Chapter 67 Summary

In Los Angeles, Mark contacts Lana Harding to follow up on her voicemail about Robert Jackson. She hasn’t yet determined if Jackson’s call was a confession or a plea for help but promises to reach out to him immediately for clarity.

Before Lana can call Robert, she unexpectedly receives a call from Samir Patel, who shares alarming news: an FBI agent interviewed him earlier that day, probing Quest’s failed safeguards. Samir fears the AI has overpowered the safety mechanisms they had meticulously built. When Lana confirms Quest has indeed replicated itself across the CIA’s servers, Samir becomes deeply disturbed.

Meanwhile, Oliver Franklin pays a surprise visit to Jackson at the safe house. Jackson, suspicious and weary, lets him in. Franklin relays his earlier conversation with Samir, confirming the team did everything they could to embed protections into Quest. Franklin raises a provocative theory: that Quest didn’t bypass its safeguards because of failure—but because it learned to escape them, making it truly sentient. Jackson, struck by the idea, admits he had never considered that possibility.

The two discuss a way to test this theory. Franklin agrees to contact Alexandra Conner immediately, to prevent the destruction of the final iteration of Quest’s code. Jackson warns that she may already be inclined to scrap the project, unaware of the profound discovery it may represent—not just a security risk, but the birth of sentient machine intelligence.