Later that night, Aiden awoke with a start. For a moment, he lay there in silence, not knowing why. There had been no sudden light or noise. The window above his bed was set to its customary opaque status so that no light from the outside filtered through.

Aiden sat up groggily. He didn’t remember setting the tint of the window to be so thick. Even at night, there was usually a glow from the service lights in Huang Mansion’s hallways coming through the open doorway, or from the city’s pre-dawn skyline penetrating his bedroom window.

Reaching up, he tapped the window surface to activate the programmed sliding scale of transparency (one being most opaque, ten being most transparent) but the glass stayed dark.

He tried a verbal command. “Window scale: setting six.” His voice was unnaturally loud in the quiet.

Nothing happened.

Aiden swung his legs over his bed, nosed his feet into a pair of house slippers, and shuffled out the open doorway into the corridor, rubbing his eyes. The house was pitch-black, the light strips on the ceiling and floor were dark.

Yawning, Aiden tried getting onto the Net via his cyberware, pulled up a browser window…and failed. An error code greeted him on the landing page: 500 Internal Server Malfunction. Reconfigure appliance and try again.

“Huh?” Aiden blinked, now thoroughly awake. “Auxy, what’s going on?”

To Aiden’s relief, Auxy’s voice promptly replied, “You’re unable to access the Net, sir.”

“I see that, but this error code doesn’t make sense. I’m using cyberware hooked up to the Ether, so there’s no server on my end involved.”

“Perhaps the entire Net is down by some event outside our knowledge.”

“We both know that’s not likely.” From his earliest recollections as a toddler, Aiden couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t connected to the Net. Now that he wasn’t, he felt strangely naked. Vulnerable, even.

“From the information I have, that is the most likely conclusion, sir.”

“Run a systems scan on me.” Aiden checked the time in his cyberware. It was two thirty-four in the morning.

My God, why am I up so early? Tancy’s birthday happened to land on the weekend this year, and on Saturdays, Aiden liked to hibernate until the beginning of the afternoon.

He moved along the hallway and tried changing the transparency settings on the blocked-out windows lining the opposite wall— but they too did not respond.

His confusion rose. Had Tancy or one of the house staff somehow activated their emergency reboot of the mansion system? But if so, it should’ve opened all the exits and entrances while the security system made itself receptive to reconfiguration.

Then suddenly, the door at the end of the corridor slid open jerkily, as if forced by a manual hand instead of by smooth automation. A shadowy figure stepped through. Aiden immediately tensed, but then the person whispered: “Hello, is anyone there? Arlo Javison, reporting.”

The name sounded familiar. Then Aiden remembered: it was the security man who’d gone missing. Inexplicably, he was now back, his brief and unsanctioned sabbatical cut short.

“It’s Aiden,” he said, relaxing. “What’s going on? McCourt and everyone else has been looking for you.”

Javison paused. “Young master?”

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Yes, it’s me. Look sharp, man. Where’s the rest of the security staff?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” said the man, sounding baffled. “I know I’ve been…out of the loop for a bit. But I came back! I’m fully ready to face punishment, and I’ll accept McCourt’s terms of termination if he brings them. It’s just that when I arrived, the gate was open and the driveway was empty. Nobody was manning the towers.”

“The gate was open?” Aiden felt unease gather within him. “What about the force-field?”

“Still operational, but as you know it only deflects high-speed projectiles. Anybody could walk right through.”

Aiden thought hard. Maybe there had been a different emergency off the mansion’s premises, which was why security could have been diverted. But then why hadn’t anyone notified him, and why couldn’t he access the Net?

Javison was still walking towards him, a dark silhouette.

“Stop,” said Aiden flatly. “Show yourself.”

Javison halted. “You want to see my face?”

The unease intensified. “Show me who you are right now.”

“Yes, sir.” Clothes rustled, and then a flashlight flickered on. The man’s visage flared into relief. He was younger than Aiden had expected, with a guileless round-faced coated with short blonde stubble. His eyes were red and watery.

“Show me your ID,” said Aiden. “Project it so I can scan it visually.”

“I have a physical card as well.”

“Show me that, too.”

Javison tucked the flashlight into a chest pocket point-up so that the circular glow was hitting the ceiling. He withdrew a card and pressed a finger to his temple. A hologram of the same thing bloomed from his eye in front of them, with additional information listed below.

Aiden leaned forward, and Auxy scanned both articles of identification. They checked out.

“Okay, I got them.”

The hologram disappeared. Javison tucked the card away. He was wearing regular clothes: a short jacket and long pants, with ziv-boots reaching up mid-calf.

No wonder this man went AWOL, Aiden thought. If he couldn’t even remember to take his shoes off before entering the house, how could he be trusted as reliable security?

But he was the best source of help at the moment.

“Let’s go find McCourt.” Aiden walked past Javison and made for the door at the end of the corridor leading to the main stairwell. “Are your communications working? I can’t get on the Net and my personal channels are down.”

“No, that’s why I’ve been on foot. I’ve already gone through that door, by the way. We should search the rest of the mansion, find young lady Huang…”

“I wanna see what’s going on outside, first.”

Javison scratched his neck nervously. “Young master, I need to secure both you and your sister. The situation is abnormal at best, even dangerous.”

“Come on, Javison. We’ll check later. Right now I want to know if the rest of the borough is like the house and this is a systemic issue. We can proceed from there.”

“Aiden, I must insist. The rest of the borough is the same as it was. If we could just —”

Aiden turned around, frustrated. It was the middle of the night and his head was pounding from lack of sleep. “Would you be quiet? You’re on thin ice, man. You’re gone for days and suddenly you waltz back in here and expect me to follow orders? My parents employ you, not the other way around, so do what I say and escort me outside.”

Aiden. Auxy’s voice resounded in Aiden’s head.

Javison inclined his head. “If that’s what you want, young master, we’ll go.”

“Good.” Aiden continued walking to the door.

Aiden, listen to me.

I hear you, Auxy — why are you going nonverbal?

Remove yourself from Javison immediately.

What are you talking about? I saw his face. His ID matches, too.

You overhauled my threat awareness with sociability training before the spring dance, remember? I read his micro-expressions and body language. He’s hiding something.

Aiden kept walking. Yeah, like where he’s been hanging out all this time in his dereliction of duty.

Aiden, that goon wants to hurt you.

Auxy’s voice was ice-cold, with an undercurrent of panic. It made Aiden freeze in his tracks.

Auxy’s speech patterns had suddenly shifted, becoming drastically more informal. This was a pre-update feature in most RAs for communication efficienty, and was built into Auxy’s personality matrix from its inception…built for the times when the system foresaw an obvious, impending, and dire threat.

Running footsteps came from behind him — Aiden whirled around and saw Javison lunging toward him with a syringe as thick as a nail. In the same moment, his face began to melt away like wax, transforming into another — a marred, monstrous face with black lips and moth-white eyes. Aiden tried to bring up his arm and activate his electric wrist gauntlet — but he would be too slow, much too slow — to block the needle’s wicked, descending point.

Suddenly, the windows along the corridor morphed to full transparency, and a rippling orange light from outside came streaming through the now-clear glass in a wave of color.

Then an explosion ripped through the wall, and Aiden’s vision went dark.