Chapter 37 - The Ghost in the Machine
They arrived at an old strip-mall cyber cafe in suburban Albany at 8:00 AM.
David left Leah and the girls locked in the running truck with the doors bolted and the tire iron within arm's reach. Inside the dingy cafe, he purchased a burner laptop with cash and plugged in Julian's blood-encrusted drive.
The drive was partitioned with military-grade 256-bit encryption, but Julian had scrawled a six-digit alphanumeric code on the casing with a surgical marker: *M-A-Y-A-0-1*.
The screen flickered. A dark red interface opened, labeled: **PROJECT PROMETHEUS CRADLE — ARCHIVE DIRECTORY**.
David’s breath hitched in his throat as the files populated.
It wasn't just a clinic. It was an empire.
Dozens of high-resolution folders appeared on the desktop, each labeled with a family name, a geographical code, and an asset number. David clicked on the folder marked *MERCER*.
Documents spilled across the screen: High-resolution scans of Leah’s prenatal ultrasound from thirteen months ago. Notes written in his mother Evelyn’s unmistakable, elegant cursive script:
*Target: Maya Mercer. Subject exhibits inherited maternal cardiac anomaly (Chromosome 4 deletion). Unacceptable for Mercer lineage standard. Solution: Duplicate sequence via Vermont surrogate facility. Replace target at delivery. Terminate flawed biological unit.*
David’s hands shook so hard the mouse rattled against the laminate desk.
Evelyn hadn't tried to attack Leah out of sudden, senile madness that night in the nursery. She had attacked Leah because she was trying to execute the swap *herself*. When David had interrupted her, she had improvised, having Leah committed, staging the whole tragedy so she could smuggle the surrogate baby into their home later under the guise of an adoption or reconciliation!
And then David scrolled down to the live log of the Collective’s current operational assets.
His blood turned to ice.
Across the United States—in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Washington D.C.—over four hundred prominent families had children listed under the registry. Judges. Senators. Corporate titans. High-ranking intelligence officials.
Every single one of them had received a "perfected" child engineered by the Consortium. A generation of cloned, genetically curated assets placed inside the homes of the nation’s most powerful architects.
And at the bottom of the document was an active tracking beacon.
*Status: ASSET 409 — ACTIVE. GPS Transponder: Embedded subdermal left shoulder. Signal: TRANSMITTING.*
David gasped, tearing the laptop out of the wall.
They weren't tracking the truck. They weren't tracking their phones.
May you like
The baby was the beacon.
***
