Chapter 82 - The False Pedigree
`00:06:50... 00:06:49...`
Cassidy lunged for the secondary keyboard, bypassing the main interface by stripping the terminal’s lower casing and manually bridging the terminal bus with a copper test lead. Sparks bit into her skin, but she didn’t flinch. She had rebuilt every circuit in this house while Donald slept off his hangovers in the room that was supposed to be hers.
"You're lying," Cassidy muttered under her breath, watching hexadecimal strings cascade across her monitor. "The hospital birth certificate in King County had Arthur's signature."
"Arthur was a technician, Cassidy. Nothing more," Valerie’s voice echoed through the speakers, unbothered by Cassidy’s frantic keystrokes. "He signed whatever nondisclosure agreements Cross-Continental slid across his desk. Do you want to see the original ledger? Check directory zero-seven on the archival spool. The one labeled *Vance-Legacy-Primary*."
Cassidy entered the system override command: `SUDO BYPASS /ARCHIVE/VANCE_LEGACY_07`.
The monitor split into two panels. On the left was the familiar digitized copy of her birth certificate—dated November 14th, standard county stamp, Eleanor Vance listed as the mother. But on the right, unsealing itself from an encrypted sector that had remained dormant since 1998, was a biological transfer requisition.
The document bore the official seal of the Department of Naval Research and Cross-Continental Deep-Sea Mining Consortium.
*Subject Designation: Secondary Clone / Fail-Safe Vance-02.*
*Source Donor: Valerie Vance (Age 6).*
*Surrogate Carrier: Eleanor Vance (Contract No. 88-CC-419).*
*Financial Binding Protocol: Manifold Resonant Bond — $1,845.00 / Monthly recurring life-support allocation.*
Cassidy felt the air abandon her lungs. Every memory from her childhood flashed before her eyes: the way Eleanor had never looked her directly in the face, the cold distance in her father’s voice whenever she brought home top marks from school, the bizarre emphasis on her maintaining strict, unalterable monthly transfers the exact second she turned eighteen.
*‘You owe this family, Cassidy,’* Eleanor’s shrill, condescending voice echoed in her memory. *‘You think you can just live here for free? Donald is fragile. Donald needs stability. You have to earn your breath under this roof.’*
It had never been about Donald’s comfort. It had been about keeping the power running. Donald’s presence was a smokescreen—a squalid, petty domestic nightmare designed to keep Cassidy too stressed, too exhausted, and too broke to look beneath her own feet.
"They made me your jailer without my knowledge," Cassidy whispered, her eyes burning as she stared at the timer.
`00:04:12... 00:04:11...`
"And you did an exceptional job," Valerie replied, her tone dripping with venomous mockery. "You worked seventy hours a week at the design firm. You skipped meals. You wore worn-out winter coats while Donald bought luxury watches with the surplus. All so the acoustic seals at Trench Eleven would never drop below nineteen percent. But when you finally walked out... when you refused to pay that mortgage... the grid began to fail. You thought you were freeing yourself from a toxic family. In reality, you simply shut off the life support of the deep vault."
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"Then why are you trying to destroy Ridge Road?" Cassidy demanded. "If you're out, why trigger Trench Zero?"
"Because Ridge Road isn't just a house, little sister," Valerie said, her voice dropping into an icy register that rattled the desktop monitors. "It’s the anchor. And to pull Trench Zero to the surface, the anchor must be shattered."
