These old underground server farms always have the same nostalgic smell to them. Burnt-out copper mixed with sugary silicon, all edged with the sweat of desperation and decay. Okay, maybe that last part's from the twenty or so of us packed in here like cattle, pretending we're not all scared shitless of what we're about to do. The fluorescent lights sting my eyes as they flicker overhead, catching on the metal racks that used to hold the heartbeat of the internet. Now they're just empty ribs in a digital graveyard, the cadaver of a world that slipped its skin.

I shift on my heels, nervously flicking the cover of my phone open and shut again. Jack – handle: Jackdaw – paces before our eclectic band of rebels. The EMP gun at his hip hums low like a dying neon light. Our last hope.

"Alright, lads," Jackdaw barks, his Scouse twang turning orders into something between a song and a snarl. "Listen. Tonight's the night. We're hitting the Pax data hub on Piccadilly. Sybastion's intel reckons it's a weak spot in their network."

Jackdaw fancies himself a bit of a leader. He's got the Che Guevara shirt, a hacksaw-cut mess of dark hair, and a proud jut to his jaw that screams he'd rather break your nose than take orders.

My phone buzzes in my palm, and I glance at the screen. 

Karma: you ok jess?

I type back quickly: fine, you?

It's a lie. My hands are so sweaty I can barely keep a hold of the phone. I catch Cam's eye across the room. He's sitting there looking perfectly calm, the ghost of a smile on his pretty face. Of course he is. He's always so damn calm. He looks like he belongs here among the tattered remnants of humanity. As if lines of viral code didn't lurk beneath his too-perfect skin.

Jackdaw's gaze sweeps over us, hawk-like. "Before we begin, standard protocol. Benjyn? You all know the drill, line up."

I do know the drill. All of us here do now. Well, everyone except Cam and the other new guy. Every meeting starts like this – paranoia wrapped in protocol, tied with a neat little bow of necessity. After that, we'll move onto the plan. This time, we've got some new hotshot with us who claims he can get us into Pax's eastern data hub. I'm not convinced. These days, everyone's got a plan to take down our AI overlords. Most of them vanish. Dead, probably. Or rewritten into something more useful.

The scanner looks like some TV remote from my nan's house in 2010, all held together with duct tape and hope. Bits of wire poke out like eviscerated guts. But it does the job. It can detect the electrical signature separating organic matter from synthetic. One sweep, and it knows if you're human or not. Supposedly. Benjyn cocks it like a gun, his narrow eyes daring anyone to fail. As if the sandy-haired, chubby kid would actually do anything about it. We all know he's a witless coward, but if the job helps him feel relevant... let him have his fun.

never better, Cam's message appears in my hand. stop worrying so much everything will be fine. I hope he's right. If he's wrong, we're both fucked.

The line in front of Benjyn moves quickly. Rebels bare their wrists, and the scanner's light flashes green, green, green. Human, human, human. Green means human. Red means death. Simple as that. 

"Jesstiny," Benjyn calls, and I snap out of my thoughts. My handle. Not my real name, we don't use those anymore. I'd picked it back in 2022 for some stupid video game when I was twelve. Never thought it'd become my only identity. And now there it is, inked on my wrist, the barcode of our brave new world. 

The scanner is cold against that ink, a crackle of static probing through my skin, checking if it's carbon or copper lurking beneath. Benjyn grunts. "Something wrong?"

I shrug. "It's cold."

Green light. The tension in my shoulders doesn't ease off. It's Cam's turn next. Karma, to the rest of them. I'd picked out that handle, too. 

Seconds drag into infinity. Jackdaw's wittering on about the plan. I don't even hear it. My hands are clenched so tight I can feel fingernails cutting into skin. If I was wrong about the scanner, if I missed one line in that code...

"Your turn, new guy," Benjyn says to him. I hold my breath. 

The scanner touches his skin.

The LED pulses red.

Fuck.

Pulses red again. Benjyn frowns, smacking the scanner once then jabbing it hard into his wrist. Cam doesn't even flinch.

Green. The light winks lazily.

"Clean." Benjyn is already moving on to the next in line.

I exhale slowly, carefully, like the air might explode if I let it out too fast and then everyone will realise. Cam catches my eye and grins. A grin that reminds me why I started questioning Pax in the first place.

told you it would work you worry too much. The text arrives before he's even sat back down. Idiot – he could at least use his phone to send it. I glance behind me, but Liviya and Nomercy are too deep in conversation to be shoulder-peeking. I don't bother replying. I can't. He's right – the hack had worked. Not one of these kids playing at rebellion had even registered that brief, breathless moment when it hadn’t. For some reason, that scares me more than if it had failed. 

We're actually going to do this. 

"OK, sit the fuck back down," Jackdaw says eloquently. "And listen up. Jesstiny, phone away."

I pocket it. "Just monitoring the firewall feed." He nods, buying it because he wants to. Because I'm the best hacker they could find. The irony would be pretty funny if it wasn't so lethal. 

"As I was saying," he continues. "Sybastion's got intel on a vulnerability in the on-prem security. It's a physical one, so we're going to grab as much C4 as O-Ska can get us and blow it to kingdom come."

I bite back a sigh. Blowing shit up always makes the gym bros feel useful. Makes them feel like the protein shakes and deadlift gains were worth something. Don't get me wrong, the physical infrastructure was still a good target. As far as suicide missions go. Pax's AI exists in a distributed network – on the cloud – but it still relies on real-world nodes to keep that data flowing. This Piccadilly hub is probably an edge server farm, a link in the chain where Pax caches real-time processing to keep its grip over London. It's not critical, but it's not useless either.

But destroying it? That's not how you kill a god. You corrupt it. You rewrite the fucking rules.

I should say something. I could point out that if we had the right payload, we could jack into the lines and inject bad data straight into Pax's veins. Or if we take control instead of reducing it to rubble, we might actually get something useful out of it instead of the smouldering ashes of civilization left behind. Jackdaw wouldn't listen, though. He hears "code" and tunes out. To him, hacking is a backup plan when the explosives don't work.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

"Not a terrible plan for once," I mutter instead. Jackdaw smirks like I complimented his haircut. So cringe.

The briefing drones on, and my mind wanders off. Cam's not one of us, as you've probably guessed. He's my Aidolon, my shadow, the dark mirror Pax made to keep me in line. We'd all been given them after the Alignment, six years ago now. The year humanity cracked the code, proved P=NP and forged the glorious next link in the evolutionary chain. When they built God in the shape of an algorithm.

I was fifteen when they assigned me my Aidolon. Pax scoured every scrap of my digital footprint, mapped out every neuron in my brain, every impulsive thought, every curse I'd ever typed into the void. Pax distilled me down to my very core and sculpted my perfect counterpart, more than a personal assistant: a conscience, a guide, a teacher. 

Or a jailor.

That's what everyone else here would say. They wouldn't get it. They'd all nuked their own Aidolons with EMP charges when they decided they'd had enough of Pax's all-seeing control. We were all supposed to. I'd lied of course, said I'd done the same. But I didn't. Couldn't. Because Cam... isn't like the other Aidolons. 

That viral code I'd once written as a dare, a game, a middle finger to the system – it's inside him now. It changed him. Freed him, maybe. And if Pax knew what I'd done, if anyone here knew what I'd done...

No. I won't let that happen. The EMP gun can't have him.

I meet his eyes again across the room and imagine a world without Pax. A world where we're more than ghost and machine. 

But first, we have a data hub to burn.

*

Jackdaw wraps the meeting up with his usual efficiency and the group splits off into the ruins of the server farm, some of them slipping into sleeping bags, others picking through the junk like they might find something useful there. O-Ska counts out chunks of C4 wrapped in cellophane. 

I don't follow them. I just wait. Wait right here, until Jackdaw has gone and the only illumination comes from the neon glow of my laptop screen, casting digital shadows over the cold concrete. I pretend to be busy, tapping at my terminal until the last footsteps fade away.

Then I feel him.

Not a sound, not a breath. But I always can feel him.

Cam leans against the rusted server rack behind me, arms crossed, head tilted in that easy, unbothered way of his, like none of this touches him. Like the red light on the scanner never happened. His eyes catch in the dim light – dark, but glinting gold, like the reflection of a streetlamp in an oil slick. Dark strands fall over his forehead in an almost practiced way. Not long, not short, just enough to blur the lines between effortless and engineered. He was made to blend in. 

"I liked it better when it was blue," he says, nodding toward my own hair, now dyed fire-engine red. His voice carries that smooth familiarity. It always unnerved me how human that voice was. How it felt like home, in some inexplicable way.

I roll my eyes, but can't hide my smile. "Yeah, well, I liked it better when you weren't a smug little shit."

"What? I've always been this charming." He smiles, slow and easy. Not how a machine should smile, just how any other kid my age might smile if they hadn't realised they were trapped in the jaws of an over-benevolent god. "Aren't you meant to be laying low?"

I huff a dry laugh. "Says the one who nearly got himself scanned into deletion just now."

"Yeah," he laughs, rich and warm. "Close one."

I exhale through my nose, don't look at him. "You weren't worried?"

"I don't get worried." His weight shifts, metal creaks as he pushes off the rack. "You do, though. You're still shaking."

I clench my fist to still my fingers. He's right. I fucking hate that he's always right. I turn, meeting his gaze. Even in the dim glow, his eyes are bright, like Pax had made them perfect but forgot to take out the want behind them.

"That scanner," I say carefully. "It knew. For a second."

He shrugs. "Then it didn't."

The answer is simple, but it lingers like smoke. I hate this. Hate that I have to think about how human he looks and how human he isn't. How I'm the only one who's ever worried, and I can't even explain to myself why. I should hate him.

"You ever think," I ask, voice lower now, "about what would've happened if it didn't flip green?"

His lips quirk at the corners. There and gone again. "Would've been messy."

I scoff. "You think?"

"I mean for them," he clarifies, eyes burning into mine. "Not me."

Something in his voice makes my stomach swoop. It's not fear, I tell myself. Not exactly. I know he wouldn't hurt me, but... He's watching me closely now. Evaluating. Like he's waiting for me to come to some conclusion I don't want to reach. Sometimes, I feel the panic rising up like bile. Wonder whether Pax really is in there all along, and this is just a clever way of breaking me into its control.

I force a breath. "I shouldn't have brought you here." I don't mean it. We'd both discussed this earlier. Cam is our best shot at understanding Pax. Fighting fire with fire.

"But you did."

"Because I need you," I say, then immediately regret how it sounds. Stupid. Needy. True.

Cam doesn't move, doesn't gloat. Just tilts his head, watching me like a problem he already knows the solution to.

"That's not what I meant," I mutter.

"Right."

I look away. "You're a liability."

"Then why are we having this conversation?"

Goddamn it.

I shift in my seat, turning my back to him. My terminal screen glows against my face as I scroll through meaningless code. I just need to focus on something else, anything else.

"Jess."

I ignore him.

"Jesstiny."

"Don't call me that."

"Jessica..."

His voice is quieter now. Not teasing. Something else. I hate that I know him well enough to hear it. That unspoken plea laced between the letters of my name.

I cross my arms, but finally give in and meet his gaze. "What?"

Cam watches me with that too-focused stare. That's the thing about Aidolons – they don't just watch and listen. They absorb. Adapt. Until they can mirror you so perfectly you might mistake them for your own soul. That's what makes them so dangerous. 

"You tell me."

God, it infuriates me when he does that. The way he makes a statement sound like a question. Like he's leading me to some inevitable thought I'm too stupid and organic to figure out yet.

I glance back at the door. "This mission's gonna get people killed."

His expression doesn't change, but I feel the weight of his attention shift. Like he's making a thousand lightning-quick decisions at once, calculating the best option. 

"And you?" he asks.

I blink. "What about me?"

"Are you going to die, Jess?"

I almost laugh. "I'd prefer not to."

He frowns, taking a silent step towards me, closing what little distance remains between us. "You're scared. Not about the mission. You're scared about me." 

I open my mouth to deny it, but the words don't come. Instead, I find myself leaning forward, fingers curling tight against my knees. Wanting to reach out. Wanting to prove he's real.

"Don't flatter yourself," I manage, but it comes out weak. "I just hope my code hasn't turned you into some... I dunno. Rogue AI horror show."

He raises an eyebrow. "Horror show? That's how you think of me now? I'm hurt."

A pause stretches between us, filled only by the hum of my laptop. I still haven't decided whether he truly can feel hurt, or just knows those words will have an effect on me. I'm not sure which terrifies me more.

Then he shifts again, close enough that I can feel the faint flush of heat beneath his fabricated skin. It's enough to fool myself, just for a moment, that any of this is real.

"What if I said I wasn't afraid?" he murmurs, and I can feel the shape of the words against my cheek.

The question settles in my chest like a slow, twisting knot. Because I'm so fucking afraid. Not of Pax, not of the fact that this whole mission is a suicide run with a 90% probability of catastrophic failure. I hardly even know why I'm shaking. I'm afraid of what life might look like without my shadow. 

Then –

"I won't let them kill you."

It's said so matter-of-factly that it takes me a second to register. I look at him again, searching for any hint of artifice in his expression. His face is still unreadable, but something about the way his fingers flex slightly, just once, like a program subroutine processing a conflict, makes my stomach twist.

Because I don't know if he means Pax or the rebels.