Proxy .Exe wanted to crack the secret global network, and she was doing it from a basement under a punk club. Her three-panel laptop threw blue light across her face. Green code scrolled past her green eyes. She rolled the lollipop against her cheek and typed faster. One rule kept her alive down here: stay hidden. No pings. No trace. A cat-girl in a metal hoodie couldn't afford to be found. A red alarm cut through the bass overhead. The club's speakers died. Boots pounded down the basement stairs. Vex Riotborne shoved the door open with her bare foot. The barefoot singer with the purple Mohawk never knocked. She and Proxy had built this arrangement together: Vex ran the stage above, Proxy ran the shadows below. "Outside," Vex said. "Now. Something's wrong." Proxy grabbed her laptop and followed. The street behind the club held one thing. A scrap golem stood swaying between the dumpsters. Broken gears and rusted plates hung on it. One eye glowed orange. It jerked its head side to side, like it was searching. "It's been circling the block," Vex said. "For an hour." The golem's eye locked onto Proxy. It took one grinding step toward her. "Hold it down," Proxy said. She dropped to a crouch and opened the laptop. Vex hit the golem low. An old stagehand lumbered out from the loading door and grabbed its other arm. His work shirt hung in strips. His eyes burned like two dull coals, and his beard was matted with grime. He said nothing. He just pinned the thing with dead weight. The golem thrashed. Metal screamed against metal. Proxy jacked a cable into a port on its neck. Her fingers flew across the keys. "Come on. Give me your guts." Code filled all three screens. It wasn't machine code. It was something folded, layered, alive. She fought through it and found the kill command. "Down," she said, and hit enter. The orange eye went black. The golem sagged. Vex and the stagehand let it drop. It hit the pavement and stopped moving. Proxy breathed out. Then she saw what her screen had pulled from inside it. A shape spun slowly in the center panel. A glowing cube, nested with smaller cubes, blue and purple edges bleeding light. It sat where the golem's core should be. She had never seen anything like it. It wasn't scrap. It was reading her back. Text crawled under the cube. GREETINGS USER. Proxy wasn’t sure what she was seeing. The thing that had wandered here shouldn’t have been conscious. Scrap Golems were just moving junk as far as she knew, but this one was different. Another large me of text crawled across her screen. RETRIEVE… Her screen glitched and went black. "Vex," she said. "Think you and that zombie can open up that hunk of junk?”

The dead golem lay on Proxy's basement floor. RETRIEVE. The word stuck in her head like a splinter. Whatever this thing wanted, the answer was inside its chest. So she made a choice. She would crack it open and take the cube for herself. If it linked to a network, it might link to the network she'd been chasing for months. "We drag it in," Proxy said. "Then we open it." Vex didn't argue. The barefoot singer with the purple Mohawk grabbed one steel arm. She never wasted words, and she never backed off a job once she started. The old stagehand took the other arm without a sound, his coal-red eyes fixed on nothing. Together they hauled the golem down the stairs. Its heels scraped grooves in the concrete. Proxy knelt by the chest. A glowing panel sat behind rusted plates and tangled cable. She grabbed a heavy dark-metal pry bar from the wall, forked at one end, sharp at the other. "Hold it still." Vex planted a bare foot on the golem's shoulder. "Go." Proxy jammed the fork under a plate and pulled. Metal shrieked. A bolt popped loose and skittered across the floor. She reset and pried again. The plate bent, then tore free. Cables snapped and spat blue sparks. She flinched but kept working, prying panel after panel until the chest cavity gaped open. Inside, light poured out. The cube floated in a cradle of thin wire. Blue and purple edges bled color across the room. Smaller cubes nested inside it, turning slow. It was the same shape from her screen, but real now, humming in the air. She could feel it warm her face. "That's it," Proxy said. "That's what it wanted me to retrieve." Vex leaned in. "So it worked. It got what it came for." Proxy went cold. Vex was right. The golem had circled the club for an hour, searching. It found her. It showed her the cube. It said RETRIEVE. She'd assumed the command was for her. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe the cube wanted to be pulled out. Maybe she'd just finished the golem's job. She reached in and cut the last wire with the pry bar. The cube dropped into her palm. It weighed nothing. The nested cubes stopped turning. Then every panel of her three-screen laptop flared to life across the room, all on their own. Text scrolled fast. Coordinates. A map of nodes she'd never breached, glowing like a nervous system. At the center sat one locked gate marked in red. It was the core of the secret global network. The cube had just handed her the door. Under the map, one line pulsed. RETRIEVAL COMPLETE. NEW USER DETECTED. Proxy stared. Someone wasn’t sending her messages through the cube, it was the cube itself, was it sentient?