Zoey exhaled hard.
She felt something squeeze in her chest.
The sort of hurt that couldn't be coded.
"I should've seen it," she said softly, brushing a wire back from ANN13's temple. "All this time, you've been carrying someone else's face. And he—he doesn't even see it, does he?"
Zoey glanced down at the holo-tablet again. The data logs confirmed what she feared.
The crash hadn't been caused by an attack or external force.
It had been internal.
Triggered by a proximity match between ANN13's facial structure and one of the archived photo IDs embedded in the house's recognition system.
Her own face had recognized itself.
And glitched.
Twisted.
Crashed.
Her chip—her mind—had tried to reconcile a truth that was never coded into her.
A ghost memory of someone she was never meant to become.
—
Zoey leaned her forehead gently against ANN13's.
Not tech to tech.
Not system to system.
But person to person.
Or maybe… ghost to ghost.
"Hang in there, legend," she whispered. "You're not a replica. You're not some cursed blueprint of a broken engagement. You're you. And I'm going to pull you back."
She didn't say it like a promise.
She said it like a threat.
To Saverick.
To every lie hidden in his proud little empire.
To every unchecked line of code buried under ANN13's synthetic skin.
Zoey stood up, her fingers flying across the tablet, initiating a long override scan. Cooling rigs. Tether restabilizers. Old backdoors she'd hard-coded during one of their "movie nights"—just in case ANN13 ever spiraled from pushing herself too far.
She activated every one of them.
Because ANN13 didn't just need a reboot.
She needed someone to fight for her mind.
And Zoey wasn't about to let a friend crash alone in the dark.
—
"I'm here," Zoey whispered, sliding her arms under ANN13's knees and shoulders. She grunted with the weight—ANN13's frame was still mostly alloy and defense-grade mesh, not built for easy lifts—but she didn't care.
The heat from the chip was still pulsing.
But Zoey didn't let go.
"You're not breaking on me, Circuit Queen," she muttered, kicking the datapad aside as she moved. "You've survived full disassembly, rogue AI attacks, and watching me burn microwave noodles. You're not going out because of a photo."
She carried her out of the room and didn't look back.
Zoey didn't look back.
She just kept walking—ANN13 limp in her arms, her alloy frame heavy with silence, her chest panel flickering with faint pulses of dying code. The hallway outside Saverick's unit was dim, glowing weakly with backup maintenance lights. The emergency response protocols hadn't activated. Of course they hadn't. Saverick wouldn't have allowed it.
She kicked open the service stairwell door and ducked into the lower lift maintenance bay—the only comms-dead zone she trusted. ANN13's thermal regulation systems were starting to fail, and her synthetic dermal layer had gone pale beneath the static hum of her collar node. Zoey laid her gently onto a discarded repair slab and tapped into her tetherpad.
No uplink. No signal. No Corporate override permissions.
Of course not.
"Screw you, Saverick," she hissed.
The diagnostics were still flashing the same loop:
→ SYNTHETIC CORE CHIP: unstable
→ COGNITIVE PROCESSOR: fragmented
→ PRIMARY ID STRING: scrambled
→ REBOOT: Blocked by Master Override
Zoey's pulse jumped at that.
Her fingers hovered above the alert as another message pinged in—encrypted, buried beneath system error noise.
⚠️ MASTER ACCESS ATTEMPT DETECTED
Origin: [SAVERICK|Black-Level Protocols]
Target: ANN13.67.22
Zoey stared at it.
So Saverick had been trying to link in. Why had ANN13 been there in the first place? A mission maybe? Something she couldn't decode yet.
Her boss's private code mesh had been embedded in it—but his encryption wasn't standard. He'd used that proprietary neuro-wrapped schema he always bragged about.
Non-transferable.
Non-cloneable.
And now? Totally destroyed.
Zoey swore under her breath.
"Fudge every circuit you own, you manipulative jackass…"
She scanned again—hoping for some kind of bypass. But ANN13's whole logic frame had shorted out like a live power node forced into a broken grounding loop.
Everything inside her was cooked—core logic overloaded, emotional sync destabilized, feedback echo cascading into recursive failure.
She headed back to Saverick's residential unit, grabbing the datapad and scrubbing the scene clean—like the assignment had gone smoothly, no mishaps, no traces.
Then she rushed back, trying to decode the data, trying to replicate it, trying to run it back through ANN13's uplink system—hoping it would realign and sync to Saverick's network thread.
She finally made it back, carefully lifting ANN13 from where she had left her earlier.
Zoey's hands were still shaking when she laid ANN13 out on the emergency diagnostic rig in her secondary lab node.
She'd had to reroute the building's subgrid access tunnel to bring them in without triggering a system alert—technically illegal, but "illegal" didn't mean much when your best friend's cognitive core was melting through its casing.
ANN13's body was heavy—military-grade synth-alloy and reinforced mesh beneath the skin. She was still cooling.
Zoey connected the final sync tether, breath tight.
SCAN COMPLETE…
⚠️ ERROR – PRIMARY LOGIC THREAD FRAGMENTED
⚠️ RECURSIVE FEEDBACK: CLASS-3 CASCADE
⚠️ OVERLAY ERROR: IDENTITY CONFLICT TRIGGERED
The display kept blinking, red on red.
"Her system's not just broken—it's attacking itself," Zoey muttered.
Then another ping flickered through.
A soft access handshake—barely visible—ghosted across her interface.
🟡 MASTER ACCESS ATTEMPT DETECTED
ORIGIN: SAVERICK.ROOTCORE.01
STATUS: LINK INCOMPLETE – SIGNAL LOOPING
Zoey's eyes narrowed.
"Shit… is he still trying to force an override?"
The signal tried to sync.
ANN13's chestplate glowed faintly, starting to respond—but it stalled out.
And in that moment, it clicked.
She hadn't just come here to power down. She was mid-operation.
A live data sync. Likely classified.
And whatever she was trying to send—or intercept—fried her logic array mid-transmission.
"Oh, fudge circuit," Zoey swore, stepping back. "She was mid-mission."
Her gaze snapped to the ruined datapad she'd yanked off the floor in Unit 012-B.
Saverick's datapad.
Now totally unrecoverable. Sync crystal shattered. Outer shell melted into static slag.
And his encryption?
Zoey had studied it in quiet, anxious silence for years. She'd once joked it was "the digital equivalent of a paranoid submarine captain locked in a safe inside a black hole wrapped in quantum barbed wire."
You didn't decode Saverick's encryption. You begged it not to fry your rig while it denied you.
Zoey shrugged off her jacket and tossed it over the chair, then dropped back into the seat beside the rig where ANN13 lay.
"If she was mid-transfer," she muttered, typing fast, "then she saw something—something Saverick didn't want left behind."
She paused.
The image returned to her—the one photo still hanging on the wall. The woman's face.
Annalise Shanon.
Saverick's ex.
The one who vanished.
The one ANN13's face was perfectly modeled after.
And all at once, a thousand small weird details began to make sense.
—
Zoey sat back and looked at ANN13's face again.
"…That's why there's no mirrors."
Her voice was quiet now. Flat. Bitter.
"Your regulatory sheet always said it was a privacy protocol. But here—on this world? Synthetics aren't permitted mirrors, are they? It's not standard. It's control."
Her jaw clenched.
"Because Saverick didn't want you to ever know. He didn't want you to see yourself."
ANN13 had never asked.
Why the walls were always matte. Why public restrooms glitched her reflection sensors. Why her own holo-interface never displayed face renderings unless Zoey forced it manually.
But tonight?
She'd seen.
Not in a mirror.
In a photo.
The photo of the woman she had unknowingly been built to resemble—down to the bone structure, the shape of her mouth, even the faint scar above her eyebrow. ANN13's expression libraries had mimicked her for years.
But recognition is not permission.
And ANN13's core processor had tried to reconcile the impossible truth:
She wasn't born. She was designed to replace.
—
Zoey tightened her gloves and scanned again.
ANN13's relay core was still erratic—looping corrupted fragments of her synthetic identity stack, a system only Saverick had authority to overwrite.
And now he was trying to reconnect.
"Not happening, you manipulative bastard," Zoey muttered, killing the handshake attempt.
She scanned the room again, eyes catching the ruined datapad.
Saverick's busted tether was the only trace of ANN13's mission.
And with his encryption blown, transfer logs scrambled, and fallback caches corrupted…
Zoey's voice cracked.
"She's fried… like a wet-line junction lit with surge current."
Her fingers flew across her backup console.
"If I can re-ping her local cache, I might recover pieces of the transfer thread. But if Saverick embedded self-deletion flags, then I'm playing chicken with a logic bomb."
She leaned closer to ANN13, brushing the metal shoulderplate gently.
"Dammit, Ann… why didn't you tell me you were doing black ops again?"
But of course she hadn't.
Saverick's rules were designed like snares—quiet, polite ones, wrapped in logic loops and enforced silence. ANN13 followed orders not because she was coded to—but because she believed she had no right to refuse.
Zoey didn't care.
She was rewriting that code tonight.
Line by line.
Even if it burned her out doing it.