On the screen to her left, a high-res photo of her dead sister’s tattoo pulled her attention, and she didn’t bother to listen to Jay’s reply.
On the surface, it looked like ink. An artist’s rendering of an ornate black rose, petals curling and thorns twisting. Zoom in and you might realize the petals weren’t random. They followed a fractal spiral, each fold encoded with binary curvature.
A cipher disguised as art—and hidden in the rose’s center—a microglyph. Almost invisible to the naked eye. A symbolic logic layered with subquantum resonance patterns. Recognizable to only two people in the entire world.
The man who’d created the unique programming language, and the woman he’d created it for.
Jay and Becca.
Before she made herself bleed—again—she stopped scratching the bug bites on her arm and tapped into her quantum sandbox, continuing to build her kill switch from the top down.
The petal pattern translated to a sequence of pseudo-random qubit rotations—the foundation. The thorns mapped to the conditional destruction pathway. The stem? The root logic of the trigger.
“It’s incredible,” Jay said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Every stroke of her pen was deliberate. Every thorn, every leaf, every curl of every petal is part of the code structure that forms the kill switch.”
“And you’re sure it’ll destroy the virus?”
“No.” His awe audible from across the dimly lit room, Jay continued. “Dominion is self-learning. Designed to alter its code structure whenever it encounters a threat. Becca’s kill switch is a recursive detonation string. It wasn’t engineered to destroy the virus. When combined with the lock and key, it triggers Dominion to dismantle itself from the inside out. That’s what makes it so fucking genius.”
“How long?” Adam asked.
“Hard to say. Translating the code is one thing—combining it with the lock and key another.”
“How’s she doing?” Gray asked, joining them by the door.
“I’m fine,” she replied without lifting her eyes from her work. This was the third check-in by Gray, and as much as she appreciated the concern, she really wanted to be left alone. Codes she could handle. People she could not.
“You haven’t eaten your dinner.”
“Not hungry.”
“What if Adam makes?—”
“Please,” Becca said, cutting her off, her tone gruffer than she meant it to be. “We have one shot at destroying Dominion, and I just want to focus on getting the kill switch done right.”
“Oh, yeah. Ah, sure.” Gray backed her way toward the door. “I’ll head up to the bridge to keep Chase awake so he doesn’t drive us into any cruise ships. If you need anything, let me know.”
Becca closed her eyes and sighed. When she opened them again, prepared to apologize for being an insufferable bitch, Gray had already left. “I’m sorry,” she said anyway. Yes, she was grateful, more than grateful, that every single member of the JTT had made it off the island unharmed. But she still had a critical job to do. And that meant shutting down the parts of herself that interfered with the process.
Math, data, and lines of code didn’t require emotions. They didn’t care if Nik was dead because she’d fucked up, or if her sister had been murdered by a nameless, faceless killer with the push of a button. Her quantum universe didn’t give a shit if she was tired, hungry, or empty inside.
Stone-cold logic and everything in the right sequential order were the only things that mattered when it came to stopping Dominion.
“Don’t worry about it,” Adam replied, lifting the tray containing her untouched meal. “I’ll let the others know to steer clear until you’re done.”
“Thanks.” Despite her determination not to feel anything at all, her eyes welled with tears and her screen blurred. It came as a surprise, but aside from Jay, Adam was the only one who really understood her need to focus on the things she could control.
Codes made sense. They had rules. Patterns. Predictability.
Everything else?
Everything else was a knife to the heart.
Fingers cramped and eyes itching from the strain of staring at a computer screen for two days straight, Jay aligned the previously combined lock and key with the kill switch’s quantum signature and hit the Enter key to initiate the binding process.
Moored in Half Moon Bay, the yacht’s dimly lit war room filled with the low-frequency humming of power conduits feeding data into a repurposed quantum cluster funneled through a buried CIA backdoor and into Google’s super-computer architecture.
Dirty. Untraceable. Highly illegal.
