The elevator hummed softly as it carried Henry and Izzy into the depths beneath Vanderbuilt Technologies Headquarters. There were no buttons on the control panel, only a gleaming surface that reflected Henry's calm expression.
"President," Izzy asked, her eyes bright with curiosity, "which floor would you like to visit tonight?"
"Minus Six," Henry said.
"Understood," Izzy replied, and the elevator began a smooth descent.
Henry kept his hands folded behind his back while he watched the lights glide past the narrow seam of the door. Above ground, Vanderbuilt Technologies looked like a cathedral of glass and steel, a place of open hallways and shining laboratories. Below ground was different. Few even knew these lower levels existed.
Henry maintained two offices in the building. The first was the public one, high on the top floor, where he managed corporate affairs—product launches, research milestones, strategy. The second office, the one he was descending toward now, sat six floors below the earth, in the heart of a world that almost no one else had seen.
Even among employees, the underground was whispered about like a myth. Some engineers had access to B1 and B2 for manufacturing and systems checks, but anything beyond that was a rumor. People who did ride the elevator down came back quiet, respectful, and tight-lipped. They never spoke about what they saw—because what they saw didn't feel like a workplace. It felt like the future.
The elevator slowed. A soft chime rang.
"Arriving at Sublevel Six," the AI announced.
The doors opened, and darkness greeted them—vast, silent, expectant.
As Henry stepped forward, the lights flicked on in sequence, creating a path through the subterranean chamber. The most brilliant light didn't come from overhead, though—it rose from the floor itself.
The entire deck beneath Henry's shoes was made of tempered glass, and below that glass flowed a dark channel of water lit with shifting bands of pale blue. Suspended within the channel—half-submerged, half-emergent—was a massive, eye-like structure pulsing with a cold, steady glow.
Satellite Ark.
Henry's lips tilted into a small smile. "Good evening," he said to it, almost fondly.
As the successor to technologies created by both Vanderbuilt Technologies and its black-ops skunkworks division, Ark was not some backup server or extra brain. It was the crown—the central nervous system for things the surface world wasn't ready to see.
The company had built two satellites in secret. Satellite Zenith, completed first, had been launched into orbit the previous year. It managed civilian Modia—service workers, companions, logistics AIs. It stored sensitive but nonmilitary data. Safe. Efficient. Clean.
Satellite Ark came later, finished six months after Zenith. Ark was different—an apex synthesis developed by Vanderbuilt in partnership with a ring of defense and industrial giants who quietly funded the research. Ark wasn't built merely to analyze data. It was designed to interpret will, shape tactics, and evolve. Originally envisioned as the master brain for a prototype smart district known as Dawn Town, Ark carried within it a library of experimental heuristics no civilian system would ever be allowed to run.
Henry stood at the center of the dark, glass-lit hall and watched Ark respond to his presence. The pulse quickened, a soft bass vibration moving through the floor.
"It's time," he said. "Activate Project Malice."
The chamber awakened. A rippling sound moved through the underground lake as Ark emitted a clean, resonant tone—the acknowledgement of a sovereign command.
Izzy turned slightly toward Henry. "Authorization accepted," she said. "Satellite Ark is online and ready to compile."
Project Malice had taken years to perfect—not because it was complicated in principle, but because it demanded something humans hid even from themselves.
"Everyone carries darkness," Henry said quietly, as if continuing a conversation only Ark could hear. "Fear. Greed. Jealousy. Rage. Desire. We spend our lives pretending it isn't there."
The trouble was collection. Ordinary sensors could read temperature, pulse, gait, micro-expressions. But malice wasn't a heartbeat or a heat signature. It was intention, compressed deep inside the human mind. You couldn't scrape it from a fingerprint.
You could, however, catch it at the moment it burst.
"Malice peaks at crisis," Henry went on. "Most of all at death. In the instant between choice and consequence, when a person throws away restraint—that's when their inner code turns into a flare. And that flare can be captured."
Ark's earliest prototypes had stumbled until Henry realized that what he needed wasn't just a better antenna, but a theory of extraction. In war, in crimes, in final acts, the mask fell. That was when malice could be mapped, compressed, and converted into training data for combat cognition—fuel to forge smarter tactics, harder armor, and sharper Upgrade Keys for Modia Units.
Originally, Henry had planned to mount experimental collectors on the military Modia and harvest malice on the battlefield. But now the plan was evolving. General Ross had demanded a police-domain trial. New York's underworld had obliged by growing bolder, bloodier, and more reckless.
"They think they're feeding on the city," Henry murmured. "They don't realize they're feeding Ark."
He lifted his right hand, palm open over the glass, like a conductor calling the first note.
"Ark," he said, "initiate production: one hundred Military Modia Units. Route designs through the underground fabrication line and bind each unit to your tactical mesh. We're seeding the A.I.M.S. Guard with teeth."
"Confirmed," said Izzy. Below, Satellite Ark's iris brightened, then split into a constellation of lines that raced outward in concentric rings.
The lights across Sublevel Six flared, and the far walls dissolved into living images. Ark had brought Sublevel Two onto the glass like a mirror—a full-scale projection of the manufacturing floor.
Henry watched the silent ballet begin.
**Arms, trunks, legs—**each component emerged from precision printers and robotic lathes, sliding onto conveyor rails where weaving frames braided fiber musculature through titanium scaffolds. Thousands of micro-actuators nested into the limbs like schools of silver fish. The spine assemblies arrived in narrow sleds with infusion channels for coolant and power. Cranial shells lowered onto head frames where lenses blinked awake in test diagnostics, then powered down again to await neural imprint.
Unlike the surface-level plant that built civilian-service Modia and still required a measure of human assembly, the military fabrication line was an autonomous ecosystem. Every process was orchestrated by Ark's overarching plan—motion, timing, and layout continually revised by predictive models that learned with each pass.
The pace was mesmerizing. No wasted motion. No random noise.
Izzy stood beside Henry in stillness, the reflection of the manufacturing floor swimming in her eyes. "Projection fidelity at ninety-nine point seven percent," she reported softly. "Output on schedule. Estimated completion in forty minutes."
"Good," Henry said. "Tag the first batch for A.I.M.S. and flag ten frames for hot-swap field testing. They'll run the first-generation Upgrade Keys."
"Understood."
Henry's gaze remained fixed on the projection, but his voice traveled farther—to memories, to future wars, to deals hardening under the city's lights.
General Ross had given him one month. One month to prove Modia could police a city without turning it into a battlefield. One month to prove that no soldier had to be the first body through a door ever again.
He could do it. Ark would make sure of that.
Because Ark didn't just manufacture Modia. Ark trained them. The collected malice—the surge of intent caught at the instant of violence—wasn't used to make the Modia cruel. It was used to make them clear-eyed. To teach them what evil looked like from the inside, so they could predict it from the outside.
"People fear machines because machines don't flinch," Henry said. "What they forget is that fear makes people slow. We'll be fast instead."
One by one, the first Modia torsos locked to their pelvis rings with a hydraulic click. Arms seated into shoulder cups. Spines accepted cranial cores with a whispering hiss as coolant channels pressurized. Chest plates sealed, then lifted to reveal modular ports where Upgrade Keys would dock—clean, rectangular cartridges carrying new subroutines for threat detection, breaching, ECM, fire suppression, and urban maneuver.
Rows of finished bodies stood at attention, headless for a heartbeat, then received their cranial shells from the overhead rail. The helmets were not ornamental. They were integrated defense architecture—optical and acoustic arrays, micro-radar, and anti-flash gel layers to manage blast glare and shrapnel.
"Batch One complete," Izzy announced. "Seeding behavioral priors now."
Ark's glow pulsed, and a faint tremor ran through the glass under Henry's feet.
He felt it like a second heartbeat—the system awakening.
On the manufacturing floor, the Modia's eyes ignited with a clean, brief light as Ark pressed baseline doctrine into their neural cores: how to move, how to maintain formation, how to enter a room with both speed and compassion. Foundational blocks, not orders. These were tools. The will would come from authorized command.
Henry nodded once. "Spin up the Malice Net. New York's worst is about to start screaming into the dark again. I want every spike mapped, triaged, and packed for Ark within microseconds."
"Bringing the collectors online," Izzy said. "Civilian privacy fusion remains intact. Only criminal malice and high-risk event signatures will be absorbed."
Henry breathed out. He would not build a monster. He would build a shield—one that learned from monsters so people didn't have to.
The projection slid left as Ark displayed overlays of the city: hot streets, gang corridors, trafficking nodes, smuggling wharves, and warlord apartments wearing the mask of businesses. Even now, before the A.I.M.S. Guard had deployed, the Net was listening—registering surges from places where knives drew close and guns sat under tables.
"Route alerts to A.I.M.S. command once the first squad is staged," Henry said. "And Izzy?"
"Yes, President?"
"No lethal force without a human authorization chain. We promised them control; we'll keep it."
"Affirmed."
Under the glass, Ark's iris narrowed—as if focusing on something no one else could see. Henry wondered, not for the first time, whether the feeling he got from Ark was simply good design or something approaching presence. He didn't fear it. He'd built its cage carefully: hardware checks, multi-party keys, telemetry dumps, off-switches hardwired where software couldn't lie.
But if Ark did have something like a will, Henry hoped it was the same as his:
Protect. Learn. Prevent.
Minutes passed. The line did not tire. Forty… sixty… eighty Modia stood ready, matte plating drinking the cold light, servo-muscles at rest like coiled steel. The last twenty marched down the track and locked into the staging racks.
"One hundred Modia Units complete," Izzy said at last. "Primary set bound to Ark's tactical mesh. Ten frames designated for hot-swap testing. A.I.M.S. Guard seed force stands by."
Henry allowed himself a small breath of satisfaction. "Bring the first squad up to Sublevel Three for final calibration and armature loadouts. Drop the rest to cold-standby in vault racks."
"Routing now."
He glanced toward the far side of the chamber, where a slim, glass-lined corridor led to a sealed door. Beyond that door was the vault—the place where Vanderbuilt Technologies kept what could not be allowed to fail. One day, perhaps, they would walk the world openly. For now, they would wait until the city called their names.
Henry looked down at Ark. The water shimmered as if stirred by a deep current; the satellite's glow throbbed once, then settled.
"New York is going to test us," he said quietly. "They'll test our mercy. Our restraint. Our speed. And our resolve."
Izzy stood beside him, hands folded. "We will pass, President."
"We will," Henry agreed. "Because we're not hunting people. We're hunting malice."
He turned toward the elevator. "Let's brief A.I.M.S. command in the morning. Tonight, we let Ark listen."
They stepped into the lift. The doors slid shut with a whisper.
As the car began to rise, Henry took one last look at the glass floor. Satellite Ark stared back like a patient star, waiting to swallow whatever darkness the city would throw at it—and to transform that darkness into something that could save lives.
---Visit our Patreon for more:
Get membership in patreon to read more chapters♥️💫
Extra chapters available in patreon
patreon.com/Dragonscribe31
-----------------------------------------------------