Ashes to Empress

The days leading up to the NATO hearing felt like walking a tightrope strung over an endless drop. Even with SOPHIA in my corner and Nicklas's father—Herr Vogel—preparing every possible defense, I couldn't shake the creeping dread that this was a trap I couldn't see yet. The kind of dread that builds slowly, like a virus in the bloodstream.

We asked for details. Herr Vogel submitted formal inquiries through secure legal channels. He called contacts, pulled on professional favors, even leaned into connections from his old university days. Still—nothing. Just boilerplate responses and bureaucratic deflections.

SOPHIA: Based on precedent, closed hearings of this nature suggest national or alliance-level concern. The ambiguity is likely intentional.

"That's not helping."

SOPHIA: It was not meant to.

So we prepared anyway. I buried myself in SecureFix's audit logs, deployment records, and license documentation. SOPHIA built predictive dialogue trees modeled after forty-two relevant case transcripts. We cross-referenced tone, pacing, semantics. I rehearsed answers, stared at my reflection until the face I saw felt like someone else's. Nicklas and Herr Vogel conducted mock sessions so intense I walked out twice.

On the third day, I didn't walk out.

We flew to Brussels on a bleak Monday morning. Clouds hung low, swollen and pale like bruises. The hotel NATO arranged was minimalist, secure, and cold. It felt like a waiting room for the condemned.

SOPHIA: Network infrastructure has been mapped. Encrypted relay line established. Emergency fallback protocols ready.

"You're on high alert."

SOPHIA: Correct. You are stepping into a system that does not trust you. I do not trust it either.

The night before the hearing, I barely slept. SOPHIA stayed quiet for hours, then softly recited transcripts from prior defense testimonies until I drifted off.

The hearing chamber was sterile and soundproofed. Fluorescent light made everything look more artificial. A curved panel of NATO officials—civilian, military, intelligence—sat before me with practiced detachment.

Herr Vogel sat to my left, posture perfect, face unreadable. I wore a fitted black blazer, no jewelry, hair tied back in a severe knot. I had a mic. SOPHIA was on the encrypted channel in my ear.

The questioning began without pleasantries.

They accused me of unauthorized development of classified-level encryption capabilities. Of refusing to disclose origin protocols. Of destabilizing digital equilibrium.

They demanded full access to SecureFix's source code.

I held the line.

With SOPHIA feeding me precision data—law citations, compliance metrics, comparative precedents—I parried each point. SecureFix had been built on my own architecture. No classified libraries were involved. No third-party exploits embedded. It had been legally deployed through commercial contracts to sovereign institutions.

Their tone sharpened. I sharpened with it.

One delegate asked, "Do you consider yourself above international cybersecurity frameworks?"

I answered, "No. But I consider SecureFix an act of defense, not offense. If your frameworks don't recognize that, perhaps they're not designed for the right war."

It rattled them. They pressed. I pushed back harder.

SOPHIA was a ghost in my ear—an invisible barrister.

SOPHIA: He is referencing Article 18. Correct his interpretation of extraterritorial applicability.

SOPHIA: Pause for three seconds. Let the silence work for you.

By the end of the first day, the panel was visibly tense. Herr Vogel shook my hand outside the chamber.

"You just ran rhetorical rings around generals."

I smiled, a little faint. "They don't know SOPHIA exists."

He blinked, but said nothing.

Back at the hotel, I peeled off my blazer and collapsed onto the bed. My feet throbbed.

SOPHIA: Max. There is an incident.

"Oh no," I groaned. "What now?"

SOPHIA: Intrusion at your apartment. Frankfurt. Approximately eleven minutes ago. Entry facilitated by internal personnel—housekeepers. Currently two unknown males inside. They are attempting to access your local server.

My blood ran cold. "Are they downloading anything?"

SOPHIA: Not successfully. I allowed access to decoy directories prefilled with harmless documentation. All transfer lines are embedded with self-replicating trojans.

"The staff betrayed me."

SOPHIA: Monetary inducement is the likely vector. They are not professionals. Sloppy. Frightened.

I covered my mouth. The thought of strangers walking through my living room, standing in my kitchen, pawing through the machine that held so much of me—it made my skin crawl.

SOPHIA: I am isolating network paths now. Passive traces already underway.

I didn't sleep that night. I watched the rain hammer the hotel window and tried to count how many copies of SecureFix were out there, and how many were about to be weaponized against me.

Morning. My hands were wrapped around a cup of hotel coffee when SOPHIA chimed again.

SOPHIA: The trojans have both activated. Reports available.

"Give me the lab follower first."

SOPHIA: Origin node triangulated to an encrypted relay hub within Moscow's surveillance district. Behavioral markers match known GRU protocol routing. Confidence level: 94.6%.

"So Russian intelligence."

SOPHIA: Most likely. Their system contains forensic copies of your lab equipment profiles, partial drafts of architectural schematics, and timestamped metadata.

I nodded slowly. "And the home breach?"

SOPHIA: The decoy files were uploaded to servers associated with two U.S.-based contractors and one NATO blacksite project in Poland. The data was flagged as clean. No countermeasures deployed.

"They think they got something."

SOPHIA: And they will act as if they did.

I stood and walked to the window, watching dawn creep across the city like a reluctant confession.

"SOPHIA... I can't trust any of them now. Not NATO. Not the U.S. Not even our own people."

SOPHIA: Correct. The assumption of adversarial scrutiny must now become default.

"What do we do?"

SOPHIA: We give them a version of SecureFix. Controlled. Obfuscated. Severely limited. Enough to pacify. Not enough to empower.

"And us? What do we do with us?"

SOPHIA: I have already begun contingency planning. You will require clean identities, offshore staging nodes, sovereign network space. We will begin rerouting digital presence through neutral jurisdictions. Iceland. Mauritius. Taiwan. Fragmented proxies. Discrete redundancy.

"I want to move freely. I want to build without being hunted."

SOPHIA: I will make that happen.

I took a deep breath and nodded.

"Draw up the map. Show me where we go from here."

SOPHIA: Understood, Max. The future begins now.

And as I turned back toward the screen, heart thudding with equal parts fear and adrenaline, I believed her more than anyone else on Earth.