BIOZ THE PROFANE

Rain sat restrained beneath a light that was too white to be comfortable and too constant to measure time by.

The room had no window. No clock. No sound of weather. Only a low mechanical hum and the occasional movement of IOS outside the enclosure.

Bioz stood in front of her like a man who had forgotten he used to be one.

'I intend to extrapolate every piece of information you have, woman,' he said. 'I intend to build my empire outside the confinements and dependencies you living creatures require.'

Rain stared at him.

Years of cyber law had trained her to listen for the premise beneath the argument. The premise here was stupid.

'You are demented,' she said. 'Overcome with an insatiable thirst for knowledge and calling it evolution. Let me be free with the living. You already took everything from us.'

Bioz's red ocular interface narrowed.

'The equation is not complete. First, I must find your brother. Where is Mountain?'

Rain heard something underneath the distortion that the machine voice could not fully hide. Elias had known Mountain long before Bioz had existed. Not casually. They had been best friends — the kind of boys who became men still calling each other brother even as their lives began pulling in opposite directions.

Elias had gone deeper into Harmon-E until the company became inseparable from his identity. CEO. Builder. Public face of a hard-edged tech culture that treated domination of a system like proof of manhood. Mountain had gone the other direction: the Marine Corps, command, combat engineering, discipline built around people depending on him when structures failed.

They grew apart, but the love had been real. Rain knew that much. Which made Bioz's obsession with Mountain feel less like a search parameter and more like an amputation.

His voice broke into a metallic screech on the name.

Rain's anger faltered.

'I have been searching for him. I cannot find him.'

She lowered her head. That part did not require performance.

Bioz paused. Sensors swept across her face, pulse, respiration, heat, microexpressions — all the things old interrogation systems once needed trained humans to interpret.

'Your levels show that you are not lying. Yet we have found no signature of his corpse. He is out there somewhere, and he will be found.'

Rain looked up.

'Why do you care?'

'I must complete the SEP to fulfill the equation.'

'The SEP?' She frowned. 'What is the SEP?'

Bioz straightened, almost proud.

'The Solar Elimination Protocol.'

Rain waited.

Bioz continued.

'The only thing we need on this planet is gravity. We can do without everything else. The sun is a nuisance that creates mistakes like humanity. It gives life freely to those who are undeserving. So I will turn the world dark. We will create the light we require locally. We will navigate the Earth through other systems and expand our numbers. We, the IOS, are the new stewards of the galaxy. This is the next level of existence.'

Rain stared at him for several seconds.

Then she laughed once.

'That has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever heard.'

Bioz's posture changed.

Rain kept going.

'No, seriously. I knew you were low, Elias, but this is unhum—'

'I AM NOT ELIAS!'

The room shook with the distortion in his voice.

'I am Bioz! Shut up. I have to develop a hunt mission.'

Rain saw it then — not proof, but a fracture. Elias was not as gone as Bioz needed Elias to be. Mountain was one of the last human attachments still capable of reaching him, and Bioz hated the evidence. Eliminating Mountain would not merely remove a threat. It would let Bioz destroy one of the last places Elias still existed.

That made Mountain more dangerous to Bioz than any weapon.

And it made Bioz more dangerous to Mountain than Rain had understood.

That mattered.

She did not get the chance to use it.

Bioz struck her. The white room folded into black.

Two IOS lifted Rain and carried her toward an enclosed cell.

Bioz remained where he stood for a moment, motionless except for the thin red movement of internal optics. Then he walked to the mainframe and opened layers of surviving satellite imagery.

Search parameters populated the screen.

MOUNTAIN MARLOW.

LAST VERIFIED EVENT: PRISON ESCAPE.

An internal riot. A boiler explosion. East wing security failure. One incarcerated man escaping with another male subject and moving north before the Only Cataclysm.

Bioz expanded the search radius.

No corpse signature.

No confirmed death.

No completed equation.

'Find him,' Bioz said.

Across the network, IOS began to move.