Threshold Protocol

Coda

23:45 | Secure Server Farm, Undisclosed Location, Maryland Tuesday, October 31, 2028 — Fifteen Days After Phase I Completion

The air in the server farm was cold enough to ache in the bones, smelling of chilled ozone and humming with the sound of a million secrets being kept. Rows of black server towers stretched into the darkness, their indicator lights blinking like a field of digital fireflies.

Malik Adeyemi stood at a lone console, the stark white light of the screen illuminating his face. He wasn't in uniform. He wore civilian clothes that did nothing to soften his rigid posture.

His fingers moved across the holographic interface with quiet, methodical precision. He wasn't hacking. He was using clearance codes that would have given the NBOA Director pause. He bypassed Langley's primary archives, sinking deep into the off-site disaster recovery servers—the system's digital subconscious, where deleted files sometimes lingered as fragmented ghosts.

He ran a search query. Not for Subject A. Not for Phase II.

QUERY: T-PROT_P1_LOGS_PRE-SCRUB_10.18.28

The system churned. For a full minute, nothing. Then, a single file appeared. Corrupted. Incomplete. But there.

He opened it. On the left side of the screen, he pulled up the official, sanitized log Vos had submitted to the NBOA—the one with clean data and stable metrics. On the right, he rendered the ghost file.

The difference was stark. The ghost file was a storm of chaotic energy—unexplained sync tremors, wild latency spikes, biometric readings that screamed instability. It was the truth Vos had buried.

Malik stared at the two versions of reality, his expression unreadable. He didn't feel anger. He felt the cold, heavy certainty of a threat confirmed.

With a final keystroke, he copied the ghost file to a shielded, encrypted drive. He slid the small, dark object into his pocket. His mission was no longer oversight.

It was containment.