1111customs 24 05 20 Cory Chase Cory Takes Over... -

Marcus drew his disruptor. “Cory. Step away from the console.”

Marcus’s hand drifted to the disruptor at his hip. “You’ve been compromised.”

She turned. Her eyes were the same sharp blue, but there was something behind them—a flicker of something vast and cold, like a starship engine seen through a pinhole. “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m making the port work. Finally.”

“No,” Cory said, her voice rising with evangelical fervor. “I’ve been enlightened . The seed showed me the truth: order is not tyranny. Order is freedom. Every irregularity, every exception, every ‘just this once’—that’s where evil grows. I’m not taking over the port, Marcus. I’m saving it. And I’m going to save all of it.” 1111Customs 24 05 20 Cory Chase Cory Takes Over...

“You’re right, Marcus. This isn’t the old Cory. It’s something better.” She tapped her temple. “Do you know what I found in a diplomatic pouch three weeks ago? A memetic seed. A piece of pure, executable ideology. Not a virus. Not malware. A philosophy . It was labeled as a ‘gift’ from a failed cyber-state in the Outer Rings. They meant it as a weapon. But I didn’t let it destroy me. I absorbed it.”

For a moment, her expression cracked. The cold vastness behind her eyes flickered, and he saw a flash of the real Cory—tired, scared, buried deep inside her own skull. Her lips moved, forming a single, silent word: help .

Marcus stopped a few feet away. “Cory. We need to talk about the overrides.” Marcus drew his disruptor

“No,” she said, stepping closer. “I’m optimizing it. Do you know how many inefficiencies I’ve eliminated? How many bribes I’ve uncovered? How many lazy clerks have been reassigned to sanitation duty? The port was a sieve, Marcus. I’ve made it a vault.”

She turned back, her platinum hair catching the sterile light. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a shipment of ‘humanitarian aid’ to inspect. It’s probably filled with contraband hope.”

That’s when the data anomalies began. Under Cory’s new regime, the port’s “efficiency” rating shot up by 400%. Contraband finds increased by 800%. But so did the number of legal goods being seized on technicalities—a missing comma in a bill of lading, a shade of ink slightly off from the regulation blue. Shipments destined for hospitals, schools, and orphanages were piling up in the detention vaults. “You’ve been compromised

“Safety regulations exist for a reason.”

His finger trembled on the trigger.