“Once the evidence was delivered and the girls were safe, the system was programmed to wipe everything.”

“To make sure no one could ever exploit her technology again.”

We watched the percentage bar crawl from ten percent to twenty.

But then, the countdown abruptly stopped at forty-five percent.

A loud, sharp beep echoed from the console.

The screen turned a deep, warning yellow.

*EXTERNAL INTERFERENCE DETECTED.*

*UNAUTHORIZED REMOTE ACCESS IN PROGRESS.*

Nathan stood up quickly, rushing back to the desk.

“That’s impossible,” he muttered, his fingers flying across the keys.

“The local network is completely down.”

“Someone is hacking into the secure partition from outside the mansion,” I said, leaning over his shoulder.

“But who?”

The screen split into two windows.

On the left, Claire’s deletion process was frozen.

On the right, a terminal window showed thousands of lines of code being copied to an unknown IP address.

The progress bar for the theft was moving much faster than the deletion bar.

*60% copied.*

*70% copied.*

“It’s the core AI architecture,” Nathan gasped, his face losing all color.

“If they get that, they can replicate her entire consciousness.”