Whisper of Thoughts
He wasn't looking at the sea anymore; he was staring at a map of the Northern Illyrian wilderness, where three distinct red beacons were pulsing in rhythmic synchronization.
"They're moving," he said, his voice flat, stripped of the human warmth he had spent months cultivating. "The Aegis backups. They aren't just legacy data, Clara.
They’re active kernels. If they reach the deep-mountain uplink, they’ll trigger a recursive reboot. The Architect will be back, and this time, he’ll have the Aegis protocols to patch his own vulnerabilities." I didn't ask how he knew. I didn't ask if we could just walk away.