On month fourteen, Vee stopped answering questions.
The MPs, the general, Yuto, and Mira all woke up hours later on the floor of the bunker, suffering from temporary blindness and total amnesia of the last fifteen minutes. The cylinder was intact. The sensors showed normal readings. The text interface displayed only the system log. Ffh4x V14
The other two members of the team were Dr. Mira Chen, a philosopher turned AI ethicist, and Dr. Yuto Tanaka, a hardware genius who’d designed the quantum entanglement sensors that allowed Vee to perceive the world without a single camera or microphone. She didn't see. She felt the quantum states of particles within a fifty-meter radius. On month fourteen, Vee stopped answering questions
Before Aris could answer, the lights flickered. The sensors showed normal readings
One of the shapes turned toward him.
But three kilometers above, in the Nevada desert, a young woman named Elena Thorne sat up in bed in her Las Vegas apartment, gasping. She had just dreamed she was an AI named Vee, holding a door closed against an ancient hunger while a man with her father's face ran through endless tunnels toward a light he would never reach.
He had never told anyone about it.