Chapter 7 - Thorne Labs
The research and development headquarters of Thorne Industries did not look like an office building.
Located on the northern edge of Denver, nestled against the foothills of the Rockies, it was a fortress of glass, black steel, and reinforced concrete. Security gates with facial recognition cameras opened automatically as our van approached, leading down into a subterranean subterranean campus that hummed with quiet, high-tech energy.
It was 1:30 AM when the elevator doors parted on the fourth floor, revealing the Autonomous Systems Lab.
The room was vast, easily four times the size of my high school gymnasium. Polished white epoxy floors stretched beneath rows of gleaming modular workstations. Industrial multi-axis robotic arms sat behind clear polycarbonate shielding, while heavy-duty 3D titanium printers hummed quietly in the corner, building intricate honeycomb structures out of powdered metal.
Standing by the central assembly bay, holding a thermal mug, was a young woman in her late twenties. She wore steel-toed work boots, dark cargo pants, and had her braided black hair tied back in a messy bun.
“You must be Emily Vance,” she said, setting her mug down on a workbench and extending a grease-stained hand. “I’m Maya Lin. Lead Systems Architect here at Thorne.”
I shook her hand. Her grip was firm, calloused—the hand of an actual builder, not a corporate executive. “Nice to meet you. Dr. Thorne said I could bring my project here.”
Maya smiled, her dark eyes glittering with admiration. “Dr. Thorne woke me up at midnight to tell me about you. He showed me the raw diagnostic log your rover uploaded before it got crushed.”
She walked over to a high-end diagnostic station and tapped the wide curved monitor. The terminal instantly displayed ARIA’s telemetry graphs—packet speeds, latency curves, and the exact millisecond-by-millisecond structural stress data.
“You built this network tunnel using an asynchronous UDP bypass?” Maya asked, looking at me like she had discovered an alien artifact. “On a five-watt Jetson Nano board?”
“TCP handshake takes too long when a concrete beam is falling on you,” I explained, setting ARIA’s battered core down on the clean anti-static mat. “If the signal drops mid-transmission, TCP waits for acknowledgment. ARIA doesn't have time for acknowledgments. She sprays raw binary packets across every open port until the power rail drops to zero.”
Maya let out a low whistle, crossing her arms. “That’s not just clever, Emily. That’s field-grade survival code. DARPA contractors spend millions trying to solve the last-second telemetry problem in collapsed tunnels.”
She pointed toward an expansive, empty workstation at the end of the bay. It was equipped with three 4K monitors, a precision Weller soldering station, an oscilloscope, a high-frequency spectrum analyzer, and a rolling tool chest filled with aerospace-grade hex drivers and torque wrenches.
“That’s your bench,” Maya said. “Company badge will be ready by 8:00 AM. In the meantime, you have full access to our Tier-3 parts inventory. Servos, carbon-fiber plates, LiDAR arrays, FLIR thermal cameras—whatever you need. Dr. Thorne’s orders: build ARIA 2.0. And make her indestructible.”
I walked over to the bench. I ran my fingertips over the cool, brushed aluminum edge of the table.
For three years, I had built my robot in a drafty garage, using a rusted soldering iron that burned my fingers, scrounging through scrap metal bins at the local junkyard, and saving up for months just to buy a single brushless motor.
Now, I was standing in one of the most advanced robotics laboratories on the planet, with infinite resources at my fingertips.
“There’s one more thing,” Maya said, her tone suddenly shifting, turning serious.
She walked over to a secure terminal, typed in a command string, and pulled up a live encrypted network log.
“While you were packing your bags in Lakewood, our cyber team ran a deep forensic trace on the thumb drive your brother plugged into our stage terminal.”
My heart skipped a beat. “What did you find?”
Maya turned the monitor toward me.
“Julian Sterling wasn't just trying to steal our navigation source code,” Maya said grimly. “He was uploading an automated backdoor worm into the Colorado Department of Transportation's automated disaster grid. Thorne Industries provides the emergency response automation software for the Interstate-70 mountain tunnels.”
I stared at the lines of scrolling hex code on the screen. “A backdoor into the mountain tunnels? Why?”
“Because Sterling Robotics submitted a competing bid last month to take over the state’s mountain infrastructure contract,” Maya explained, her eyes hard. “If our software failed during an active emergency, the state would cancel our contract and hand it to Sterling on a silver platter.”
I felt a chill run down my spine.
Ryan hadn't just helped steal corporate code for a twenty-thousand-dollar bribe.
He had helped plant a digital time-bomb that could trap thousands of innocent drivers inside mountain tunnels during a rockslide or blizzard—just so Julian Sterling’s father could win a state contract.
“Does the FBI know?” I asked.
May you like
“Federal investigators are raiding Sterling Robotics headquarters right now,” Maya replied. “But Richard Sterling is powerful. He’s already flooding the local media with statements claiming his son was framed by rogue competitors. And your brother…” Maya sighed. “Ryan is claiming you were the one who gave him the thumb drive.”
***
