“A swarm of them,” Chen corrected. “Designed to look like a school of bioluminescent squid. The ‘23.05.15’ is the deployment date. May 15, 2023. ‘Richh.Des’ is the architect—Richard Desai, a prodigy who went off-grid three years ago. ‘XXX’ isn’t the rating. It’s the operational code: Extreme Deep, Covert Extraction.”
“Talk to me, Chen,” Marcus said, pushing his glasses up his nose.
Marcus reached for his gun. It dissolved into brine. The video file was now playing on every screen in the precinct, and on every screen in the world, the impossible structure’s door was beginning to open. AssParade.23.05.15.Richh.Des.XXX.720p.HEVC.x265...
The room went cold.
Marcus leaned forward. “And the ‘720p.HEVC.x265’?” “A swarm of them,” Chen corrected
Marcus’s phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: “Did you like the trailer? The full feature is 8K. But you’ll need to dive yourself to get it. Bring a shovel. The parade is waiting.”
Marcus blinked. “A robot submarine?” May 15, 2023
He looked at Chen. Chen was no longer there. In his place was a perfect, bioluminescent replica of the agent, made of seawater and organized light. It smiled with a thousand tiny squid mouths and whispered, “Welcome to the AssParade, Detective. The real XXX stands for ‘Xibalba, Xanadu, Xenu.’ And you’re the guest of honor.”
“It’s a dead drop,” Chen said. “The filename is the key. ‘AssParade’ was a popular adult series, but here, it’s our coder’s sick joke. A-S-S-P-A-R-A-D-E. Autonomous Subsurface Synthetic Personnel Array for Recon and Deep Exploration.”