All Chapters of His To Take: Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

VX scheduled their global summit for maximum optics.Hosted in Zurich, streamed in real time across six continents, the event was built to be sleek, clean, and untouchable. Nothing controversial. Nothing messy. Just experts. Product demonstrations. Testimonials.A rebranding exercise dressed up as philanthropy.And at the center of it all: a keynote on “responsible innovation in human-centered AI.”But the team at the Lyon compound had other plans.The relay room was a storm of static and urgency.Nova hunched over a terminal rerouting packet headers. 03 was writing a delay loop to stall VX’s built-in crash failsafe. Lyra traced radio frequencies from three fallback uplinks in case the hijack attempt got kicked mid-broadcast.And at the center of it all, Rowen stood in front of a camera.Alone.No makeup. No lighting. Just the truth, and the terror of telling it.Ava checked the feed pipeline one last time.“We’ve got 14 seconds from breach to lock-in. If they reroute, we’ll have mayb

Gabriel Hart appeared on screen wearing a navy blue sweater and a soft expression.Nothing clinical.Nothing cold.Just familiar.Like a grandfather telling bedtime stories instead of war strategy.And that was the point.Because if there was one thing Gabriel Hart knew how to do better than anyone, it was build trust out of nothing.The broadcast was billed as an “urgent thought piece on synthetic empathy and public manipulation.”VX didn’t even label it a counter-response.They made it look like a warning.A public service.A cautionary tale.And Gabriel?He leaned into it like he was doing the world a favor.“I was never meant to speak again,” he said. “I gave my life’s work to the institutions that needed it most. I let it become theirs. I let the world forget my name.”He paused.Tilted his head.“But I’ve watched the noise grow louder. And when lies reach a pitch too high to ignore, sometimes the past must rise again to bring clarity.”In the Lyon compound, the broadcast played

The Geneva summit center smelled like expensive air.Filtered. Ionized. Clean to the point of fiction.It wasn’t a conference. It was a cathedral.White stone walls. Seamless chrome fixtures. Curated artwork lined the hallsabstract digital installations meant to evoke “emotion without narrative.”Ava had seen it before.Not this place.But this type of place.Every surface is a lie.Every corner is soft enough to make you forget that compliance was the cost of entry.They walked in under clean identities.Ava was listed as Dr. Elise Ronan, an independent researcher in neural ethics.Rowen came as her assistant, “Tess Monroe.”03? She was security. Cold, polished, unreadable.No one questioned them.Because no one expects the ghosts of their worst mistakes to come back smiling at the front desk.Inside, everything was smooth.Too smooth.Screens displayed looping welcome reels.Smiling speakers. Testimonials. ContinuumSubject 09smiling gently, laughing at a moderator’s joke, walking ha

The vault wasn’t supposed to open.Not to her.Not to anyone.Gabriel had buried these files for a reason. Deep beyond normal firewalls, sealed behind biometric checks and kill-trigger encryption.But the girl who walked into the dark archive now wasn’t the same girl they’d calibrated for compliance.She wasn’t Continuum.She wasn’t a subject.She wasn’t a product.She was a question with blood in her mouth.Rows of data towers blinked to life as she stepped through the threshold.Screens hummed.Footage whispered open in flashesshort, shaky clips playing on loop.A girl screaming in a lab.A child reaching for a hand that didn’t reach back.Ava, unconscious on a table, blood in her hair.The silence wasn’t quiet.It was curated.This was where memory had come to be erased.And now?It was all coming back.She approached the central console.Her file pulsed on the main screen.SUBJECT_09 // “CONTINUUM”STATUS: ACTIVECONDITION: COMPROMISEDRECOMMENDED ACTION: RE-ARCHIVEShe tapped t

Subject 12 didn’t blink.Not when the alarms began to flare across the Geneva compound.Not when Gabriel’s face twisted first with uncertainty, then with rage.Not when 03 reached for her weapon and Ava, slowly, lowered it.Because violence wasn’t the answer anymore.Not in this room.Not this time.This was about choice.And for the first time since stepping out of the cryochamber, Subject 12 wasn’t waiting to be told who to be.She was deciding.Gabriel tried to recover.He stepped toward her slowly, the edge of his voice smoothed out again like a politician rehearsing empathy.“Listen to me,” he said. “I know you’re confused. That’s natural. Your schema is colliding with memory fragmentsechoes from prior source material. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong. It just means you’re in transition.”Subject 12 turned to face him.Her voice was steady.“Stop talking to me like I’m code.”A pause.Small. Heavy.She continued:“I’m not a system waiting to be debugged.”Her eyes flicked to the re