The Null Protocol

The neon was the first thing Rex Mercer noticed when he woke up. It was always the first thing. Red, blue, amber—colors bled through the cracked polycarbonate window of the data center bunker and painted the walls in a slow, hypnotic pulse. Outside, Neo Pacifica never slept. It couldn't. The city was powered by the Megacorp servers in the upper tiers, and those servers never stopped humming.

Rex sat up and pressed his left hand to his eye. The cybernetic implant—a military-grade optical system pulled from a decommissioned security contract—gave him a heads-up display: heart rate normal, neural stability at ninety-four percent, loyalty index for Subject Alpha at twelve. Twelve. That was the number that kept him up at night.

"Alpha is Nika," said Jax from the far end of the bunker. He was hunched over a terminal, his fingers moving across a holographic keyboard. "She's at eight now. Dropping fast."

Rex didn't respond. He pulled on his jacket and walked to the command console. The bunker was a converted data processing center, three levels beneath Neo Pacifica's streets. The walls were lined with server racks that hummed like a hive of mechanical bees. In the center of the room was the command table—a flat holographic display showing the city's security grid, Megacorp patrol routes, and the Ash Operations' three hidden safe houses.

The Ash Operations was a resistance cell. They called themselves the Ash because that was what remained after everything else burned away. They were three years old, forty members strong, and currently running operations against the Megacorp's data monopoly. But data monopoly was a polite term. What Megacorp did was worse: they sold memories. People uploaded their experiences to the corporate cloud for safekeeping, and Megacorp monetized those uploads—targeted ads embedded in nostalgia, personality modifications sold as premium features. The Ash Operations was one of the few groups trying to bring it down.

Dax Calloway was the tactical commander. Twenty-nine, former Megacorp security contractor who had defected because "the job got boring." Dax treated war like a video game—innovative in ways that were occasionally effective and frequently disastrous.

"Call a meeting," Rex said.