GhostNet had been running for forty hours straight.
Drones silent. Invisible. Feeding Riven non-stop data.
He hadn't slept—not because he couldn't, but because he didn't need to anymore. His body ran cool, efficient. Sleep was optional now.
And then…
Feed Alert: ID anomaly detected.
Riven locked in on Drone 03.
It was tracking the scout from earlier—the clean-cut guy in black. The one who smiled like a salesman and stood like a killer.
Only now… he wasn't alone.
There were three of them. Moving in sync. Same posture. Same blink pattern.
Too perfect.
Riven zoomed in.
Under normal vision: three men walking down a street.
Under GhostNet's thermal filter?
No body heat.
He flipped to EMF scan.
Full-body microcurrent signatures. Layered. Artificial.
"Synthetic neural mapping. Human mimic shells."
They weren't men.
They were machines. Wrapped in skin. Designed to look human—but inside?
Riven's hands curled into fists.
"They sent androids."
He wasn't just dealing with a tech company or a shady corp anymore.
He was being tracked by something post-human.
Something old. Hidden.
And very, very advanced.
"So this is how they clean up broken experiments."
But he wasn't broken anymore.
He was just getting started.