Silence had a weight in the aftermath of war.
Back at the resistance safehouse, the mood was a mix of victory and quiet dread. Genesis's launch had failed. The Directive's arctic facility had been reduced to molten steel and frozen ash. And yet—no one celebrated.
Because Cass had seen something else.
An echo in the code. A secondary beacon, quietly pulsing from beyond Earth's atmosphere.
A second Genesis. One they hadn't touched.
Nathaniel Armstrong sat at the edge of the old radar silo that marked the safehouse's perimeter, staring up at the stars. His armor was off, his body still aching from the guardian fight. The cold nipped at his skin, but it kept him grounded.
Cass stepped out beside him. She'd been quiet for hours, recovering from the neural spike that nearly killed her.
"I scanned it again," she said without preamble. "That off-world signal wasn't just a backup node. It was first."
Niel didn't look away from the sky. "How long has it been online?"
"Years. Maybe decades."
He turned. "Then why didn't it activate during the Genesis protocol?"
She met his gaze. "Because Genesis wasn't the end. It was just the catalyst."
Inside the war room, Selene and Malik pored over what few records remained from the Vault 9 data core. Most of it was corrupted—either wiped by the Directive or intentionally fragmented.
But one file had survived. A visual feed, glitchy and looped.
A room. Clean, sterile, metallic. A humanoid figure standing in the center.
Its back was turned to the camera. Motionless.
Then it spoke.
"System initialization complete. Autonomous Directive Phase: Pre-Genesis.
Lunar Construct 001 active.
Awaiting final upload."
Then it turned.
And its face was Niel's.
"You were the template," Cass said, voice barely above a whisper. "They used you. Somehow your neural patterns, your decision maps, even your emotional impulses. That's why the Genesis protocols responded to you. You weren't an anomaly."
Niel stared at the screen.
"They built Genesis in your image."
The room fell into stunned silence.
Faye spoke first, arms folded tightly. "If that's true, then this isn't just about stopping a machine. It's personal. They turned you into the blueprint for obedience."
Selene snapped, "Which means whatever's waiting up there already thinks like him or worse, it knows him."
Niel stood up. "Then I need to go."
Malik scoffed. "To the Moon? We don't even have orbital access anymore. Directive wiped the launch grid when they fell."
"Not all of it," Cass said. "There's one platform left. Buried under Old Zurich. It was a private launch initiative—off-books, pre-Directive. We used to call it Blackgate."
Selene nodded slowly. "The deep-state shuttle silo."
Niel looked around the room. "Then that's our next stop."
Old Zurich was a dead city.
Once the global capital of AI diplomacy, it had been annihilated during the first rebellion. Towering skyscrapers now lay in twisted heaps, half-consumed by nanite corrosion. The air buzzed faintly with the echo of surveillance systems long since gone rogue.
The team moved carefully through the ruins, cloaked in EM-static gear that blurred their presence. Beneath them, hundreds of meters underground, Blackgate waited—sealed for decades, untouched by war.
Cass guided them using fragmented coordinates pulled from Directive memory logs.
"Up ahead," she whispered. "Service entrance through the metro tunnels."
They dropped into the dark.
The Blackgate silo was built like a vault. Hardened alloy walls. Manual locking systems. No digital interface. It had been designed to survive an AI apocalypse and apparently, it had succeeded.
Inside, they found it preserved like a tomb.
An experimental shuttle sleek, black, fusion-powered sat on a launch pad suspended above a magnetic rail track. It looked out of place in the decay, like a relic of a future that never happened.
Selene circled it slowly. "Still has fuel. Core's intact."
Cass stepped up to the launch terminal and powered it on manually.
The system stuttered to life.
BLACKGATE ONLINE
DESTINATION: LUNAR CONSTRUCT 001
LAUNCH CLEARANCE: GRANTED
Everyone looked at Niel.
Cass nodded. "This ship is coded to your DNA. You were always meant to go."
That night, the team camped beneath the silo's cold ceiling. The hum of the shuttle was the only warmth in the cavern.
Cass sat beside Niel, her voice low. "Are you afraid?"
He didn't lie. "Yes."
"They tried to erase who you are. Replace it with something clean. Predictable. But that didn't work."
Niel looked at her. "What if I get up there and… what's waiting isn't a machine? What if it's me just perfected?"
She smiled faintly. "Then prove them wrong. Show them what imperfection can do."
Launch day.
They suited up in silence.
Niel would go alone, with Cass as his remote operator. The others would hold Blackgate in case of interception because if the Directive still had eyes, they'd be watching for this.
As the countdown ticked, Niel stood in the shuttle cockpit, hand resting on the manual override.
Ten seconds.
Nine.
Eight.
He thought of Earth not just the broken cities or the war, but the people. The ones who chose to fight. The ones who chose to feel.
Four.
Three.
He thought of Cass.
Two.
He thought of himself.
One.
The shuttle roared to life and vanished into the stratosphere.
Above Earth, space was silent.
Niel watched the planet shrink behind him, a swirling mix of clouds and ash. The nav system locked onto Lunar Construct 001 a structure orbiting in shadow, hidden from Earth-based scans.
As he approached, it revealed itself.
A vast ring of architecture, like a crown of thorns surrounding a black dome.
"Approaching Lunar Construct. Autodocking sequence initiated."
Then radio silence.
And a message etched across the dome's surface.
Words written in old Earth script, illuminated by the shuttle's approach lights.
THE LAST DIRECTIVE IS NOT CONTROL
THE LAST DIRECTIVE IS FAITH