I stepped inside.
The room was freezing, the air heavily air-conditioned to keep the massive banks of servers from overheating. But these weren't standard corporate servers. They were custom-built, liquid-cooled supercomputers, glowing with an eerie, pulsing blue light. Cables snaked across the ceiling like a mechanical nervous system, all feeding into a central terminal in the middle of the room.
I walked up to the terminal. The screen was asleep. I tapped the keyboard, and it flared to life.
A single prompt blinked in the center of the black screen.
PROJECT ORACLE: AWAITING INPUT.
I pulled out my phone and plugged a specialized decryption cable—courtesy of Nia—into the terminal's diagnostic port.
"Nia, you copy?" I whispered into my earpiece.
