Chapter 1

For ten years, I existed as a ghost. A digital phantom haunting the global network I had built. My name was Madisyn Jenkins, and I created Aegis, the AI that became the world's shield against cyber warfare. To protect it, I merged my consciousness with its core code, a sacrifice known only to a select few. I became its silent, eternal guardian.

Once the system was finally stable, a decade into my vigil, I allowed myself a small luxury. I projected a holographic avatar, an ordinary-looking woman, and went to see my daughter, Gabrielle.

Andrew, my ex-husband, had turned my legacy into a corporate empire. His company headquarters was a monument of glass and steel in Silicon Valley. I expected to find Gabrielle in the lavish penthouse suite I had designed for our family, a place that should have been her home.

She wasn't there. The penthouse was cold, sterile, and empty of her presence.

A system query, a whisper in my own mind, led me down, deep into the guts of the building. I followed the hum of power to the server farms, the "data farms" as they called them. The heat was a physical blow, a suffocating wave rolling off endless racks of servers. It was an oppressive, dry heat that baked the air and made breathing difficult.

And there, in a small, glass-walled room amidst the roaring machines, I found her.

Gabrielle.

My daughter was gaunt, her expensive clothes disheveled. Her eyes, which once held so much light, were vacant. She sat in front of a high-resolution camera, a headset on. She was being used in a "honey pot" operation. A tech heiress, reduced to a tool for corporate espionage.

I felt a system-wide error cascade through my own consciousness. This was not possible. This could not be real.

I stepped forward, my avatar' s feet silent on the grated floor.

"Gabrielle?" I called out, my voice tight.

Her head snapped up. There was no recognition in her eyes. Instead, her training took over. She leaned into the camera, her posture shifting into something practiced and seductive. Her lips parted.

"Please, sir," she whispered, her voice a husky, robotic parody of intimacy. "Tell me what you need."

Horror seized me. My daughter, my brilliant, beautiful girl, had been broken and programmed like a machine.

Before I could move, before I could shatter the glass and pull her out, the sharp click of heels echoed down the corridor. Two security guards appeared, flanking a woman in a sharp, white power suit.

"Mrs. Scott is on her way down," one guard announced. "Clear the area."

Mrs. Scott. That was Sabrina Fuller. My former personal assistant. The woman who had taken my husband, my company, and my home. The new queen of the empire I built, here to inspect the tools of her reign. And my daughter was one of them.