Gate 9 was a service entrance to the NeuroTec Consortium's Distribution Complex—not the corporate headquarters, not the research labs, nothing that ever made the news. It was a logistics warehouse in an industrial zone that smelled like kerosene and melted plastic, guarded by two bored security officers and a biometric scanning system Mateus had studied for three weeks.
It worked exactly as planned.
The pirated neural interface synchronized with the corporate identification system using fake credentials provided by Renko. The scanners read the nanites as the authenticated signature of a maintenance employee named Hélio Camargo. The two guards didn't even look up.
Mateus walked in.
The warehouse was enormous and almost empty. Rows of servers stacked all the way to the ceiling. The constant hum of cooling systems. Blue lights blinking in a rhythmic pattern, like a massive artificial heart breathing slowly.
The file Renko wanted was cataloged as Preventive Maintenance Report 7-Delta. Mateus found it in ninety seconds—it was easy work now that he could navigate systems with his thoughts. That was the part that scared him. Not the access. Not the risk of getting caught.
It was how the neural interface made everything feel… natural. As if those systems had always been extensions of his own body.
He transferred the 7-Delta file.
And then, as he was disconnecting, he saw something else.
He wasn't looking for it. There was no reason it should have appeared to him—a classified file with quintuple access protocol, buried inside a server partition that shouldn't even have been visible to the credentials he was using. But it was there. Blinking. Marked with a red priority tag he had never seen in any system he had ever repaired.
TAG: AURORA-DIRECT / HELIOS-7 / ABSOLUTE-CLASSIFIED
Mateus froze.
Don't open it, one part of his brain said.
Another part—the one that had grown up fixing things that weren't meant to be fixed—had already opened it.
The file had three lines.
"The object is not in motion.""It is under observation.""And it detected us first."
Mateus stared at those words long enough for the system's silent alarms to start registering his unauthorized presence.
He ran.