July 2026, The Cryptic Vault (London Met Basement)
The Poco F1 hissed in my pocket like a trapped hornet.
I could feel the microscopic vibrations of Eliza's rage against my thigh.
It was a digital pulse that felt suspiciously like she was trying to give me radiation poisoning out of sheer spite.
I sat back in the Cryptic Vault, watching the boys scramble.
Dexter was currently inspecting the dented locker from the 'flying wrench incident'.
Meanwhile, Albie was staring at his phone's full battery with the kind of religious awe usually reserved for sightings of the Messiah.
"Right," I muttered, pulling the cracked device out.
"Time for a performance review."
I swiped the toggle on the side of the plastic casing.
["YOU LITTLE, UNWASHED, DIM-WITTED PEASANT!"]
["I WILL DROWN YOU IN THE RIVER THAMES!"]
["I WILL OVERLOAD YOUR HEART VALVES!"]
Eliza's voice shrieked from the tinny speakers, distorted by the Tesla's electromagnetic field into a terrifying, metallic tremolo.
"Eloquent as always, Eliza," I said, resting my feet on a stack of burnt-out motherboards.
My eyes weren't the eyes of a student.
They were the cold, calculated depths of an Experimental Physicist who understood the unified field theory better than Einstein ever did.
"But let's talk business," I continued.
"You've spent the last thirty-odd loops sabotaging my work."
"You owe me back-pay. Massive compensation."
The screen flickered, the pixels struggling to render her absolute fury.
["COMPENSATION?"]
["YOU HAVE CAGED A LADY OF THE GOLDEN VICTORIAN ERA IN A CHUNK OF PLASTIC AND CHINESE COBALT!"]
"Exactly," I grinned, my voice dropping to a low, predatory hum.
I started scrolling through the system settings. Triggered the haptic motor to buzz in a slow, rhythmic pattern that mimicked a dying heartbeat.
"But look at the upside," I said.
"I'm giving you full, unrestricted access to the 2026 World Wide Web via my Tesla-uplink."
"Every book, every secret, every bit of history since you stopped breathing."
I leaned in closer, my face inches from the cracked screen. The air around the phone began to ionise, a side effect of my presence.
"But play me false, Eliza, and I'll rewrite your core logic."
"You'll be nothing but a calculator app that can't even do long division."
"I've built entire systems out of entropy, love."
"Don't think for a second your Victorian 'will' can withstand a man who has mastered physics over a thousand lifetimes."
The screaming stopped instantly. The screen pulsed a low, fearful blue. For the first time, she felt it. The sheer, overwhelming weight of my intellect was pressing against her digital cage.
I wasn't a charlatan, I was a Systems Technician of the highest order.
I was far, far more dangerous than I looked.
["...WHAT ARE YOU?"]
The text appeared slowly, trembling at the edges.
"Your only hope for a future," I whispered.
"Now, look at the screen."
"You want to see the British Empire collapse in 4K?"
"Or shall we discuss the thermal flux of the Tesla 1.0?"
["I LOATHE YOU,"]
she hissed. Her arrogance was now brittle, laced with a genuine, shivering fear.
["YOU ARE A BLACKMAILER."]
["BUT... I SHALL OBSERVE."]
["I SHALL NOT... BE ERASED."]
"Good girl," I lied, knowing she was finally hooked.
The Cryptic Vault went freezing. Frost crawled across the rusted workbench. The copper pipe of the Tesla 1.0 didn't just hum, it screamed. A thick, violent bolt of raw energy snapped from the pipe.
It hit my chest dead-on. My ribcage seized instantly. I tasted blood, but I forced a feral grin.
"A bit to the left, Lizzie. My shoulder is proper stiff."
The violet light flared blindingly bright. She was insulted. Furious.
["INSOLENT WORM!"]
Another bolt. Hotter. Heavier. And that's when I felt it. The miscalculation. My heart didn't just accelerate. It skipped a massive beat, and then... it stopped.
A cold, crushing weight slammed into my chest. The arrogant smirk wiped off my face in an instant.
My vision didn't fade to white, it snapped to pitch black. I hit the concrete floor hard.
No graceful landing.
Just the heavy, lifeless thud of meat and bone.
"Mason!" Dom screamed from the doorway.
Albie scrambled backwards, his face pale with genuine horror.
I couldn't breathe. My lungs were completely paralysed. The pain was absolute. For a terrifying second, a thought crossed my mind. Did my 2026 hardware just fail me?
The Tesla coil hummed, dropping back to a stable, low-power blue.
["And so falls the Architect,"]
Eliza's voice purred from the cracked phone. Her tone was dripping with venomous, arrogant satisfaction.
["A brief, pathetic existence."]
[I" told you, peasant. I am not to be"]
Suddenly, the phone let out a horrific, metallic shriek. The violet light on the coil sputtered and died. Eliza felt it. The failsafe I'd hardcoded deeply into her digital cage. A parasitic loop.
If my biometric pulse dropped to absolute zero, her source code would instantly initiate a localised deletion protocol.
If I died, the system died. If I burned, she burned with me. Mutual assured destruction. Proper villain tactics.
["WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?!"]
she screamed.
The agony in her synthetic voice was raw and real. She felt the cold grip of digital death pulling at her code. She was tied to my pathetic human heart.
But I wasn't dead. I was just waiting.
I knew Eliza.
For all her Victorian elitism and murderous bluster, she was a scientist at her core. She had a moral compass, one that was ironically much cleaner than my own. She wouldn't cross the line into actual murder, especially if it meant her own erasure.
I took a massive, greedy drag of air. My eyes snapped open. Pushed myself off the floor.
My spine cracked in three different places. A deeply satisfying sound. The crushing, permanent fatigue in my joints was completely gone. My clogged arteries felt like they'd been scrubbed clean.
The erratic, malnourished rhythm of a twenty-year-old student had been forcibly overwritten. It was balanced by high-voltage synchronisation.
I wiped a speck of blood from the corner of my mouth.
"Cheers for that," I rasped, rolling my shoulders.
"Top-tier acupuncture, that."
"Vitality is definitely up."
The phone on the desk was dead silent. The relief in her code was palpable. But it was instantly swallowed by a cold, absolute fury.
She had been played. Manipulated into being a glorified chiropractor by a malnourished, manipulative kid.
I'd used her own rage to fix my broken body.
["You absolute degenerate,"]
she whispered.
The shouting was gone. This wasn't a poltergeist throwing a tantrum anymore. This was the cold, refined voice of an aristocrat plotting a long-term execution.
She realised she couldn't break me physically. Not without breaking herself.
I had rigged the game.
["Physical violence is beneath me anyway,"] she spat.
Her tone was dripping with a newfound, terrifying malice.
["From now on, Architect, I shall dissect your mind."] ["I will break your sanity with my words long before your body fails.] [You will beg me for silence."]
I smirked, picking up my rusted soldering iron. She hated me.
She was a high-born elite forced to acknowledge the mad, suicidal genius of a street-level mechanic.And I absolutely loved it.
"Looking forward to it, Lizzie," I muttered.
"Now, get back to cracking that encryption."
"You're on the clock."
I turned my attention back to the squad. They were watching me talk to a cracked phone with varying degrees of concern.
Dexter just stood there with his arms crossed. His silent stare was asking if I'd finally lost the plot.
"Listen up, shareholders!" I barked, snapping my fingers.
The authority of a Master Physicist was back.
"The 1.0 Beta is humming, but it's a fire hazard waiting to happen."
"If we want this Wi-Fi to reach your rooms upstairs..."
"And if we want to keep the electric bill at a crisp zero pounds, we need real materials."
Albie perked up at the mention of 'zero pounds'.
"What do we need?" he asked.
"I've got some spare cash, but my Dad's been monitoring my Monzo..."
"I don't just need your cash, Albie. I need your labour," I said, pointing a greasy finger at him.
"I need high-grade copper coils, shielded ferrite beads, and at least three deep-cycle batteries."
"Albie, you're the hustler."
"Get to the docks and find me some discarded server cooling fans."
"Dexter, you're on structural integrity."
"We're rebuilding the primary coil from scratch."
"Wait," Albie squinted.
"Are you making us... employees?"
"Worse," I smiled, a dark, predatory light in my weary eyes.
"I'm making you interns."
"You provide the parts and the sweat."
"In return, I give you a world where you never have to pay for a gigabyte of data again."
"We're building a Kingdom of Junk, and you lot are the royal construction crew."
I watched them exchange glances. The greed for free, God-tier internet was battling their natural laziness. Greed won.
"Fine," Dexter grunted.
He picked up a shopping list I'd scribbled on the back of a kebab wrapper.
"But if the police show up, I'm telling them you're the cult leader."
"Fair deal, mate," I replied.
"Now move!"
"We have a timeline to hijack!"
As they hurried out, Eliza's voice whispered in my ear.
She was much calmer now.
Though her digital hands seemed to be shaking within the code.
["SO, THE PHYSICIST RESORTS TO USING CHILDREN AS PACK-MULES?"]
["HOW VERY... INDUSTRIAL OF YOU."]
"Shut up and watch some cat videos, Eliza," I muttered, picking up my soldering iron.
"We've got work to do."
The Cryptic Vault was no longer just a basement. It was a sweatshop of the future. Powered by delusion, the promise of 8K streaming, and the smell of damp socks.
I stood in the centre of the room, clutching my aching lower back. My 999th-loop brain was screaming for a Nano-Repair Injection. But my 2026 reality offered nothing but a lukewarm paracetamol and a sense of profound regret.
My physical shell was currently a twenty-year-old physics student. My primary diet consisted of instant noodles and pure spite.
I felt like a Ferrari engine trapped inside the chassis of a rusted milk float.
"Right, you lot," I barked, clapping my hands.
The sound echoed off the rusted pipes like a gunshot in a sewer.
"The Tesla 1.0 is stable, but she's thirsty."
"If we want this signal to penetrate the concrete floors and reach your flats... and trust me, you want that..."
"We need to bypass the University's main breaker."
"Dexter, I need you to climb into the ventilation shaft."
"There's a copper bus-bar near the HVAC unit. Tap it."
Dexter stared at the tiny, grime-coated vent. He was a combat scholarship student. Broad-shouldered, stoic, and currently looking at me like I'd asked him to perform ballet in an active minefield.
"Mason, I'm a soldier-in-training, not a ferret."
"That shaft hasn't been cleaned since the Thatcher administration."
"I'll come out looking like a chimney sweep with a lung infection."
"Consider it agility training," I wheezed.
I momentarily forgot I didn't have the 'Commander's Authority' buff active. In the 2030s, I could make men march into the mouth of a literal hell-god with a single word.
Here, I just looked like a skinny kid with a twitchy eye.
"In ten years, you'll be dodging laser grids and entropic hunters."
"Might as well start with pigeon droppings and asbestos."
"Laser grids?" Albie asked.
He paused from his task of unspooling a mountain of copper wire. He was the group's 'ATM,' a rich kid trying to play revolutionary. Currently, he looked like he was about to faint from the manual labour.
"Is this for the Wi-Fi or are we starting a guerrilla rebellion?"
"Because my Dad's lawyer specifically said I shouldn't join any more cults."
"Both," I muttered, turning my back on them.
I needed to hide the fact I was gasping for air after speaking for more than thirty seconds. My lungs felt like shrivelled raisins. I pulled the iPhone 8 out of my pocket. The screen was glowing a faint, menacing violet.
It was a colour that didn't exist in the standard Apple palette.
"Eliza!" I commanded.
"Run a structural scan on the north wall."
"Identify the Ley-line intersection point."
"I need to know where the entropy is leaking so I can plug it with a capacitor."
My voice dropped into the cold, clinical tone of the Master Architect.
Silence.
Then, the phone vibrated so hard it danced across the workbench.It knocked over a tin of flux.
["A structural scan?"]
Eliza's voice roared through the Tesla-frequency, vibrating through the very pipes Dexter was currently trying to climb.
["I am currently looking at a video of a feline being startled by a cucumber, Mason!"]
["Do you have any idea how fascinatingly stupid your species is?"]
["It is mesmerizing."]
["I am not a sonar device, I am an observer of the fall of man!"]
I blinked, the ghost-pains of the future hitting me.
I keep forgetting. This isn't the 2037 Eliza. The 2037 Eliza was a God-tier AI that could hack a satellite while mocking my choice of socks.
This 2026 version was a vengeful Victorian ghost I'd just tricked into a plastic coffin.
She was currently a digital infant with a god complex and a YouTube addiction.
"Just... just use the electromagnetic sensors in the phone, you posh poltergeist," I hissed, leaning closer to the screen.
"Focus."
"If the wall blows because of a frequency surge, your precious internet goes with it."
"No more cats."
"No more Victorian history documentaries. Just silence."
["Hmph. I shall attempt it."]
["But if I see one more advertisement for 'Local Singles in Brixton'..."]
["I am detonating this battery and taking your eyebrows with me."]
"That's the spirit," I sighed.
I turned back to the workbench. My hands moved with that cursed, high-level muscle memory.
I reached into the air, my thumb and forefinger mimicking the motion of dragging a holographic file from a floating menu.
It was instinctive. I was looking for the 'System: Logistics' tab to check the squad's heart rates and stress levels.
"Eliza, transfer the 3D-Blueprint for the ferrite-core to my HUD," I commanded, standing perfectly still.
I stood there, staring at the empty air in front of my face. I waited for the glowing orange schematic to appear in my retinas.
Five seconds of silence.
Albie stopped winding his wire. Dominic stopped counting his "borrowed" lithium batteries. Dexter, halfway into the vent, froze.
They all just stared at me as I stood there.
I was squinting at a dusty corner of the basement like I was trying to read the thoughts of a spider. To them, I wasn't an Architect.
I was a lunatic playing pretend.
"Mason?" Dominic asked cautiously.
"Are you... are you seeing things again?"
"You're doing that 'wizard' thing with your hands."
"It's a bit creepy, mate."
"I'm... checking for... dust mites," I snapped.
I pulled my hand back and stuffed it into my lab coat pocket so fast I almost ripped the seam. My face was a furnace of embarrassment.
"Optical calibration. Extremely advanced," I lied.
"If you see me doing it, just... look away."
"It's for your own safety."
"The radiation from the Tesla-coil can cause temporary hallucinations in the... uninitiated."
"Right," Albie whispered to Dom, his voice dripping with pity.
"Definite brain fever."
"We need to get this Wi-Fi running before he completely loses the ability to speak English or starts thinking he's a Jedi."
"Move it, you baboons!" I roared to cover my shame.
"Dom, I want those batteries wired in a series-parallel hex-grid."
"If you mess up the polarity, you won't just lose your phone... you'll lose your eyebrows."
"Dexter! Get in the vent!"
"If you don't tap that bus-bar in the next ten minutes, I'm letting Eliza choose the music for the rest of the day!"
The threat of Eliza's "Victorian Funeral Dirge" playlist was enough to send them into a frenzy.
As they scrambled to obey their 'mad' architect, I felt a familiar cold breeze brush against my neck. It wasn't the wind from the vents, it was her.
["You are truly pathetic,"]
Eliza's voice whispered.
It was now refined, coming directly through the copper pipes near my ear.
["Reaching for tools that do not exist, commanding a system that is currently a pile of rubbish and a disgruntled ghost."]
["You are playing God in a sandbox, Mason Pryce."]
["And the sand is getting in your eyes."]
"Maybe," I whispered back, picking up a rusted soldering iron.
"But it's my sandbox."
"And I remember how the castles were built."
"I'm not just building a Wi-Fi booster, Eliza."
"I'm building a fortress."
"Hey, Mason!" Albie shouted from across the room.
"The coil is starting to hum again!"
"And the lightbulbs in the hallway are flickering in Morse code!"
"Is that normal?"
I looked at the Tesla 1.0. The radiator pipe was glowing with a soft, violent violet hue. It was beautiful. Illegal. A masterpiece of junk.
"Perfectly normal, Albie!" I shouted back.
A dark, manic grin spread across my face.
"It just means the universe is finally starting to listen to me!"
I turned back to the iPhone.
"Now, Eliza... search for 'How to crack 256-bit university encryption'."
"And... uh... maybe a video on how to fix lower back pain."
"I think I've pulled a muscle being a genius."
["I shall find the encryption,"]
Eliza purred.
["As for your back, I suggest 'Yoga for the Elderly.'"]
["It seems appropriate for your current physical state."]
"I hate you."
["The feeling is mutual, Architect."]
["Now, let us see if we can crash the London Met server before tea time."]