Thursday, 2:00 PM. The Temporary Bunker.
The abandoned auto body shop smelled of stale motor oil, rust, and ozone. Nia had set up a secure, air-gapped terminal in the corner of the garage, surrounded by a fortress of empty energy drink cans and tangled cables. The ghost-admin partition of Project Oracle was running smoothly on her encrypted laptop, feeding off a heavily masked, untraceable connection to the Vanguard servers deep beneath the city.
"This thing is absolutely terrifying," Nia said, rubbing her bloodshot eyes beneath her glasses. She had been staring at the scrolling data streams for hours, deciphering the complex UI of the predictive algorithm. "It's not just predicting the stock market, Jake. It's predicting human behavior on a macro scale. It's analyzing the sentiment of millions of emails, news articles, private memos, and social media trends to forecast corporate decisions before the CEOs even make them."
