Cassandra led me through the steel door and down a narrow, brightly lit corridor that spiraled deeper into the mountain. The air grew colder, the hum of the cooling fans louder.
"Artemis isn't just software," Cassandra explained, her voice echoing off the concrete walls. She was walking quickly, her manic energy propelling her forward. "It requires a specialized hardware environment to process the sheer volume of biometric and consumer data we scrape from the global network. Standard silicon chips overheat and degrade too quickly."
We reached the end of the corridor. Another biometric scanner, another heavy vault door. Cassandra pressed her hand against the glass plate and leaned in for a retinal scan. The door hissed open.
I stepped inside and stopped dead in my tracks.
The room wasn't a standard server farm. It looked like a scene from a dystopian sci-fi movie.
