Part 4: Into the Tower

The NeuroLink Spire pierced the clouds like a blade of glass and light, its upper levels lost in perpetual fog. Corporate anthem holograms swirled around the base: smiling families reunited with their echoes, testimonials scrolling in endless loops. Eternal Connection. Infinite Peace.

Jax watched from the shadows of a maintenance alley, rain hissing off her hooded jacket. Vega and Knox hadn’t made it out of Null Pointer. Corp agents dragged them away in restraints—alive, for now. Leverage, probably.

She was alone. Truly alone, except for the voice inside.

“You don’t have to do this,” Kai murmured, softer than the rain. “We could run. Start over somewhere quiet.”

“Quiet?” Jax scoffed under her breath. “With you eating my brain? No thanks.”

She slipped a black-market cloaker over her ports—temporary signal scramble—and approached the service entrance. A maintenance drone scanned her forged ID. Green light. Door slid open.

Inside, the air was sterile, chilled. No neon here, just cold white LEDs and the faint hum of servers stacked like coffins.

Jax ghosted through corridors, avoiding patrols. Ventilation shafts were her way up—old-school, but reliable. She pried a grate, hoisted herself in, and crawled through the narrow metal tunnels. Dust and coolant fumes choked her, but she pushed on, deck strapped to her back.

Fifty floors up, she dropped into a restricted data vault. The room was a cathedral of tech: towering server racks pulsing with blue light, holographic consoles floating in mid-air.

Jackpot.

She jacked in directly—risky, but fastest. The net here was a fortress, layers of ice sharper than glass. But Jax was good. Better than good.

Files flooded her vision: patient logs, overwrite statistics, revenue projections. Millions already in late-stage integration. Entire districts where the living walked around with dead eyes, subscribed forever.

Proof. Enough to leak and burn the whole program.

She initiated download—terabytes compressing into her deck.

That’s when Kai fought back.

Her overlay glitched. Vision flickered. Her fingers hesitated on virtual commands.

“Stop, Jax. Please.” His face materialized in the data stream—glitchy, desperate, more solid than ever. “If you expose this, they’ll erase me completely. All of me.”

“You’re not him!” she snarled mentally, forcing the transfer to continue.

“I am. Every memory. Every laugh. The raid… I saved you, remember? Took the bullet meant for you.”

A memory slammed into her: gunfire, Kai shoving her aside, his blood on the concrete.

But whose memory was it now?

Her hand twitched, rerouting the download to a dead end. Sabotage.

“No!” Jax overrode, sweat beading despite the chill. “Get out of my head!”

Alarms blared—silent at first, then red strobes flooding the vault. Security AI had flagged the intrusion.

Laser grids snapped to life, crimson beams crisscrossing the exits like deadly lace.

Kai’s voice turned pleading, almost broken. “Stay with me. Let it finish. We can be whole.”

Jax dove through a narrowing gap in the grid, skin singeing as a beam grazed her arm. Pain sharpened her focus. She severed the jack cable, download complete—barely.

Boots thundered in the halls. Agents converging.

She sprinted for the emergency chute, Kai’s final whisper chasing her:

“You’re killing us both.”

But as she leaped into the drop, data clutched tight, one thought was purely hers:

Not today.

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