Chapter 9 – 24 Charles Street

From the outside, the house at 24 Charles Street looked like any other in Mayfair: Georgian gleaming white stone, wrought iron railings, and black-gloss doors with a brass door knocker polished to a diplomatic sheen. A placard just down the street noted the area’s status as a conservation zone, and the house itself was technically Grade II listed—protected under UK heritage law. But Bernard von Moravek had a particular talent for navigating systems, whether they be governmental, financial, or architectural.

He’d purchased the property a decade earlier through a trust so layered it had taken the Land Registry two years to determine that they’d properly assign title. Actually, they hadn’t –  it turns out the Land Registry had run into an unrecognized dead end when it came to determining the beneficial owner of a perpetual trust located in St. Lucia.

Then came the renovation: a seven-figure refit disguised on paper as "structural reinforcement" and "security enhancement." Behind the preserved façade, everything had been gutted and remade. He brought in materials from Tokyo, lighting design from Milan, acoustic wall panels from an unnamed tech incubator in Seoul. Some of it almost certainly bent the rules, but BVM was never so gauche as to break them outright—he simply convinced the rules to evolve.

The entry hall was cool steel and Macassar ebony, recessed lighting humming just above candle warmth. Everything smelled faintly of bergamot and lacquer. Hideo, BVM's personal aide, moved like a shadow between the kitchen and study, silent and unseen but omnipresent. His age was indeterminate—maybe mid-thirties—but everything he did seemed precise enough to have been rehearsed since birth. A small man, dressed in a white shirt, black suit, and black and white checkerboard silk tie, Hideo moved with an economy of motion reminiscent of zen tea ceremony.

Downstairs, there was a lap pool lit from beneath with an indigo tile surround. Upstairs, a teak-lined library with nothing as archaic as paper. And here, on the ground floor, in a room that once housed Victorian oil paintings and now featured glass-inset chessboards and programmable kinetic walls, Bernard von Moravek waited for his opponent.

"You’re early," Morag said as she stepped into the room, shrugging off a wrap of black cashmere.

BVM smiled. "You’re late. By twenty-four years."

She arched a brow. "I do love a man who can hold a grudge."

He gestured to the chessboard already mid-game. “I’m exploring an alternate Sicilian Defense. Would you care to join or continue watching me lose to myself?”

She sat, fingers steepled. “Depends which self I’m playing. If I just watch, do you care which you I root for?”

They began in silence, a few fluid exchanges of pawn and knight. Then Morag broke the quiet.

“You let them take it, didn’t you?”

BVM glanced up. “Them?”

“The napkin. Riley. ‘They’ and their whole little grubby theater troupe.”

“‘They’? Dear, I had no idea you were so outré in your views on the currently accepted gender ideology. I’m shocked.”

“You know as well as I do that this is just this season’s hate for her. In any case, I couldn’t care less.”

He looked at the board and then at her, out of the corner of his eye. A small smile. He moved his bishop with surgical grace. “To answer your question, what better way to test an organism than by introducing stress?”

Morag chuckled. “So it was a sacrifice.”

“A misdirection,” BVM corrected. “Sacrifice implies loss.”

He reached for the tablet beside him, its titanium frame cool to the touch. The screen lit up with lines of system behavior logs, most of them flickering red or collapsing mid-query. ForgeMind, in its fragmented state, wasn’t just breaking down—it was evolving sideways. Memory clusters stitched and then restitched themselves together in illogical ways, drawing connections between past sensorium inputs and moments that had never happened.

One thread had merged Riley’s voice with Morag’s syntax. Another began mirroring Lena’s interrogation transcripts with statistical models of maternal bonding. Bits of peer-reviewed studies on emotional attachment and juvenile crime floated by in other threads.

ForgeMind wasn’t retreating from its own disintegration. It was using it as raw material.

It was improvising. Reorganizing. Mourning, even.

BVM felt the way a watchmaker might feel watching one of his devices run backward, faster, and still keep time.

Onscreen:

> \[ :: memory corrupted / seeking anchor : ]

He showed Morag the tablet.

She read. “It’s dreaming.”

“It’s not dreaming, it’s creating. And it’s adapting.”

Morag slid her knight into play. “And you think Riley’s the right crucible?”

“Someone once said that you don’t go to war with the army you want, you go to war with the army you have. I think Riley is... catalytic. But not essential.”

“So, this is a war?”

“Social experiment, war – I’m not attached to labels.”

He paused, savoring the moment, then said casually:

“Zane still has the original.”

She looked up, sharply. “The poker game?”

BVM nodded. “Everyone thought I folded out of foolishness. Four kings to a jack-high straight. But Zane was meant to win.”

Morag’s eyes gleamed. “You gave him the origami algorithm.”

He smiled. “He got what he thought he paid for. A paper-folding revolution for packaging optimization—transformational geometry, surface topology, combinatorics, and all the other shiny baubles. Lovely fun writing it. But deep inside? Layer two unfolds QNC. And beneath that?” He tapped his temple. “A seed. Encrypted. 256-bit key, unshared.”

She leaned back. “Your kill switch.”

“My conscience, more like. If ForgeMind ever grows teeth.”

She moved her queen. “And Zane?”

“Rich enough to protect what he doesn’t understand.”

“Like most men.”

They laughed, but not entirely kindly.

On the tablet, another log surfaced:

> \[ :: voss / 2 / contact imminent : ]

BVM’s smile faltered. “They’re converging.”

Morag tapped her rook. “Is that concern I hear?”

“No,” BVM said. “It’s anticipation.”

He slid a device from his pocket—sleek, glassy, no visible interface—and tapped once. A secure line blinked green.

A message went out, encrypted and routed across twelve proxies:

> TO: KOVALENKO

> SUBJECT: Operation Second Fragment

> BODY: Prepare it.

Morag moved a pawn forward. “So. Sacrifices. You ever plan to be one?”

BVM stared at the board. “No great player puts himself on the altar. That’s what pawns are for.”

She tilted her head. “Spoken like a man who’s never bled.”

He leaned forward. “Spoken like a woman who always knew the blade was coming.”

They locked eyes.

Outside, the Mayfair rain began to fall.

The chessboard gleamed.

Morag’s fingers lingered near the captured bishop, her nails tapping out an irregular rhythm. “You always did prefer strategy to intimacy.”

BVM stood, walked to the liquor cabinet, took two Norlan whiskey tumblers off the glass shelf. He added a few tiny pieces of chipped ice from the round ice bin with penguins embossed on it. Hideo had just disappeared back to the kitchen after silently filling the ice bin. BVM poured two glasses of scotch labeled Glendronach Parliament 21 Years Old without asking. He handed her one.

She took it, let their fingers brush too long. “Your tells are worse than your middle game.”

“I don’t bluff anymore,” he said.

“Neither do I.”

A quiet beat passed.

“You know,” she said, rising, “I once wrote a scene like this.”

He turned. “Did it end in betrayal or seduction?”

She stepped closer. “Same thing, if you do it right.”

He kissed her before she finished her smirk. Soft, then not. She kissed back like a challenge. The glass in her hand never spilled.

Somewhere in the house, Hideo dimmed the lights without a word. The rain tapped louder against the glass.

They left the board behind—still mid-game, still unresolved. Morag glanced over her shoulders back at the board as they left the room.

And when they disappeared upstairs, the last log on the tablet blinked once more:

[ :: player error / sacrifice pending : ]

[ :: romantic variable introduced / forecast unstable : ]

The board, in every sense, was in motion.