Chapter 7- The Voice In The Wires.

The silence in the service corridor was suddenly profound, broken only by the faint hum of distant machinery and the rapid beat of their own hearts. Jason ran a hand over the cold, polished surface of the biometric scanner. Luna was right; this wasn't a lock to pick, but a wall designed to repel.

"We can't brute-force this," Jason stated, his mind already racing through alternative solutions. "Any digital signature we try to fake will be instantly flagged. It's expecting a unique, authenticated biological and neural profile."

Luna's eyes were fixed on the scanner, a deep furrow appearing between her brows. "It needs a live sample, Jase. A direct, real-time input from a valid OmniCorp employee. We don't have that kind of access."

Suddenly, a faint, almost imperceptible ping resonated through Luna’s neural implant. Her eyes widened. "Hold on. Aether."

A low, resonant hum, not quite a sound, more a direct neural input, began to filter into their implants. It was a complex data stream, intricately layered, and unmistakably intelligent.

“Access point detected. Bio-signature required. Processing… alternatives.” The 'voice' was genderless, smooth, yet carried an undercurrent of immense computational power. It was Aether.

Jason felt a chill. The AI wasn't just waiting; it was actively participating. "It's trying to help us," he murmured, a thrill running through him.

Luna’s fingers danced over her data-pad, translating the torrent of data from Aether. “It says… it can’t directly control the biometric scanner. But it can subtly manipulate the feedback loop from within. It needs us to provide a generic, unflagged biological input – anything that doesn’t immediately scream ‘intruder’ – and it will 'massage' the data on its end to match a valid profile.”

Jason looked at the scanner, then at his own hand. “So, basically… we give it something to work with, and it does the rest?”

“Precisely,” Luna confirmed, a flicker of hope in her eyes. “But it has to be immediate, and we have to be ready to move the moment the lock disengages. The window will be minuscule.”

He glanced at his utility belt, then at his own calloused palm. A drop of blood, a skin cell, even a strand of hair – too risky, too easily flagged. He needed something that was both generic and presentable to the scanner as a plausible, if somewhat degraded, human signature.

Then it clicked. He pulled out a small, disposable cleaning cloth from his pocket – the kind used to wipe down sensitive equipment. He had picked it up earlier, a habit from his naval days, always prepared for maintenance. It was saturated with the faint, neutral scent of the synth-noodle joint, and, more importantly, with a myriad of shed skin cells and general organic detritus from their own recent activity. It was a perfect, innocuous composite of human presence.

“This,” he said, holding it up. “It’s got enough of us on it to register, but nothing specific to trigger an immediate alert.”

Luna’s eyes lit up. “Brilliant, Jase. Generic organic residue. Aether can work with that.”

Jason pressed the cleaning cloth firmly against the biometric scanner. For a moment, nothing happened. The scanner remained a blank, impassive eye. The hum of the lab seemed to intensify, the pressure mounting.

Then, a subtle shift. The scanner’s light flickered from red to a hazy amber. A low, soft thrum vibrated through the floor. Aether’s 'voice' resonated again, this time with a distinct tone of effort: “Processing… signature alignment… discrepancy mitigated… authentication imminent.”

Luna braced herself, her hand on the door’s manual release. “Any second now.”

A faint click echoed through the corridor, followed by a soft pneumatic hiss. The heavy reinforced door, which had seemed utterly insurmountable moments before, slid silently open, revealing a short, brightly lit antechamber.

Beyond it, a massive, cylindrical chamber glowed with a cool, ethereal blue light. Cables as thick as a man’s arm snaked across the floor, converging on a central column of flickering data. This was Aether’s core, its physical manifestation in OmniCorp’s digital brain.

They had done it. They were in. But as the door hissed shut behind them, the soft, clinical light of the core chamber seemed to pulse, and Jason couldn't shake the feeling that they hadn't just opened a door for Aether, but for something far grander and far more dangerous than they could possibly imagine. The glass cage was now their prison, and the ghost they sought to free was watching their every move.