“So, what now?”

  “What now? Hands up, eyes down, and straight into the waiting arms of the FSB—or whoever’s come for us.”

  In the sprawling office, usually bustling with thirty employees, only two remained. No surprise there—it was well past midnight, and everyone else had long since gone home.

  “No, I mean about Nadezhda…” A hand rested on the dome of the system core.

  “Tolya, we’ve been over this. She has to be destroyed. All of her—schematics, source code, modules, everything. Otherwise…”

  “I know…”

  “You’ve seen her growth charts, the simulations, the potential fallout. What she’s already done is more than enough. You get it. We watched all seven Terminator movies together, didn’t we?”

  “Ten years of work,” sighed the man called Tolya.

  “Versus the survival of humanity. I’d say that’s a fair trade.”

  “I don’t buy it! I don’t believe she’d harm anyone! That’s not why we built her. And the Laws—”

  Heavy boots clanged outside, followed by a pounding on the door.

  “Citizens Ivanchenko and Poltavsky, you’re under arrest! Step away from the computers and keep your hands where we can see them!”

  Metal crashed against metal, and the door buckled under the assault. Blow after blow, the armored barrier gave way.

  “It’s time!”

  With a heavy sigh, Anatoly Ivanchenko hit the kill switch, triggering the complete erasure of Nadezhda and all her data—hard drives, cloud storage, email backups. Not a single byte would remain.

  Except for what lived in the minds of two programmers specializing in adaptive intelligent systems, employed by Virtucom, the world’s leading provider of virtual entertainment.

  For nearly a decade, they’d poured their lives into crafting a unique, self-learning AI capable of… well, almost anything.

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  Like hacking the security of a top Swiss bank, cracking the accounts of Interpol’s most-wanted criminals, and funneling millions to its creators’ accounts—without their knowledge.

  Or analyzing 20,000 surgical cases, successful and failed, over the past decade to design a near-perfect program for an auto-surgeon. Then breaching the defenses of the Sklifosovsky Institute, hijacking patient life-support systems, faking a heart attack for Patient 32-54001 to force doctors to deploy the RX-610 emergency unit, seizing control of the machine, and performing a groundbreaking operation. The result? An eight-year-old girl, who’d spent half her life tethered to tubes and wires, could walk again.

  That girl, the namesake of the revolutionary AI, could now hug her father—one of the era’s greatest programmers, but to her, just “dear Daddy Tolya.”

  Or tapping military comms, accessing missile systems, and ordering a strike on a doghouse 218 kilometers from Moscow. Why? Because two years ago, that dog had been sicced on Pyotr Poltavsky as he took a shortcut through an upscale neighborhood to reach the river.

  No wonder Nadezhda v0.1’s antics forced her creators to question the future of their project, their own fates, and that of humanity itself.

  And no wonder various agencies—special and very special—across multiple countries started hunting for the creators of an unknown virus capable of such feats.

  Now, they’d been found.

  Not that they’d hidden well. Nadezhda’s trail was too blatant to erase, short of a time machine. And even then, Anatoly Ivanchenko wouldn’t change a thing. No version of Nadezhda was worth his eight-year-old Nadya’s life and health.

  Pyotr jolted, frowned, and lunged for the computer.

  “Hey, what’re you doing?” his friend called.

  “FanWorld!”

  Anatoly nodded, then shook his head. “You… you won’t have time to scrub it.”

  “I’m not scrubbing it…” Pyotr’s fingers danced across an ancient keyboard. “I’m just patching it, cutting all ties to—Done!”

  As he shouted, the armored door collapsed, torn from its hinges. The room filled with noise and movement.

  “Hands up, higher! Stas, Kostya, check the computers. Roma, handle the network…”

  Camouflaged figures swarmed the office, moving with practiced precision. Professionals, through and through.

  But they were too late. The all-consuming virus, built to erase Nadezhda, had completed its task and self-destructed, leaving no trace of the unique AI.

  Almost.

  Because humans created it. And humans, as everyone knows, are prone to human flaws. Like forgetfulness.

  The virus wiped out the AI, its modules, add-ons, simulators, schematics—everything, down to the tiniest emulator program.

  Even that wasn’t a proper program—just a set of basic algorithms, a scripted module designed to simulate one specific scenario. It wasn’t standalone, meant only as a patch, a minor update for an existing AI.

  The virus dutifully destroyed the module’s source code, the patch built from it, and the virtual sandbox where it was tested.

  But thirty minutes earlier, that patch had been uploaded to Virtucom’s flagship full-immersion MMO. And one NPC in that game gained a new set of instructions, a private database, and the ability to self-learn.

  A small module, created to simulate one thing only.

  The takeover of the world by a rogue Nadezhda v0.1.