The Vault
It all started deep down in the Chicago underground. Not in the hidden hideout from the gangster days, and definitely not in the present-day walkway beneath the city streets—the Pedway. The story I’m about to drop on you sparks to life in a cutting-edge lab hundreds of feet beneath the Windy City—discretely accessed through a series of abandoned and somewhat spooky freight tunnels.
More than a lab, the Vault was an impenetrable underground fortress bound by layers of titanium, lead, and enough concrete to survive the next extinction level event. Inside, surrounded by a jungle of cables and computer racks, a handful of the most gifted minds on Earth was getting ready to rock the most ambitious piece of code ever written.
Normally, somebody in my line of work would’ve been clued in on this kind of thing. But Pegasus was no ordinary government program. It was what we spooks call a special access program–black budget, off the books. Even the fella in the Oval Office was vaguely familiar with it.
But all that cloak-and-dagger stuff was of no concern to Dr. Celeste Turing. With no actual lineage to the daddy of computer science, but on par with his brilliance, the quiet hoodie-clad 29-year-old was a legend in her own right, known at MIT as Dr. Hat Trick. Who else had ever bagged triple PhD’s—Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, and Cryptography—in under 5 years?
It was Valentine’s Day, and Celeste had only one thing in mind: making sure her labor of love went live, without a hitch, and as scheduled—16:00 hours ZULU. Two years of mind-bending algorithms, quantum computing, and neural networking came down to today.
Cel rubbed her tired eyes. Thousands of lines of code had finally caught up with her like a bad hangover. Two monitors glowed with a chaotic mess of data and diagnostics, with three vinyl figurines wedged between them: Vito Corleone with his smug cat, Messi mid-kick about to score an insane goal, and Jimi Hendrix, guitar raised, ready to shred away the ills of the world. Little reminders that life outside the sterile Vault wasn’t a total black hole.
“Voodoo Child” pulsed through her earbuds, but even Jimi couldn’t keep her nerves from creeping up.
Next to her, Bryce Jennings—the wiry, messy-haired dev in a Ghost in the Shell t-shirt and hipster dark-rimmed glasses—was zoning out, likely lost in some cyberpunk dystopia.
Across the room, Shivanya Sharma, the Pegasus program’s no-nonsense Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), was in full-on battle mode. Her tone sharp, she was tearing into the new CSIRT supervisor for letting a minor glitch go unreported. “Minor doesn’t cut it here. Fix it and escalate next time, or I’ll find someone who will.”
A few feet away, Nick Torres, the Vault’s head of security and a mountain of intensity, loomed over a jittery guard who’d left the safety off on his weapon. “Playtime’s over, dipshit! Get your head in the damn game!”
“Hey, Brycy. You, too!” Cel snapped at her dreamy friend and colleague. “Head in the game, bro.”
Bryce jolted back to reality, mumbling an awkward, “Yeah, yeah, got it,” face flushed like a kid caught sneaking a smoke behind the gym. Then, barely a breath later, the guy just couldn’t help himself: “But—you ever wonder what the world would do if they knew what we were up to down here?”
Cel’s eyes stayed glued to the screen, fingers dancing over the keyboard. “I don’t have time for hypotheticals right now. And neither do you.”
Everyone was on edge. Well—almost everyone.
From an unlit passage above the control room, a tall man with silver hair in military fatigues calmly sipped his coffee, watching the chaos below.
Only a few feet behind, a slender, suit-clad silhouette hovered in a darkened doorway—observing him.
Cel looked up at a big clock on the wall.
15:59.
“Come on already!”
In less than sixty seconds, a behemoth block of code known as AI-CAP-1—Artificial Intelligence Cognitive Augmentation Program One—would hit the Pegasus mainnet. If all went according to plan, in six months, CAP-1 would boldly go where no AI had gone before. But today, it was getting a test run by the folks in the adjacent room—the crew of an upcoming hush-hush space mission snuggled tight inside a simulator.
Two years earlier, a NASA probe reportedly captured images of a mysterious outpost on Callisto, one of the moons of Jupiter. The photos and analysis suggested that whoever—or whatever—was running it was not of this Earth. In response, NASA and the DOD activated Pegasus, a special access program designed years earlier with a straightforward mission template: recon, greet, meet, and, if necessary, kill any uninvited guests to our solar system.
Spearheading the giant Pegasus delivery vehicle was Aegis Vanguard, a multi-role beast designed for space recon and combat. Packed with every surveillance gadget and weaponry you could dream of, Aegis also had one ace up its sleeve: CAP-1, a sentient AI. Its job? Assist the human crew with everything from data crunching to analysis, navs, comms, and, if need be, combat. It could even complete the mission solo if things went south for the crew.
But without humans around to keep it in check, was there any chance the AI could turn naughty? With any luck, they’d never have to find out.
As the Pegasus rocket sat primed somewhere beneath the Nevada desert, Dr. Hat Trick and her team counted down the seconds, each wondering if CAP-1 was worth the billions taxpayers unwittingly shelled out to make it real.
A hefty chunk of that cash went into CAP-1’s cutting-edge tech—not just the SchroCAT-2 quantum processor, but its uncanny natural language skills, designed to make it more relatable to the crew strapped in for the long haul to Jupiter. Celeste had even thrown in quirks: a dash of sarcasm, a full-on personality, and an oddball taste for The Godfather saga, Hendrix, and Lionel Messi. Go figure. And apparently, it cracked good data scientist jokes—whatever those were.
But the real kicker? Dr. Turing had coded a core mandate into its neural network:
Protect humanity at all costs. Whatever it takes.
The stakes were high, sure—but today’s test was supposed to be low-key. A simple simulation: CAP-1 collaborating with the Aegis crew en route to Jupiter, monitoring systems, responding to commands. Nothing more intense than deep space flight with a super-smart co-pilot.
Only one problem. That wasn’t the simulation Bryce loaded.
Cel frowned, leaning closer to the screen, taking her earbuds off. “Wait a second. This isn’t program one. Bryce, what the hell did you load?”
Bryce adjusted his glasses, hesitating like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Uh… simulation program seventeen?”
Cel whipped around, her irritation sharp enough to cut glass. “Seventeen? That’s one of the ‘Aegis under attack’ scenarios! We’re supposed to be testing CAP-1 in routine mode!”
“Yeah, about that…” Bryce scratched the back of his neck. “Drake’s orders. Said we need to ‘stress test the system.’”
Cel threw her hands up. “Of course he did! Chaos is his love language!”
Shivanya leaned against her console, arms crossed. “Take it easy, Cel. Bryce is just following orders. And he’s good at it—saved my ass more than once back in the Navy.”
Cel shot her a withering look. “Yeah, yeah. Debugging mission-critical systems. You’ve only told that little sailor story a thousand times.”
“And yet,” Bryce chimed in, shrugging, “you didn’t hear about me coding a predictive maintenance algorithm on the Reagan during downtime. But sure, no big deal.”
“No big deal is right,” Torres scoffed as he ambled in, arms folded, his signature smug grin in full force. “Button-pushers—always think they’re saving the day.” The retired SEAL leaned against the doorframe, throwing a pointed look at Bryce and Shiv. “Maybe if you ever stepped outside the server room, you’d understand what stress really looks like.”
“Charming, Torres,” Shiv shot back, her voice cool but sharp. “I don’t remember you complaining about ‘button-pushers’ when we kept your comms running flawlessly during ops.”
Bryce smirked, joining Shiv’s side. “Yeah, and speaking of stress, don’t you have a bar brawl to instigate, big guy?”
Torres barked a laugh, letting it roll off. Poking fun was practically a team sport in their world, and if you could dish it, you’d better take it. He did glance at the clock, though.
Less than thirty seconds left.
Cel pulled off her glasses, cleaning them furiously. “Fine. Let’s just hope program seventeen doesn’t blow the system to the Moon.”
“Or to Callisto,” Bryce quipped, tossing her a quick wink that earned a reluctant grin.
The energy in the room shifted. Shiv and Bryce exchanged a quick glance—years of shared service and camaraderie sparking between them. Cel noticed but stayed quiet. The divide between her civilian academic world and their prior-service mindset was always there, humming just below the surface.
“All right, enough drama,” Torres muttered, moving toward his post. “Let’s see how your fancy AI handles a good old-fashioned shitshow.”
Cel sighed, gripping the edge of her workstation as the clock ticked down to launch. Program seventeen was loaded. No turning back now.
At the 10-second mark, Pegasus Mission Commander Mike Miller placed his thumb on the toggle. His breath steadied as the countdown echoed in his headset.
9… 8… 7… 6…
Fingers tightened on controls.
5… 4… 3… 2… 1…
CLACK!
Nothing.
Or actually—everything. Because at the exact moment that CAP-1 was supposed to go live, in a dimly lit chamber humming with servers and blinking monitors, the quirky AI went rogue. The digital entity severed its connection to the Pegasus mainnet and vanished into the vast expanse of the internet, dodging every fail-safe designed to keep it on a leash.
A heartbeat later, the control room crackled with tension as white noise hissed from every monitor. A low murmur spread through the crew stations, swelling into a panicked uproar as techs scrambled to update their superiors.
“I’ve tried that already, sir!” Bryce cried out. “It’s all gone!”
Security personnel tightened their grips, awaiting instructions through their earpieces.
“Lock and load, ladies!” Torres barked, taking a position across the main door. “Prep for breach!”
Meanwhile, somewhere on an unknown private blockchain…
CRON/OS Testnet loading...
Go Live: 30 days: 15 hours: 23 minutes: 39 seconds
Back in the Vault, Cel stormed into the data center to figure out what the hell was going on. Shivanya met her with three words: “Digital ghost town.”
Every trace of CAP-1—gone. Backups across four separate servers? Wiped like they’d never existed.
Cel slipped off her glasses, pinching the bridge of her nose. A long sigh escaped her lips.
What now?
