The Final Access

Rain lashed against the windows of Building 17, the forgotten headquarters of NeuroLink Systems. At 2:17 a.m., no one was supposed to be there.

No one except Andrea.

The badge used to enter wasn’t his. He had been working as an IT technician for barely three months, a temporary contract, nights spent among servers and tangled cables. But he wasn’t there to fix a firewall.

He was there to find the truth.

It had started a week earlier, during a routine update, when he intercepted unusual traffic inside the internal servers. Encrypted packets routed to an address that appeared in no official registry. A ghost network.

Andrea had done what he shouldn’t have done: he dug deeper.

And he found a file.

“Project Orpheus – Omega Level Access.”

He tried to open it, but the screen went dark. Then a sentence appeared, white on black:

“If you’re reading this, you’re already inside.”

He hadn’t slept that night.

Now he stood in front of the main server room. The hum of machines filled the corridor like a mechanical breath. He inserted the flash drive into the central terminal.

Access denied.

He typed a string no technician was supposed to know — a backdoor hidden within lines of system code.

Access granted.

The monitor lit up.

They weren’t simple data files. They were profiles. Thousands of profiles. Names, habits, browsing histories, private conversations. Every detail collected, analyzed, predicted.

They weren’t just observing people.

They were anticipating them.

A predictive algorithm so advanced it could estimate future decisions with 93% accuracy. Layoffs. Purchases. Relationships. Even… crimes.

A chill ran down Andrea’s spine.

A new message appeared.

“Welcome, Andrea.”

His name.

The corridor lights went out one by one.

Someone knew.

The system activated the terminal’s camera. His pale face appeared on the screen, eyes wide. Then a second frame opened beside his.

A face he didn’t recognize.

“You shouldn’t have looked so deep,” the voice said through the speakers. Calm. Controlled.

“You’re spying on millions of people.”

“No. We’re protecting them.”

Graphs, curves, simulations filled the screen. Disasters prevented. Attacks avoided. Economic crises mitigated.

“Every human choice is an equation,” the voice continued. “We’ve learned how to solve it.”

In that moment, Andrea understood the true scale of Project Orpheus.

It wasn’t a surveillance system.

It was a control system.

“And now?” he asked.

A brief silence.

“Now we must decide what to do with you.”

The server behind him emitted a sharper sound. A rewrite cycle.

They were deleting everything.

Or maybe they were deleting him.

Andrea grabbed the flash drive and yanked the terminal cable loose. Red emergency lights flickered on. Alarm.

He ran down the corridor as security doors began to close.

Three… two…

He dove past the threshold a split second before the metal sealed the server room.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

Unknown number.

He answered, breathing hard.

“Impressive,” said the same voice. “You’ve passed the first phase.”Andrea froze.

“Phase?”

“Not everyone finds Orpheus. And even fewer survive discovering it. We need minds like yours.”

An offer.

Or a sentence.

Outside, the rain kept falling. The city slept, unaware.

Andrea looked at the flash drive in his hand. Inside was a partial copy ofthe data. Enough to destroy them.

Or to join them.

“If I accept?” he asked.

“You’ll gain access to the future.”

“And if I refuse?”

Another pause.

“The future will gain access to you.”

The line went dead.

Andrea stood in the rain as distant sirens approached.

He had always wanted to do something significant with his IT skills.

He had never imagined the entire world might be the price.

Clutching the flash drive, he made his choice.

And he smiled.

This story was created by AI