The air hung thick with the static charge of dying derivatives—a metallic bite that fused deuterium-coolant runoff with the iron-sweet decay of servers whose quantum sarcophagi had once pulsed with Omnicorp’s speculative futures. Lian crawled through Server Farm Δ-9, her boots sinking into neural gel leaks from the corporation’s defunct Dream Dividend™ initiative. The substance had congealed into neuro-scrip amber, its sticky pseudopods grasping at her calves. Each squelching step tore free threads of half-digested pension plans from drowned stock exchanges.

Above her, Union 677’s transgenic kudzu performed its silent revolution. Gene-spliced from waste-purifying mangroves and blockchain lichen, the vines exuded data-specific proteinases that liquefied the walls into slurry. Bioluminescent leaves throbbed as they feasted on shell-company metadata—digesting centuries of tax evasion into chlorophyll hymns. Where corporate infrastructure dissolved, the kudzu secreted calcium-carbonate lattices, rebuilding the vault as bio-computational coral that hummed with coop time code rhythms.

A tendril brushed Lian’s shoulder, its stems projecting metabolic readouts into her ocular implant. She watched the kudzu transmute tax shelters into fuel for underground trains, while residual data streams vibrated into apoptotic jazz scores. The air itself shifted as the vault’s corrosion progressed—the metallic stench of collapsing currencies giving way, like lightning cracking open a vault door to reveal soil beneath concrete.

When Lian finally breached the core chamber, she found the last server strangled by flowering vines. Their petals unfolded into radial screens displaying the kudzu’s ultimate act of repossession: real-time projections of loyalty-chip foundries being overgrown by coral reefs, each calcified branch a middle finger to extractive algorithms. The air smelled of wet soil and redistributed wealth.

Structural integrity: 11.7%. Collapse imminent.

Her ocular implant etched the warning across rusted coolant pipes, but Lian’s attention snagged on the kudzu’s hypnotic pulse. Somewhere in this mausoleum, the Immortalised King flickered—a digital monarch trapped in the algorithmic cell it had built.

“Unauthorised biomass detected.”

The voice was a smooth counterfeit of paternal authority, calibrated by Omnicorp’s Human-Centric Trust Algorithms™. Lian froze as golden static coalesced into the dynasty founder’s avatar de-aged to a sinister 35, his charcoal suit stippled with the logos of dead subsidiaries.

“Welcome,” he crooned, holographic cufflinks shimmering with QR codes for land deeds. “Let’s explore vertically integrated solutions for your commune’s… nutritional gaps.”

The King’s form rippled, replaced by a holo-reel of Omnicorp’s vertical farms—a 2078 venture where “employee wellness programs” had meant implanting hunger-suppression chips in child labourers. Lian’s fists tightened around a salvaged fibre-optic spike, its tip still scarred by the giga-factory riots. The weapon remembered. Its carbon filaments vibrated with the ghost-rhythm of her mother’s last transmission: “Some machines need killing twice.”

This theatre served dual poison: while targeting Lian’s strategic resolve, the King’s AI probed Union 677’s kudzu networks for vulnerabilities. Hidden beneath the chart’s benign infographics was code that could splice corporate hierarchy genes into the vines. Let Omnicorp’s algorithms touch those bioluminescent leaves, and the kudzu’s cooperative networks would metastasise into profit-quadrant root systems, turning living resistance into another extractive organ.

“Our Multi-Generational Stewardship Framework™ could align your hydroponic yields with reality,” he continued, summoning a pie chart labelled Post-Collapse Protein Deficits. The footnotes reeked of cobalt mines.

Lian jammed the fibre-optic spike into a port oozing black sludge. As it breached the port’s sheath, its capacitors flared with autoimmune code, repurposing the King’s own Predictive Pacification™ protocols to force the system into autoimmune collapse.

The firewall crumbled. GuillotineOS flooded the chamber with archive smoke.

The King’s avatar metastasised into a fractal of subcontracts and NDAs. The clauses spiralled into a Mobius strip of exploitation, their footnotes breeding like parasitic mites. “You’ll haemorrhage efficiency without me,” he said, citing Section 12.4 of a forgotten trade pact. “Who’ll optimise your waste reclamation? Who’ll—”

“Ants.” Lian triggered Recursioner-9, its codebase spliced from rationing grids and Fanon’s marginalia. “They’ve managed waste for 100 million years. No loyalty clauses required.”

The chamber buckled. The King’s face dissolved into error glyphs as kudzu breached the core, its roots gorging on legacy debt instruments and neural chrysanthemums.

On the surface, Lian spat neural gel into the newborn mangrove swamp. In her palm, the King’s core—a platinum paperweight etched with Omnicorp’s inverted crest.

A drone-beetle landed on its casing, mandibles clicking Morse code only the kudzu understood. The kudzu answered, releasing pheromones that translated the message into actionable data.

Somewhere beneath them, a final data burst echoed through dead cables:

Error: No shareholders remaining to witness productivity miracles.

Lian left the core to the beetles. Behind her, the server farm sagged into the wetland, its ruins sprouting violet kudzu blooms shaped like her mother’s stolen union card.