Call.

"Could a simple intruder deterrent really have a configuration this complex?" he asked himself, over and over.

Maybe he shouldn't have, but professional pride drove him deeper and deeper. He began digging into the documentation of the emitting modules themselves, territory he'd never entered before.

Every new tab he opened confirmed his suspicions. A mind honed by years of working with synthaioid neural networks parsed the installation's algorithms. This did not look like a fear-signal generator or an ultrasonic siren.

The Lilac Call generated a series of ultra-powerful, coherent pulses tuned to a specific frequency of neural oscillation. The emission was brief, but the power was colossal. Effective radius: fifty miles. An enormous kill zone. Who exactly do they plan to scare that far from the Dome? Curiosity was curdling into a vague premonition of danger.

And if...

Omega's libraries included a safety-analysis suite called Bio-Med: Clinic. Standard software for assessing how devices affect living organisms. Say engineers design a powerful transformer — the program produces a report: no humans within ten meters, or migraines and worse will follow.

"Let's try it." Mark fed the emitter's parameters into the safety model.

The program processed the query; strings of analysis scrolled across the screen, and a few seconds later the system delivered its final report. Mark skimmed it and went still. Calculation error — that was his first thought. He patiently rechecked the input data and ran the test again.

Same result. Now the engineer began studying the report line by line, and a paralyzing horror began to take hold of him. He understood everything.

Impossible.

In the section titled Psychophysical Consequences, the program dispassionately stated: "Complete and irreversible destruction of higher cognitive centers." A single pulse from the Lilac Call would instantly sever the neural pathways responsible for self-awareness, memory, and will. A person's identity simply burned out, leaving an empty biological shell. But the most terrifying part was the tuning filter: the pulse was selective. It destroyed only the male architecture of the brain.

Mark mapped the wave's propagation. Since the emitters were mounted directly on the Spire — dead center of the Dome — the wave spread outward in circles, making no distinction between "ours" and "theirs." It would cover everyone without exception. Not just the savages in the wastes — every Y-chromosome bearer in Omega would be reduced to docile livestock in a single instant.

Panic built. All this time he'd been assembling the guillotine for himself and every man in the shelter. The Council of Lilith had known from the very start! Why?

The tissue-degradation graphs left no room for alternatives — this was final mental castration. All that would remain were zombies, fit to keep working in the Depths.

Helena's snakelike grin surfaced in his memory, her mocking darling. He saw his place now: not a man, a biological exercise machine. A toy, soon to be replaced by a "stable," burned-out version. Fury smashed into his chest, jolted the back of his skull like a live wire, and the implant port seared like a red-hot needle.

At the base of his skull, where the Halo was seated, came a dry crack. The virtual reality collapsed into pixels. Mark came to on the laboratory floor, curled up in pain. He had been screaming. Apparently the implant's power unit hadn't survived the voltage spike and had burned out.

The agony gradually subsided. What remained was a ringing, crystalline clarity. The obsessive whisper of Lilith's algorithms had fallen silent, and Mark was alone with his own hatred.

Freedom? The brain the Architects had sentenced to destruction began operating at peak efficiency.

21:00 on the clock. The assistants had long gone home. Nobody had heard his screams; this end of the floor was always empty in the evening. But there was nothing to celebrate.

In the morning a security officer would inevitably scan his implant — standard procedure. After that, he'd be sent for processing. Slaves don't get new implants.

Fuck you, it's not over yet! His fingers hammered the touchscreen display. He needed access to the Core, but a direct hack was impossible.

Wait. He remembered. The system was pathologically protective of important data. Every hour, on the hour, a save protocol fired. The program automatically entered the Lilac Call project database, copied every new file, and carried them to the Central Server archive. The Core was opening the door itself — all he had to do was stow the bomb in the luggage.

"Wanted to burn out my mind, darling?" He didn't recognize his own voice. His perception of reality had shifted that much. "Then choke on the rage of the people you ground into the dirt!"

He feverishly wrote the virus, disguising it as a data array on the emitter's thermal expansion. An array of boring numbers the Core was certain to index during the save.

The objective of the sabotage was appallingly simple. Once inside the Core, the virus was to locate the process in active memory that handled implant firmware updates. And corrupt it. Replace the scheduled-calibration command with an emergency shutdown. Receiving that "broken" update package, thousands of Halos across the city would stop suppressing will and emotion.

Every line of code soaked in the thirst for revenge. When the scales fell from the eyes of the inhabitants of the Depths, they would simply tear their oppressors apart.

He finished at 05:58. Saved the file thermal_data_v89.bin to the project's root folder.

06:00.

The network activity indicator blinked: "Backup initiated." The Core copied the file. Mark pulled his hands from the keyboard. The virus should be unpacking itself inside the most heavily protected server in Omega right now.

He waited. One minute. Another. Nothing happened; the silence pressed on his ears.

And then he heard the dismantled synthaioid lying on the nearest table call him by name.