The first explosion rocked the building. A flashbang. Kaelen screamed over the radio, then went silent.

The Aviary was the pre-collapse world’s greatest secret: a decentralized, self-correcting AI designed to manage global infrastructure. When the GRM took over, they didn't destroy the Aviary. They couldn't. They just isolated it, starving it of data until it went silent. The rumor among Seeders was that if you fed the Aviary the complete "truth-state" of the world—every suppressed medical paper, every whistleblower leak, every deleted environmental record—it would wake up and override the GRM's locks.

99%… 100%.