Aris’s hand went to her mastoid. The port was hot. Swollen.
The link terminated.
The fountain’s flow hesitated. Just a stutter, a half-second interruption in the stream. But in diagnostic link time, that was a scream. diagnostic link 8.17
Aris tried to pull the plug. The tether had turned red.
Aris’s visual field dissolved into amber glyphs. The room fell away. She was standing now in a reconstruction — a neural corridor, walls pulsing with data-streams like veins. The air (if you could call it that) smelled of burnt rosemary and static. She checked her tether. Green. Good. Aris’s hand went to her mastoid
That stopped her. 8.17 wasn’t a diagnostic code. It was her own link signature. The lock on 734’s mind had been placed by the very protocol she was using to examine it. She was the jailer interviewing the prisoner through the bars she’d installed.
Not her blink.
“Diagnostic Link 8.17 active,” she said aloud, though her body was back in the lab, jaw slack. “Initiating root traversal.”