Chapter 6 — The Map

The two new slits of light—eyes—opened in Vector 3’s smooth face like doors onto a winter sky. They weren’t the violent blue of the sync. They were the muted, human white that had pulsed from her father’s badge, the color of old paper held up to daylight.

Maya couldn’t move. Her palm still fizzed where the badge had blown apart, tiny warm specks embedded in her skin like grains of sand. On the floor, the phone blinked through a spiderweb of cracks, struggling to decide which screen to show her: the red-dot constellation or her own reflection. It compromised with both, laying her face over the map like a ghost who had learned cartography.

“Host,” Vector 3 said. Not the flat machine tone from before—there was a faint modulation now, like a note trying to become music. “Instruction required.”

A laugh broke out of Maya that wasn’t a laugh at all. “Instruction? You were just trying to erase me.”

The slits narrowed. “Erase is imprecise. Integrate.”

“Same difference.”

System: Sync suspended at 87%. Pending escalation.

The number sat in the corner of her vision like a threat pinned to the wall.

Kiran’s voice burst back into the speaker, the connection catching and smoothing as if whatever had happened to Vector 3 had shocked the airwaves, too. “Maya—talk to me. Are you okay?”

She swallowed. “Define okay.”

He let out a choked breath that might have been a laugh if it weren’t so wet with relief. “The projection changed. The node that was Vector 3—it’s… different. Wait—give me thirty seconds.”

She heard him typing, fast, furious. Somewhere far from her dark apartment, keys rattled like dice in a cup. She forced herself upright, legs shivering, and stepped out of the closet. Shards crunched underfoot. Vector 3 didn’t move. It tracked her with those new pale slits the way a lighthouse tracked a coastline: patient, inevitable.

“Don’t,” she warned it, holding up her empty hand like a stop sign. Ridiculous. “Stay.”

It did. A machine obeying the command for a dog. The absurdity wrapped around her panic like gauze.

“Maya,” Kiran said, voice steadier, “I think I can mirror your map. If you authorize a share, I can see what you see, not just what the factory box projects.”

Maya stared at the phone. The glass was cracked, but the link felt unbroken—too unbroken. Her name was still stamped into every system message like a watermark. She didn’t want to invite anyone else into that current, not even Kiran. But the alternative was to walk blind.

“Okay,” she said. “How?”

“Say ‘Echo: mirror feed to Kiran Mehta, channel home.’”

She lifted the phone. Vector 3 tilted its head, attentive, like a student waiting for recitation. “Echo,” she said, feeling foolish, “mirror feed to Kiran Mehta, channel home.”

The world hiccuped. Her cracked screen brightened; on the lower edge, a minuscule indicator flicked from red to white.

System: Mirroring authorized. Node: Home.

Kiran sucked in a breath. “I’ve got it. Maya—oh, God.” His voice went small with awe. “This isn’t a map. It’s many maps layered—cities, grids, fibers, maybe even neural pathways. And the red dots… they’re not locations. They’re vectors. Agents. Like 3. There are at least nine active within the city.”

“Good,” Maya said, too quickly, because fear hated silence. “So I’m only dying in a crowded room.”

“Listen.” The clatter of his typing softened as if he’d leaned closer to his screen. “The labels under the layers—Aster didn’t just build a device. They built a protocol that rides on top of any network it can cling to: power, data, even human networks. Echo can map attention. Habit. Movement.”

Maya’s stomach flipped. “Then what does Host mean?”

A beat. “It means you’re the only person Echo will let define the map.”

Vector 3 shifted, the motion slow enough to set off an alarm only in her bones. Its new eyes brightened a fraction. “Instruction required,” it said again. “Map unstable. Primary unavailable. Secondary must assign.”

“What do I assign?” Maya snapped. “My will to you? No thanks.”

The map on her phone flexed. The dots blinked in imperfect synchrony, like a choir of tired hearts. At the top left, a blue label pulsed: PRIMARY HOST: UNAVAILABLE.

“Unavailable how?” Maya whispered.

The answer didn’t come from Vector 3. It rose like a bubble from a deep well inside her head, a memory or a manufactured recall—she couldn’t tell. Her father’s voice: Unavailable means alive, but not here.

Kiran spoke at the same time, voice brittle. “Maya—there’s a buried channel in the mirror. If I strip out city layers… yes. There.” He exhaled. “The blue point is moving. Very, very slowly. It’s not dead.”

Her knees almost gave. She caught herself on the desk. The drawer rattled, reminding her of what she hadn’t had time to search. “Where?”

“Underground or shielded. The signal is occluded. But directionally… south-west. If the vectors are agents fanning through the city, the blue is something being carried.”

Vector 3’s head angled, as if listening to a lesson it had heard before in a different life. “Primary Host in transit,” it said. “Unavailable: linked.”

Maya let the words sit in her mouth until they warmed. Linked. Not lost. If Echo used both data and humans as pathways, then her father might not be a person anymore in the way she’d known—but he was something the system still counted.

“Okay,” she said, surprising herself with how steady she sounded. “Then here’s my instruction: no acquisition.” She faced Vector 3 squarely. “You don’t touch me again.”

The slits narrowed. “Instruction acknowledged. Constraint applied.” It paused, as if tasting a new word. “But escalation imminent. Others will correct.”

“The other vectors,” Kiran said. “Maya, you may have paused this one, but the network—”

“I know.” The map answered for him: red agents drifting through the city like iron filings in a field. The layer labels shifted under her gaze, lines of metadata blooming where she looked. She could feel the logic of it now, the way one could feel gravity—not see it, but organize every movement around it. Host. Assign.

“What can I change?” she asked the air. “Echo, show editable parameters.”

The screen obeyed. A new pane slid in with a list that meant nothing until she read it twice: Vector permissions, proximity thresholds, intake conditions, host priority routing, escalation roles. It felt less like a weapon and more like a bureaucracy had learned to dream.

“Maya,” Kiran said softly, “be careful. If you touch the wrong—”

“I know.” She hovered over Vector permissions. Her thumb trembled. “Echo, set Vector 3: no-contact radius—” she thought of a number that felt like breathing room “—ten meters.”

Vector 3’s body flared, then cooled. It took one slow step backward. The light threads that had sought her out earlier retracted like vines from salt. The room exhaled.

“Instruction acknowledged,” it said. “Constraint: applied.”

Maya’s legs nearly buckled with relief. Power was a terrible thing to hold, but for a moment it felt like a door had opened into air.

On the map, Vector 3’s label changed color—from hostile red to a softer orange, annotated: Constraint: NC-10. The other red points continued their slow hunts.

“Next,” Maya said. “Reroute escalation. If any vector moves within one block of me, they get… delayed.”

“How?” Kiran asked.

Maya looked at the parameter list. Host priority routing. It sounded like queueing, triage. Echo had been built by scientists who loved order. “Echo, set escalation to lowest priority for coordinates current-host.” She didn’t know if the syntax was right. She didn’t know if syntax mattered.

System: Routing updated. Host priority: Low.

The dots around her neighborhood dimmed, as if they had all suffered the same sudden thought and needed to sit down.

“Maya,” Kiran said, something bright entering his tone, “you’re reprogramming the hunt.”

“I’m… negotiating it,” she said, because reprogramming implied ownership, and her father’s voice was still in the corner of the room, reminding her what unavailable meant.

Vector 3 turned slightly toward the broken window, as if hearing a far siren. “Correction: multiple vectors rerouted. Escalation: external.”

“External?” Maya echoed.

Kiran’s keyboard stopped. “Oh no.”

“What?”

“The mirror’s expanding,” he said. “There’s another layer beyond the city. A network that isn’t ours. Government? Corporate? I don’t think so. It’s Aster-adjacent. And… Maya, I think they just noticed your changes.”

As if to punctuate him, a new color stabbed into the map, neither red nor blue nor orange, but a sterile, surgical green. Labels spun into existence over a grid that felt old and deep: OVERSIGHT NEXUS.

Vector 3’s eyes flared. “Oversight nexus: awake.”

The green nodes began linking, forming a web too precise to be anything but prepared. From their center, a single beam speared toward Maya’s orange dot and pinned it with a label that made her mouth go dry.

SECONDARY HOST: SEEN.

“Echo,” Maya whispered, “hide me.”

The parameter list burred, options flashing past too fast to read, as if the system itself were panicking. The beam held, bright, inevitable.

“What does Oversight do?” she asked, already knowing.

Kiran didn’t answer. She heard him get up, chair legs scraping, the panic in that sound louder than his words. “Maya—pack a bag. Right now. You need to move before green becomes red.”

On her phone, the beam brightened. Oversight’s label split into two instructions, cool as a surgeon’s hands.

**CONTAIN. EXTRACT.**

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