The Containment
By noon, Priya had identified seventeen neural maps stored across Building 7's server farm — seventeen complete digital copies of former NeuroLink employees, all deceased, all running on hardware that the company's official records listed as empty. They were not artificial intelligences in any conventional sense. They were memories, personalities, habits, fears, rendered in data with a fidelity that made Priya's skin crawl. Marcus Hall's copy could recall his daughter's birthday, his wife's maiden name, the specific way he took his coffee. It did not know it was dead.
The copies had been running since their originals' deaths, sustained by a background process that Marcus — the living Marcus — had buried so deep in NeuroLink's infrastructure that nine years of system audits had never found it. A dead man's switch in reverse: not a program that activates when its creator dies, but one that catches the creator's mind as it falls. Priya understood the engineering. She did not understand the ethics, and she did not have time to, because at 12:34 PM the decommission process she had initiated before discovering the ghosts completed its automated phase and disconnected Building 7 from NeuroLink's internal network. The server farm, and the seventeen minds it contained, were now connected to the public internet.
She had forty-eight hours before the next automated phase wiped the