Chapter 61 - The Awakening of the Prime Conduit
A deafening groan echoed from the bedrock. The transparent floor shuddered violently as a jet of superheated plasma surged through the containment channels circling the circular platform. Steam hissed through pressure valves, filling the air with the scent of ozone and scorching copper.
"Warning: Unregistered data injection detected in Sector Zero," the Spire’s central operating system flared across every transparent monitor. "Firewall suppression active. Rejection protocol initiating."
"Let it reject us," Marcos muttered, his left hand locking onto Mateo’s shoulder while his right danced through thousands of lines of raw algorithmic countermeasures. "The Blue Folder was never meant to hack the Genesis network from the outside. Mother built the Genesis architecture around the Blue Folder’s encryption keys."
Aurelius lunged toward the console, his fingers hooked like talons, desperate to rip the physical drive from the slot. "Touch that terminal again and I will throw both of you into the trench!"
Before the mad patriarch could cross the three-meter gap, Álvaro hurled himself forward. Using the last reserves of his battered strength, the deadbeat father wrapped his arms around Aurelius’s knees, dragging the older man violently down to the steel deck.
"Get off me, you useless parasite!" Aurelius roared, slamming his heavy brass cane against Álvaro’s shoulder. Bone cracked beneath the impact, but Álvaro’s grip only tightened.
"I spent my entire life being your obedient shadow," Álvaro snarled, blood spraying from his lips as he bore down on his father with frantic, desperate weight. "I abandoned my own flesh and blood to prove I was worthy of your sick empire! But I won't let you murder them! Mateo! Marcos! Shut it down! Don't look at me—shut it down!"
The twins did not waste a single millisecond on sentimentality. Their minds operated in symphonic synchronization. Mateo took command of the primary vector calculations, routing the anomalous energy into secondary dissipation chambers, while Marcos targeted the planetary transmitter’s harmonic lock.
"The resonance key is anchored to Mother’s voice frequency," Mateo called out, his eyes darting across cascading red alerts. "Aurelius locked the manual override behind an encrypted voice-print."
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"A voice-print he recorded before her disappearance," Marcos added grimly. "He synthesized her tone, but he corrupted the inflection. The system is rejecting his command because the emotional harmonic is synthetic."
"Then we give it the original," Mateo said. He pressed his palm against the titanium drive. "File seventy-four. The recording from our fifth birthday."
