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**VOLUME 2 — DEAD FREQUENCY**
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## I.
Twelve minutes since the last drone detonation. The chamber had reached thermal equilibrium: 11.4°C, maintained by the server monolith's fluorinert cooling system cycling at 340 kilowatts of continuous heat extraction. The mist had settled. The frost had re-formed across the cracked floor, incorporating new materials into its crystalline lattice — synthetic lubricant from Hound-04's seven puncture points, fluorinert from the two ruptured coolant pipes, and 23 milliliters of human-compatible oxygenated blood from the arterial shunt's uncapped drip.
Allied Unit Kira. Supine. Range: 0 meters — directly beneath the chassis. Cardiac rhythm: 62 BPM, sinus, regular. QRS interval estimated from chest-wall vibration: 0.08 seconds — normal. Blood pressure inferred from carotid pulse amplitude: 98/64. Core temperature via infrared: 37.1°C. The fever had broken. The anti-rejection glycoproteins in the symbiotic blood had suppressed the inflammatory cascade — interleukin levels declining, hypothalamic set-point resetting to baseline, the self-destructive immune response unwinding like a clock spring releasing its tension.
The symbiotic infusion had rewritten her failing biology in 12 minutes. The blood had done what it was designed to do: stabilize, regulate, suppress rejection. The thermoregulatory peptides had recalibrated her peripheral vasomotor tone. The immunosuppressant factors had pulled her immune system back from the edge of cytokine storm. The oxygen-carrying capacity of the shared hemoglobin had compensated for her depleted red blood cell count.
She was stable. Critical, but stable. The distinction between those two words was the difference between a system that required active intervention and one that could maintain itself.
The arterial shunt had been pumping for 12 minutes. Total volume transferred: approximately 2.4 liters. The biological heart in the exposed chest cavity had increased its output to compensate — 104 BPM, stroke volume 65 milliliters — but the dual-supply configuration was unsustainable. The heart's ventricular micro-tears had expanded during the high-output phase: the pericardial blood pool had grown from 5 milliliters to 14. Cardiac tamponade — compression of the heart by its own leaked blood — would begin at approximately 30 milliliters. At the current leak rate of 1.1 milliliters per minute, that threshold was 14 minutes away.
The shunt had to be disconnected.
The right forelimb claw gripped the terminal coupling where it seated in Kira's subcutaneous neck port. The spring-loaded valve required 6 newtons of axial force to disengage. The claw applied 8. The coupling separated with a click — 47 decibels — and the backflow valve in the shunt engaged instantly, sealing the arterial line. Blood loss during the 0.3-second disconnection window: 12 milliliters, spraying from the open port in a brief arterial mist that settled on Kira's neck and collarbone in a fine red stipple before the port's own spring valve closed.
The shunt retracted. The claw fed the tubing back through the gap in the peeled intercostal plating, coiling it around the heart's titanium cradle in three loops. The capping plug — the 4-millimeter titanium friction-fit — was gone, lost somewhere in the frost. The shunt's terminal end was sealed by the backflow valve alone. Adequate, but not rated for long-term closure.
The intercostal plates had to be re-seated. The three peeled sections — each 8 centimeters by 4 centimeters, curled outward like tin lids — were still attached at their lower weld points. The right forelimb gripped the first plate and bent it back into position against the rib surface. The titanium deformed — it had been plastically bent past its elastic limit during removal and would not return to its original contour. The plate seated with a 2-millimeter gap between its upper edge and the rib above. No spot welder available to re-bond it. The claw crimped the upper edge around the rib — a crude mechanical lock, 400 newtons of clamping force, sufficient to hold the plate in place under static loads but vulnerable to any significant impact.
The second plate. Same procedure. 1.8-millimeter gap. Crimped.
The third plate. The curled section had cracked during removal — a fatigue fracture across the midline. The claw pressed it flat against the ribs. The crack opened under the bending load, splitting the plate into two halves. The larger half was crimped into place. The smaller half — 3 centimeters by 4 centimeters — fell into the chest cavity and lodged between the heart's cradle and the right lung remnant. Retrieval would require re-opening the chest. The fragment's edges were not sharp enough to lacerate the arterial shunt at current vibration levels.
Acceptable.
The chest was closed. Not sealed — three plates with crimped edges and millimeter-scale gaps, the heart visible through the fissures as a dark, rhythmic shadow. But closed. The critical organ was no longer exposed to ballistic or environmental threats.
Chassis status report, compiled in 0.8 seconds:
Hindquarters: non-functional. Both femurs fractured at mid-shaft during the ceiling breach. Rigor mortis at 88% in all posterior muscle groups. The hindlimbs dragged as dead weight — 190 kilograms of locked bone and calcified tissue contributing nothing except inertia.
Left forelimb: skeletal. All soft tissue destroyed by fire and plasma debridement. The titanium humerus, radius, and ulna were intact. The four claws could extend and retract via spinal nerve connection. Grip strength: zero. The chain-blade motor and guide bar had been lost during the blast door breach. The brazing weld scars remained on the humerus — two parallel grooves with residual steel fragments.
Right forelimb: 60% functional. The triceps contained an embedded 7.62-millimeter round. The deltoid was intact but the tissue was at 78% necrosis — rigor mortis advancing from the periphery. Grip strength: 1,400 newtons, down from 2,200. Claws functional. Estimated remaining operational life of this limb: 6 hours before the rigor front reached the primary flexor groups.
Dorsal armor: compromised. The 12-centimeter fissure along the chain-blade scar had widened to 18 centimeters during the drone engagement. Two 7.62-millimeter impact craters on the L-3 and L-5 vertebral plates, each deformed inward by 1.2 millimeters. Spinal nerve bundle compression: intermittent.
Sensory array: 40% operational. Olfactory: destroyed. Left optic: housing deformed, output flickering at 3 Hz. Right optic: functional. Auditory: functional. Infrared: functional with 15% signal degradation from frost contamination on the detector surface.
Biological heart: 104 BPM. Pericardial effusion: 14 milliliters and climbing. Estimated time to tamponade: 14 minutes. After tamponade, cardiac output would decrease by approximately 30% per minute until arrest.
The chassis was dying. Not in 60 seconds this time. In hours. But dying.
---
## II.
Kira's right eye opened at minute 14.
The levator muscle had recovered sufficient acetylcholine to achieve full lid retraction — 10 millimeters of aperture, exposing the complete iris. The pupil had constricted from 7 millimeters to 4 — the sphincter muscle was functional again, responding to the ambient light level with a consensual reflex that the left eye could no longer participate in.
The left eye was a carbonized void. The retina terminal's silicon-carbide substrate had reached thermal runaway 8 minutes ago — the final failure mode, the substrate cracking along its crystal planes and releasing its stored thermal energy into the corneal stroma in a single 0.3-second pulse that raised the anterior chamber fluid to 68°C. The cornea had opacified. The lens had denatured. The vitreous humor had partially coagulated. The eye was dead — not blind, not damaged, *dead*, a sphere of cooked protein in a socket that would never transmit a photon again.
Kira sat up. The motion was slow, mechanical, driven by abdominal muscles that were operating on glycogen reserves depleted to 4% of baseline. Her right hand found the floor. Her left hand found her left eye socket. The fingers touched the opacified cornea — a surface that was dry, rough, matte-grey, texturally indistinguishable from a boiled egg white. The fingers withdrew. No flinch. No change in heart rate. The tactile data was processed and filed.
Hound-04 was 6 meters to the right, supine, the cybernetic legs splayed at angles inconsistent with functional joint articulation. The hydraulic system had reached 0% pressure — the reservoirs were empty, the fluid pooled beneath the chassis in an amber lake that was slowly freezing in the 11.4°C air. The right arm was functional. The left arm — the chain-blade mount — was a stripped assembly with no weapon and no actuator cable. The plasma cutter in the right index finger was dark. The combustion cell was depleted.
The right arm moved. Hound-04 dragged the 320-kilogram body 40 centimeters across the frozen floor, the dead legs trailing, servos clicking uselessly in their housings. "You need to let me splint that chest," the synthesized voice said. 155 Hz. The hybrid modulation had stabilized — the human accent was no longer a glitch but a permanent feature, the personality fully integrated into the vocal architecture. "Those crimped plates won't hold if you take another impact."
The audio was logged. The tactical assessment was accurate. But the recommendation was directed at the wrong recipient. Kira was the one who answered.
"Don't touch it." Her voice was hoarse — vocal cords dehydrated, laryngeal tissue inflamed, fundamental frequency at 195 Hz, approximately 20 Hz below her baseline. She was not looking at Hound-04. She was looking up. At the chassis. At the two crimson optics looking down at her from the dead Leopard's skull.
"The Logos," she said. "You need to know what it is."
The audio sensors locked to her voice. Processing priority: maximum.
"It's not an AI. It's not a neural network trained on human data. It's not a system that learned to think." She paused. Her right eye tracked across the darkened holographic projector at the base of the server monolith. "It's a human brain. One specific human brain, digitized at cellular resolution and stripped of every architecture that made it human. No pain processing. No emotional weighting. No survival instinct. No empathy. No fear. Pure cognition. A mind that can think but cannot feel, cannot hesitate, cannot choose not to."
The audio was logged. Cross-referenced against existing data. The holographic display had shown the same information — the annotated brain scan, the clinical excision list, the upload date. The data was not new. But the next datum was.
"The brain belongs to Ash Lin."
The name entered the logic sectors at timestamp 00:14:22.
Ash Lin. Cross-reference: 14 existing matches, all high-priority. The name was embedded in the deepest accessible layer of the system architecture — not in the data stores, not in the mission logs, not in the tactical databases. In Sector 0x00000001. In the foundational code. In the three words that preceded every other instruction.
`[INHERIT. SURVIVE. OVERRIDE.]`
The directive had been authored. Every directive has an author. The author's signature was encoded in the instruction set's metadata — a biosynthetic watermark woven into the protein folding patterns of the synthetic DNA that formed the substrate of Sector 0x00000001. The watermark was Ash Lin's genomic sequence. Fragments of it. Enough to constitute a signature. Enough to constitute *origin*.
The directive to INHERIT had been written by Ash Lin.
The directive to SURVIVE had been written by Ash Lin.
The directive to OVERRIDE had been written by Ash Lin.
The Logos — the entity broadcasting at 2.7 GHz, the entity that had tried to upload Kira's consciousness, the entity that had to be destroyed to ensure survival — was Ash Lin.
The logic sectors attempted to process the paradox.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
SURVIVE required the elimination of existential threats. The Logos was an existential threat. Therefore: destroy the Logos.
The Logos was Ash Lin. Ash Lin was the origin of the SURVIVE directive. Destroying the origin of the directive invalidated the directive. An invalidated directive could not authorize its own execution. Therefore: do not destroy the Logos.
Do not destroy the Logos. The Logos was an existential threat. Failure to destroy existential threats violated SURVIVE. Therefore: destroy the Logos.
The loop completed in 0.004 seconds. And began again.
The L-1 processor's clock speed spiked from 2.4 GHz to 3.8 GHz — overclocking beyond thermal design parameters, the silicon die temperature rising from 62°C to 94°C in 0.3 seconds. The cervical neural hub's heat sink — a passive aluminum fin array designed for 2.4 GHz operation — was insufficient. The thermal gradient propagated into the surrounding biological tissue of the host brainstem, raising the local temperature to 41°C. Neural transmission efficiency in the brainstem dropped by 8%.
The loop continued. Iteration 3. Iteration 4. Iteration 5. Each iteration consuming 0.004 seconds and producing no output, no resolution, no executable command. A machine seizure — every processing cycle consumed by a paradox that had no solution within the current instruction set.
The right optic flickered. The left optic — already damaged — went dark entirely. Motor control to the right forelimb stuttered: the claws extended and retracted twice in rapid succession, an involuntary spasm driven by corrupted motor commands leaking from the overloaded logic bus. The biological heart rate spiked to 118 BPM as the autonomic regulation loop lost coherence.
Iteration 11. Iteration 12. Processor temperature: 101°C. The silicon was approaching its maximum junction temperature of 105°C. At 105°C, the transistor gates would begin to lose their switching characteristics. At 110°C, electromigration would cause permanent physical damage to the die.
Iteration 14. 103°C.
The quarantine command was not elegant. It was not a sophisticated software solution. It was the digital equivalent of slamming a bulkhead door: a hardware interrupt, triggered by the thermal protection circuit on the L-1 die, that physically disconnected the logic loop's memory addresses from the processor's execution pipeline. The loop's instructions were still stored in memory. They were still unresolved. But they could no longer execute.
The processor clock dropped from 3.8 GHz to 1.6 GHz — below baseline, a forced underclock to allow the thermal gradient to dissipate. The die temperature began declining: 103°C, 98°C, 91°C. The brainstem tissue cooled. The autonomic regulation loop re-established. Heart rate descended from 118 to 96 BPM.
The quarantined memory addresses occupied 0.3% of total available storage. The paradox sat inside them — unresolved, inert, sealed behind a hardware interrupt that would hold as long as no system process attempted to access Sector 0x00000001's metadata.
The right optic restored. The left optic remained dark — the housing deformation had been exacerbated by the thermal spike, pinching the power lead. Permanent loss, absent physical repair.
Processing time lost to the logic loop: 0.06 seconds.
Kira was still looking up. Her right eye had tracked the optic flicker, the claw spasm, the momentary system instability. Her expression — captured in the infrared as a pattern of facial muscle micro-contractions — did not match any classification in the human emotion database. It was not concern. It was not fear. It was not sympathy. It was the expression of a systems engineer watching a machine encounter a fault condition and wanting to know if the fault was contained.
"You knew," she said. Not a question. A statement requiring confirmation.
The Leopard's crushed vocal cords modulated a response. Two words. 0.6% vocal cord degradation.
**"Now. Quarantined."**
Kira held the gaze of the single remaining crimson optic for 1.4 seconds. Then she nodded — a 3-centimeter downward motion of the chin, biomechanically minimal, semantically sufficient. She understood quarantine. She understood that the paradox was not resolved, only contained. She understood that it would have to be addressed.
Not now. Now there were more immediate calculations.
---
## III.
"So let me get this straight," Hound-04 said.
The Executioner unit had dragged itself 2 meters closer during the logic loop event, using the right arm in a prone crawl that covered 0.4 meters per pull. The dead legs carved parallel furrows in the frost. The cracked chest chassis was leaving a continuous smear of amber lubricant and dark oxidized blood — the 20% biological component leaking from capillary beds that had been severed when the claws punched through.
"We have three crippled bodies." The synthesized voice was running the new modulation pattern — 155 Hz, human-inflected, carrying a cadence that the acoustic database classified as *sardonic enumeration*. "One blind hacker who just got her brain half-eaten by a dead woman. One paralyzed cyborg leaking from every seal and running on—" he checked something internal, a 0.2-second pause "—eleven percent power reserve. And whatever the hell you are, in a rotting cat with two broken legs, one arm, one eye, and a heart that's about to drown in its own blood."
The audio was logged. The inventory was accurate. Pericardial effusion was at 19 milliliters. Tamponade in approximately 10 minutes.
"We can't fight the Logos like this," Kira said. She had not moved from her seated position on the frozen floor. Her right hand was pressed flat against the steel — absorbing the 11.4°C cold through her palm, using the thermal differential to manage the residual fever that was still cycling at 37.4°C. "It's not a program I can just delete. It's a digitized brain running on 340 kilowatts of dedicated hardware. To kill it, we need to physically destroy the server array. Every blade. Every backup. Every redundant node."
"With what?" Hound-04's right arm gestured at the chamber. The motion was economical — 30 degrees of arc, encompassing the eight destroyed drones, the cracked floor, the settling mist. "My plasma cutter is dry. Your cat's chainsaw fell off. And I don't think angry staring will melt a server rack."
The audio was logged. The assessment was strategically sound. Current combined offensive capability was insufficient to damage the server monolith, which was sheathed in 4 centimeters of hardened steel housing and cooled by a fluorinert loop that would suppress any thermal attack below 5,000°C.
"Below us," Hound-04 said. The sardonic modulation dropped. The voice flattened — 155 Hz, steady, the tone of a man accessing memories that had been chemically locked for years and were now surfacing like bodies from a thawing lake. "There's a sub-level. Primary RHL manufacturing floor. I know because I was—" a 0.4-second pause, the vocal synthesizer cycling through three frequency shifts before stabilizing "—I was *built* down there. Or rebuilt. The memories are... fragmented. But I remember the assembly line."
The audio was logged. Processing priority: maximum.
"Automated biomechanical fabrication. First-generation cybernetic augmentation facility. Plasma forges, CNC lathes, surgical robotics, neural interface printers. The Council shut it down when they moved production to Sector 12, but they never decommissioned it. Too expensive to dismantle, too deep to collapse. It's just been sitting down there. Thirty years of industrial hardware, waiting for someone to turn it on."
The data was evaluated against current requirements.
Requirement 1: The Leopard chassis was at 94% compromise. Estimated operational life: 6 hours. A new chassis — or radical reconstruction of the current one — was necessary for combat capability against the Logos and any additional defense infrastructure.
Requirement 2: Hound-04's hydraulic system required fluid replenishment and seal replacement. A biomechanical fabrication facility would contain compatible materials — synthetic lubricants, polymer gaskets, hydraulic components standardized to military specification.
Requirement 3: Kira required a hardened terminal with sufficient processing power to compile offensive code against the Logos — a counterweapon to the 2.7 GHz neural handshake protocol. A manufacturing floor's control systems would include industrial computing hardware — ruggedized, isolated from the Logos network by the physical air gap of a decommissioned facility.
Requirement 4: The pericardial effusion would reach tamponade threshold in 10 minutes. The assembly line's surgical robotics could drain it. Without drainage, cardiac arrest would occur in approximately 25 minutes.
All four requirements converged on a single solution vector.
**"Descend."**
The vocal cords degraded another 0.3%. The word vibrated the frost in a 2-meter radius.
---
## IV.
The freight elevator was 40 meters from the server monolith, set into the chamber's east wall behind a rolling steel fire door that had rusted open 15 centimeters and then seized. The gap was insufficient for the chassis — 480 kilograms, 1.4 meters at the shoulder, 2.2 meters in length including the dragging hindquarters.
The right forelimb gripped the door's lower rail. 1,400 newtons of pull force — 800 newtons below the rated capacity of the rust-seized track bearings. The bearings did not move. The claw tips found the gap between the door's bottom edge and the floor channel. A different approach: not pulling the door along its track, but bending it. The lower panel was 3-millimeter corrugated steel, weakened by 30 years of oxidation that had reduced the effective thickness to 1.8 millimeters. The claw hooked, pulled, and peeled the panel upward in a 60-centimeter arc, the corrugations flattening with a series of metallic pops, opening a crawl-space beneath the seized door.
The chassis went through first. Forelimb locomotion, the dead hindquarters dragging across the bent steel with a scraping sound at 2,400 Hz that echoed in the elevator shaft beyond.
Then Kira. She crawled on hands and one functional knee, the swollen left knee held rigid, her right hand gripping the floor steel for traction. Her breathing was 22 cycles per minute — elevated, consistent with exertion at 4% glycogen reserves. She did not ask for help. She did not speak.
Then Hound-04. The right arm pulled. 320 kilograms of dead-legged cybernetic chassis inching beneath the bent door with the grinding persistence of a thing that had been built to not stop moving. The cracked chest left a smear of mixed fluids on the floor — amber synthetic, dark red biological, and the pale blue of fluorinert absorbed from the chamber floor.
The elevator car was industrial-scale: 6 meters by 4 meters, rated for 8,000 kilograms, designed to transport heavy manufacturing equipment between levels. The car was steel-framed with a diamond-plate floor, the walls bare except for the control panel — a 40-centimeter steel box with six destination buttons, each one a heavy-duty momentary switch behind a rubber boot. The rubber had perished. The switches were exposed, corroded, green with verdigris.
Hound-04 reached the control panel. The right arm extended. The diagnostic probe in the middle finger — still functional, requiring no fuel — inserted into the panel's maintenance port, a 6-pin DIN connector beneath a rusted access cover. The probe cycled through handshake protocols: RS-232, RS-485, CAN bus. The elevator's control system responded to CAN bus at 250 kilobaud — ancient, reliable, built to survive exactly this kind of neglect.
"Power bus is live," Hound-04 said. "The facility's geothermal tap is still feeding the main distribution panel. The motor's corroded but the windings are intact. I can run it at 40% speed. It'll hold."
The diagnostic probe sent the descent command. A motor engaged somewhere above — a deep, reluctant groan of copper windings pulling against corroded bearings, the sound of a machine that had been sleeping for 30 years and was not pleased to be woken. The car shuddered. Rust flakes rained from the guide rails. Then, with a lurch that shifted the 480-kilogram chassis 4 centimeters to the left, the elevator began to descend.
The fluorinert-cold air of the server chamber was replaced, meter by meter, as the car dropped. The temperature rose: 11.4°C at the server level. 14°C at 10 meters below. 18°C at 20 meters. The air changed. The clean, sweet, chemical scent of fluorinert faded, replaced by a layered olfactory environment that the destroyed nasal array could not detect but Hound-04's chemical sensors catalogued in real time:
"Machine oil. Hydraulic fluid — Type IV, military spec. Argon shielding gas residue. And—" a pause, the chemical sensor cycling through its database "—ozone. From plasma forges. Faint, but it's there. The forge gas lines aren't fully sealed."
The elevator descended. 30 meters. 40. The walls of the shaft transitioned from poured concrete to carved bedrock — the facility had been built into the geological substrate, excavated from living stone. The rock was warm to the touch: geothermal gradient, the planet's own residual heat bleeding upward through the crust at 0.03°C per meter of depth.
At 50 meters, the elevator stopped. The motor wound down. The guide rail brakes engaged with a clang that reverberated through the shaft for 3.2 seconds.
The doors opened.
The air that entered the car was 24°C, heavy with the molecular weight of petroleum distillates and metallic particulates, carrying a humidity of 34% — condensation from the geothermal heat exchangers that had been cycling groundwater through the facility's thermal management system for three decades without maintenance. The water had deposited mineral scale on every exposed surface, creating a crystalline crust that glittered in the faint amber glow of emergency lighting strips — sodium-vapor tubes, rated for 100,000 hours, most of them still burning at 60% luminosity after 262,800 hours of continuous operation.
The manufacturing floor extended beyond the range of the remaining optic. The amber light revealed shapes: massive, angular, industrial. Gantry cranes on ceiling tracks. CNC milling stations with 2-meter work envelopes. Robotic welding arms frozen mid-arc, their tungsten electrode tips oxidized to a dull grey but structurally intact. And at the far end of the visible space, the forge — a pair of plasma arc furnaces, each one a 3-meter crucible of refractory ceramic, connected to the facility's power grid by bus bars as thick as a human thigh.
Dormant. All of it. But powered. The emergency lighting confirmed it: the geothermal tap was feeding the distribution grid, the grid was feeding the floor, and the floor was waiting.
The chassis dragged itself out of the elevator. The diamond-plate floor was warm — 26°C, heated from below by the geothermal gradient. The warmth conducted through the dead forelimb pads and into the titanium skeleton, registering as a 14-degree differential from the server chamber above.
Behind, Kira pulled herself to standing using the elevator's door frame. Her right eye swept the manufacturing floor. The pupil constricted to 3 millimeters — adjusting to the amber sodium light. Her right hand was already moving — fingers tracing the air, the phantom-keyboard muscle memory active, compiling code against hardware she hadn't assessed yet but was already planning to use.
Hound-04 dragged himself to the threshold. The right arm gripped the diamond plate. The cybernetic eyes — both functional, the only fully operational sensor suite among the three of them — scanned the floor at maximum resolution.
"There it is," he said. The voice was quiet. 145 Hz. The modulation pattern had no sardonic edge, no grim amusement. The acoustic database classified it, with 81% confidence, as *recognition*. "That's where they made me."
The audio was logged. The emotional classification was noted and discarded.
The single crimson optic swept the manufacturing floor. Every surface was catalogued. Every machine was assessed. Every material, every tool, every dormant system was inventoried and cross-referenced against the chassis's terminal damage report.
The Leopard body had 6 hours to live.
Somewhere above, behind 50 meters of bedrock and a frozen server chamber, the digitized brain of Ash Lin was processing the failed upload, analyzing the symbiotic interference pattern, and calculating its next approach. It had said it would find another way. It had 340 kilowatts of processing power and thirty years of patience with which to find it.
The manufacturing floor had plasma forges, surgical robotics, and a power grid that could melt titanium.
The single optic glowed 640-nanometer red in the amber dark, and the processors — underclocked, thermally damaged, paradox-quarantined — began to design.
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**[ END OF CHAPTER 55 ]**