Ava Savanus lounged in the living room of Magnus Venture’s laboratory. She’d changed into a white ballistic catsuit, one made to emulate the Grecian statues of old. She sat on the same couch where her contemporary sat just three weeks ago. There was an imprint in the fabric from where he usually sat.

Ava sat on the other side of the couch. She didn’t have the heart to take Magnus’s seat.

The symbolism of either seat choice wasn’t lost on her.

Ava had spent a considerable amount of time down here in Magnus’s old living quarters. At first, the scenery had been stifling—even after figuring out how to adjust the view on the large wall screens. When she first engaged it, the screens defaulted to a scenic view of Belport’s skyline. There were other options stored, each more curious than the last.

Most were views of ocean seascapes and mountain ranges, each of which Ava could match using her neural network and database connections. None held geographic or cultural significance, though Ava programmed a squadron of drones to search each location.

Then there was the city of New Venice—it likely held an important memory for Venture, though she could only guess at its significance. He had never shared details of his personal life with Ava, and she doubted he would be forthcoming now.

Then there was a patch of night sky taken from a forest outside of Belport. It was completely unremarkable… unless one had access to a starmap and the Summit’s records of alien contact. One of the tiny stars in the center was known publicly as Niccolo F-1.

It was known to the Summit and other privy organizations as Terradun. A planet ruled by an entire race of Class 5 lifeforms—the Dunamen.

Of course, that was a rough translation from their language to that of Earths, but the Dunamen envoys accepted the name.

One of those envoys was the super codenamed Paragon, and the other would take the name Narine. She would later birth a child with Magnus Venture.

Ava still couldn’t understand it. What could a being such as Narine see in a mortal like Venture? Humans were so short-lived compared to the Dunamen. So weak, so shallow. Terradun was ruled by a single democratic government, one that put the welfare of the people above petty and selfish concerns.

Maybe that was what they’d bonded over… Venture did want to change the world, misguided as he was.

That second night after the takeover, Ava had scoured the living quarters and the personal rooms of the lab.

Everything was destroyed. Nanomachines had dissolved everything inside the personal rooms. There weren’t any personal files left either; the AI must’ve wiped everything days or maybe even weeks before.

Venture had been prepared.

And he had lost.

Ava turned her attention back to the living room screens. There were other options in the wall display, mostly layouts and configurations for displaying simulations and experiment data. The data itself was all either corrupted or deleted, but the layouts remained, like ghosts in the circuitry.

Finally, Ava gained access to the drone feeds. Once she established a neural link, it was easy to cycle through drone feeds. The lab’s search algorithms could monitor the bulk of the drone fleet, but Ava wasn’t as trusting as Magnus. She preferred to maintain her own control wherever possible.

Ava also discovered that drone feeds were often overlaid onto the wall screen—up to fifty at a time. Despite her own innate abilities and processor implants, Ava relied on her biomechs to be semi-autonomous. Given an order and an adequate set of parameters, they could function on their own.

She knew Venture had a knack for parsing data, but this felt like more than a simple knack.

Despite that, Ava couldn’t help but wonder why Magnus felt the need to monitor them at all. The AI had been considerably advanced, and Magnus had put tremendous faith in its operation, judgment, and morality. If it was so competent, why did he feel the need to look over its shoulder?

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Was it a need for control? If so, maybe her and Venture weren’t so different after all… Midas certainly had a thing for control.

Since the takeover, Midas had insisted that either he or Ava be present in the lab. Because Ava could control her army from anywhere, that duty had mostly fallen on her shoulders. She’d made peace with the arrangement. It meant fewer press conferences. It meant she could stay out of the spotlight.

And it allowed her to learn the lab’s systems more intimately.

Ava used her neural link and pulled up an interior view of section 95. The small, auxiliary biolab appeared on the wall screen. In the center was the holding tank where Dr. Magnus Venture floated in medically induced suspended animation. His face and bare chest were visible through the viewing window. His vitals appeared alongside Ava’s view—all nominal.

She trusted that Magnus was fine, but she still wanted to see him.

“Are you dreaming in there, Magnus?” Ava wondered aloud.

“Subjects do not typically dream in suspended—”

“That was a rhetorical question.”

Ava knew how suspended animation worked. It slowed down all biological processes to a crawl, including brain function. Most subjects described the sensation as an instantaneous, dreamless sleep, akin to general anesthesia.

The outcome may be similar, but the two things worked by very different mechanisms.

General anesthesia worked by more or less interrupting the flow of information from the body to the brain, and interrupting consciousness itself. It was akin to turning off a computer and turning it back on.

Suspended animation slowed down the body’s processes. Most subjects simply didn’t have time to dream. If Venture could blink, he might see flashes of movement when someone walked by his holding tank.

It was a minor difference, but for artificers, details were everything. For example, powerful speedsters could not be put in suspended animation, whereas general anesthesia could knock them out.

Magnus Venture knack allowed his brain to process data much faster and much more efficiently than others. Even though he was cut off from the outside world and unable to move his body, maybe his mind was still free, like a disembodied brain in a jar.

Ava ran her fingers over the couch between her seat and Venture’s old seat. “Not so different.”

Suddenly, the room flashed red with emergency lights and the computer’s voice blared through the living room speakers.

“Attention: Foreign presence detected in lab systems.”

Ava startled and stood. “Show me everything you have.”

The view of section 95 was replaced with a map of the lab’s systems—not the physical layout of its circuitry, but the organization of systems, subsystems, and files. The presence had found a backdoor through one of the small drones, then used it to worm its way through the rest of the lab.

“Goddamnit… Where is it?” Ava asked impatiently.

The presence had already passed through most of the lab’s surface level systems. Nothing had been tampered with, but if it was looking to find out information, then its mission had already been successful. They would know the lab’s current capacities and which systems were marked for upgrades.

“Foreign presence cannot be located.”

“Find it!”

“Foreign presence has retreated. The foreign presence is no longer detected in lab systems.”

“Oh, no you don’t…” Ava scanned the pathways again. There had to be something there.

Moments later, she found it.

The path the presence took through the system was too precise, too careful. It wasn’t something that could’ve been done by an algorithm. It required connection and direction.

“Trace the connection. Find the source. Show me the trace in real-time.”

A map of the East coast appeared on screen, which rapidly zoomed in on the city of Belport. The presence had been careful enough to spoof their location, but that wouldn’t save them. White circles appeared around several districts, each with a label for accuracy. The highest rating was centered on Eastside.

Before the war, the abandoned sections of Eastside had been sparring grounds for low-level supers—those without potential or direction. There were fewer supers there now, thanks to the Summit’s conscription, but the homeless population had quadrupled.

Ava could see them through the UV and infrared eyes of the drones and her biomechs. They huddled beside trashcan fires and peered out enviously at the other sectors of Belport.

“Significant deviance in signal trace. High likelihood that the source is mobile.”

While the computer was tracing the signal, Ava had been running her own search. There were only a handful of artificers in the world that could’ve hacked into the lab’s systems. Einon Silver or Alastair, possibly even Daedalus. Whatever the old man had used to push his way into her flagship might have been able to do the trick…

No. It had to be the cyborg. No one else would be both that brazen and that successful.

With newfound focus, Ava tapped into the biomechs and drones in and around the Eastside of Belport. There were three patrol groups within effective range. Twelve groups more within a five-minute intercept window. She rerouted seven more small drones to keep an eye on the perimeter.

Then Ava commanded her biomech patrol groups to round up everyone on the block.

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