The Diagnosis
?The smooth, mournful notes of the saxophone filled the Executive Lounge, mixing with the scent of old paper and expensive cedar.
?Elias stood swaying on the Persian rug, the heavy iron wrench dangling from his bleeding hand. His lungs rattled with every breath. He looked at the crystal glass of amber bourbon sitting on the table, and then he looked at the man offering it.
?The Consultant wasn’t reaching for a weapon. He wasn't calling for guards. He was just watching Elias with the mild, detached fascination of a scientist observing a rat in a maze.
?Why am I still alive? Elias thought, his mind racing through the pain. He has turrets in the lobby. He has Wardens on Floor 10. Why is his personal sanctuary completely unguarded?
?And then, looking at the Consultant’s perfectly calm eyes, Elias understood.
?It was about the data.
?The Consultant had built Protocol Zero to be flawless. It was a perfect algorithm designed to eradicate the human variable. But Elias had survived forty floors of it. To The Consultant, Elias wasn't an assassin; he was a glitch. An anomaly in the dataset. The Consultant hadn't killed him because he needed to study him, to find out why the code didn't break him, so he could patch the system.
?"You're taking notes," Elias rasped, a wet, bloody smile cracking his face. "You don't want to offer me peace. You want to debug your software."
?The Consultant’s expression didn't change, but his eyes narrowed a fraction of an inch. "You are remarkably resilient for a man with a shattered ribcage. I simply want to understand the source of your irrationality before I correct it."
?"It's not irrationality," Elias said, taking a slow, agonizing step into the room. "It's a conscience. You can't calculate it, so it terrifies you."
?The Rejection
?"It doesn't terrify me. It disgusts me," The Consultant replied coldly, placing his hands in his pockets. "You look at the city below us, at the violence, the starvation, the crippling depression of free will, and you call it 'human.' I call it a failure of design. My system works. The pain is gone."
?"Your system is a graveyard," Elias spat. "You just painted the tombstones and put on a jazz record."
?Elias glanced around the room. He didn't look at the Consultant's fists. He looked at the environment.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Floor-to-ceiling reinforced glass holding back the raging storm outside.
A massive, unlit gas fireplace carved from marble.
And directly above them, discreetly integrated into the mahogany ceiling panels, the silver nozzles of a Halon fire suppression system.
?The Consultant had sealed this room to keep the world out. That made it a closed environment.
?"I am offering you a way out of the pain, Elias," The Consultant said, his voice dropping to a low, commanding register. "Put the wrench down. Surrender the guilt. You don't have to carry the God anymore."
?"You're right about one thing," Elias whispered, shifting his grip on the rusted iron. "I am tired of carrying things."
?The Variable
?The Consultant sighed, reaching under his suit jacket. "A pity. I suppose I will just have to analyze your corpse—"
?Elias didn't throw the wrench at The Consultant. He knew he would miss, or the man would dodge.
Instead, Elias spun, pouring every last ounce of his fading adrenaline into his fractured ribs, and hurled the heavy iron wrench directly into the massive, open gas valve of the marble fireplace.
?CLANG.
The iron sparked violently against the brass fitting, snapping the safety valve clean off.
High-pressure natural gas immediately shrieked into the room, a deafening hiss that overpowered the jazz record.
?The Consultant froze. "What are you doing? You'll blow us both up!"
?"I'm introducing a variable," Elias choked out, pulling his cheap plastic lighter from his pocket.
?He flicked it. The small orange flame flared.
?"No!" The Consultant shouted, abandoning his calm completely. He lunged backward.
?Elias tossed the lighter onto the Persian rug, right into the path of the expanding gas cloud.
The ignition wasn't an explosion. It was a localized flash-fire. A wall of intense blue-orange heat erupted across the center of the lounge, instantly vaporizing the oxygen.
?But Elias wasn't trying to burn the man. He was targeting the room's logic.
?A microsecond later, the environmental sensors in the ceiling detected the sudden, massive temperature spike. The smart-room did exactly what it was programmed to do.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
?The mahogany ceiling panels irised open. The Halon fire suppression system deployed.
A thick, heavy cloud of chemical gas blasted downward, instantly smothering the flames, but also rapidly displacing all the breathable air in the sealed room.
?The Consultant gasped, choking on the chemical retardant. The immaculate architect of Sector 4 stumbled, coughing violently, his eyes watering. The pristine control he held over the city was gone; he was just a man drowning on dry land.
?"The elevator!" The Consultant choked, staggering blindly away from the gas cloud toward the wall of leather-bound books. He slammed his hand against a hidden panel.
?The bookshelf split apart with a hiss of hydraulics, revealing the sleek, glass cylinder of the bio-metric elevator. The doors slid open, offering the only pocket of clean, pressurized air left in the room.
?The Consultant lunged inside, desperate to breathe.
As he turned to hit the override switch to close the doors, a bloody hand shot through the gap, gripping the glass.
?Elias threw his body weight into the opening.
He collapsed onto the floor of the elevator, coughing up blood and Halon gas, his boots crossing the threshold just as the doors tried to close.
?The Consultant backed against the glass wall of the cab, staring down in horror at the ruined, bleeding man who had just hijacked his sanctuary.
?"Floor fifty," Elias wheezed, leaving a bloody handprint on the pristine glass of the elevator door. "Let's go see God."
