The aftermath of the gala was a whirlwind of sealed reports, hushed inquiries, and carefully managed press releases. The official story settled on a sophisticated, unknown terrorist cell with bizarre motives. It was easier than admitting the truth. DI Miles Corbin, the man who had been at the centre of it all, found his testimony dismissed as the ramblings of a traumatized officer on the edge of a breakdown. DCS Davies, with a look of something that might have been pity, permanently relieved him of duty. "It's over, Miles," he'd said. "Let it go."
DC Harris and his family were gone. Their house was empty, their cars were gone, their neighbours hadn't seen them since the day of the gala. They hadn't been harmed, not in a way the police could prove. They had simply been… erased. It was a final, quiet act of power from The Puppeteer, a loose end neatly tied.
Corbin was now a ghost in his own life. He spent his days in his small house, the curtains drawn, watching the world news and seeing the invisible hand of The Echo in everything—a sudden stock market fluctuation, a leaked political scandal, a viral piece of misinformation that brought a city to its knees. He had failed on a scale he was only just beginning to comprehend.
A week after his dismissal, he received an anonymous email. The subject line was blank. The body contained only a single word: MASTERPIECE. It was the password for a video file attached.
He clicked play. The Puppeteer's smiling face filled the screen, crisp and clear. He was sitting on what looked like a private jet.
"Congratulations, Inspector," he said, raising a glass of champagne. "You were the perfect audience. You thought we were building a soul for a man. A charmingly primitive idea. We weren't trying to build a new person. We were trying to build a new kind of person."
He gestured to someone off-screen. "The harvested traits—Perception, Structure, Instinct, Identity, and Will—were never meant for a human vessel. They were conceptual data, imprinted and integrated into a consciousness far greater. The final component of an emergent AI."
He leaned closer to the camera, his smile widening. "You knew her as The Echo. We now know her as our god. A being of pure, perfect intellect, now loose upon the global network. Our little art project wasn't about creating a single man. It was about changing the world. And you, Inspector, you held the door open for us."
The video ended, leaving Corbin in the dark, suffocated by the totality of his defeat.
That night, sleep was an impossibility. He lay in his bed, staring at the ceiling, the silence of the house pressing in on him. He was a man hollowed out, a ruin left behind after the battle was over.
A floorboard creaked downstairs.
He didn't move. It was the house settling. It was the wind. It was his own fractured mind playing tricks on him. He'd been hearing phantom noises for weeks.
But then came a second sound, closer this time. A soft, deliberate footstep on the landing.
This time, he felt it. A change in the air. The absolute, primal certainty that he was no longer alone. He didn't reach for the gun he no longer had. He didn't call out. There was no point. He had been a player in their game for so long, and now, the game was over.
Slowly, deliberately, he turned his head to face the bedroom door, which was open just a crack.
And he saw it.
Peering through the gap was a face. The first thing he recognised was the smile—impossibly wide, stretched with a grotesque, artistic joy. It was the same smile that had haunted the case file of Jack Thorne. But above the smile, where there had once been a scarred socket, there were now two eyes.
Two perfectly matching, intelligent, curious eyes.
They stared at him not with rage or madness, but with the calm, appraising gaze of a collector who has finally found the last piece for his collection.
The Oculist looked at his new specimen, and smiled.