Trigger Protocol

Jessica’s breath came slow and measured, her fingers testing the raw skin around her wrists. The zip ties had already cut into her flesh, a dull sting reminding her of time lost.

She rolled her shoulders against the chair, feeling the weight of the restraints, the rigidity of the bolts locking it to the floor. This wasn’t their first time holding someone like her.

But Jessica wasn’t someone like her. She was something else entirely. Her mind worked through the problem, cataloging her surroundings. No windows. One door. Power conduit running along the ceiling.

Her eyes flicked downward. Shoes still on. No weapons. No tools.

She exhaled, flexing her fingers. She had to make do. Her thoughts drifted for half a second to Mr. Black’s words.

“I never needed to reprogram you.”

“I made you free.”

Jessica swallowed, pushing it away. Not now. Now, she needed to get out.

She focused on the zip ties first. Plastic. Brittle under heat. Jessica glanced toward the overhead light. Too far. Then she spotted the power conduit running beneath the chair’s leg.

She shifted her weight, pushing her boots against the floor, dragging the chair just enough for the metal bolt to scrape against the conduit.

The first spark was small. The second larger.

Jessica clenched her jaw, ignoring the growing heat against her palm. The plastic tightened, then snapped.

She jerked her hands free, shaking out the sting. Step one was done. Now it was time for step two. Time to get out of the room.

She pushed herself up, assessing the room. The door was locked, electronic. No handle. Jessica scanned the power conduit again, tracing the line toward the panel in the corner. Security wiring.

Her fingers brushed against the leg of the chair, feeling for weakness. Wood. Splintered at the base. She yanked hard, pulling off a jagged strip, her mind already racing. Pressure points. Weaknesses. Where to break the circuit.

She took the splintered wood and jammed it into the panel’s edge. Twisting. Forcing. A spark. A short hiss of electricity. The overhead light flickered violently. And the electronic lock clicked.

Jessica smirked. “Not so perfect after all.”

She pushed the door open, stepping into the dim corridor.

* * *

The hallway stretched into darkness, lit only by the soft hum of emergency lighting. Jessica moved quickly, keeping her footsteps light. No cameras. No guards. She should have questioned that. Should have hesitated. But something deeper was pulling her forward. Something she wasn’t supposed to find.

Then she saw it. A room at the end of the hall, door half-open. Light spilling through.
She slipped inside.

It was an operations room. Monitors lined the walls, each displaying security footage from across the world. She read the labels on the monitors. Washington. Berlin. Moscow. Beijing. And then, the Vatican. Her stomach twisted. The Mayflower lead. The embassy. Dominion’s reach wasn’t just political. It was ideological.

She took a slow step forward. Then she saw the file sitting open on the desk. Her fingers trembled as she reached for it.

The file contained a list of names. Hundreds of them. Politicians. Diplomats. Military officials. She exhaled, feeling the weight of it. These weren’t just the leaders Dominion controlled. They were fail-safes. A small notation glowed in the bottom of the file. “ACTIVE STATE: PENDING.” And beneath it there was a countdown.

Jessica’s pulse pounded in her ears. The kill switch. She clenched her jaw. The failsafe Dominion had built into every reprogrammed mind. She remembered Dr. Whitmore’s voice, explaining it in the vault in Rome:

“The brain is a machine, Jessica. And like any machine, it can be programmed… or shut down.”

Dominion hadn’t just rewritten these people. They had built an off switch. A kill command that could erase them all with a single keystroke. And the countdown was already running.

She stared at the list of names, and for a split second, she didn’t see strangers. She saw herself. The President. That look in his eyes when he spoke like a man reading a script he’d memorized in another life. He believed he was free. Just like she had believed. Maybe still did.

What if she wasn’t the one outside the system? What if everything. Every defiant step, every moral stand, was just another layer of the programming?

Jessica’s breath steadied. They weren’t waiting for her to decide. Dominion was about to erase them all. She grabbed the external drive sitting next to the computer, slotting it into the system. Copying everything.

Her fingers hovered over the command line. She had minutes, maybe less. If she did nothing, Dominion would wipe them all out. If she stopped it, Dominion remained in control. If she activated it herself, she would be no better than them.

“Wouldn’t it be better than the chaos the world is in now?” Her throat tightened. The question lingered like a trap.

Jessica squeezed her eyes shut.

No. No, she wouldn’t play by their rules. She wouldn’t be Mr. Black. And she wouldn’t be the next failsafe.

She saw what they had turned her into, an asset who believed she’d escaped. Not again. No more overwritten lives. No more empty vessels born from someone else’s moral clarity.

Her fingers flew over the keyboard. Access prompts blinked red. A challenge-response protocol from Dominion’s last firewall. She typed faster, heart pounding. For every line she fed it, the system hesitated, but didn’t stop her. It didn’t expect her. And that was its first mistake.

She entered a new command. Instead of erasing them, she overwrote the programming.

The kill switch didn’t just fail, it turned. Jessica didn’t just stop the command. She freed them. Every politician, every leader, every rewritten mind would wake up knowing exactly what had been done to them.

The screen flashed: EXECUTING OVERRIDE

Jessica let out a slow, unsteady breath. This wouldn’t erase Dominion. But it would end their control.

And as for Mr. Black? Jessica turned toward the exit, a single bullet already chambered. She was ending him next.