It started with a handshake.
A builder named Leo from Zone 8 shook hands with an Echo technician.
The next day, every schematic Leo had uploaded… was gone.
The next?A partial collapse of the Floating Grid Tower in Zone 11.
"We verified him," Ash said, slamming the biometric logs."He passed the Echo Key. He built real things."
Riven frowned.
"But his mind wasn't his own."
Proxy Infiltrators.
Builders conditioned by rival corps. Echo-fake agents with real tools, implanted with sleeper protocols.
Not robots. Not clones.
Humans. Turned into trojans.
Every handshake. Every hug. Every shared tool kit—potential contamination.
Trust began to crack.
But Riven refused to go full surveillance.
Instead, he proposed a new system:
"The Mirror Test."
A challenge issued to every contributor.
You'd build something in isolation.
EchoNet would then recreate it—with only your data pattern and builder rhythm.
If it matched: you were real.
If it didn't… you were a Proxy.
The first scan caught twelve agents.
Each one silently wired into old-world governments.
One confessed before disappearing from the grid:
"We weren't here to destroy your system. We were here to own it from inside."
Riven deployed a countermeasure.
Not a firewall.
Not a purge.
A signal—beamed into every builder's Echo node.
It was a phrase, but more: a feeling.
"You don't need to prove you're not corrupted.You need to build something that can't be faked."
And across the planet…EchoNet lit up again.