"The past doesn't die. It just waits in the code until someone's stupid enough to look for it."
—Gareth Lancer
The first outdoor exercise of the training cycle arrived wrapped in gunmetal light and a fog that clung to the ground like forgotten memories. Arcadia's western field stretched wide and uneven—a landscape of grass and steel punctuated by the skeletons of pre-Erebus ruins. The recruits stood in squads of five, their assignment simple in theory and brutal in practice: locate a beacon hidden somewhere in the field's center before rival teams did.
"Non-lethal combat rules," Commander Vale's voice crackled through comms. "But expect the drones to disagree. They have... creative interpretations of 'non-lethal.'"
Gareth crouched behind a collapsed barricade, scanning the mist ahead. The cold morning air felt sharp in his lungs, a sensation he was still learning to process as discomfort rather than just data. Lyra was beside him, close enough that he could feel the warmth radiating from her body—a distraction his system kept flagging as 'non-tactical, but notable.'
Behind them, Riven and the rest of their squad fanned out, their nervous energy palpable.
"Still foggy," Lyra murmured, her hands already glowing with faint photonic energy.
"Perfect cover," Gareth said, his voice steady despite the unfamiliar thrill of adrenaline coursing through him. "Or perfect trap."
"I hate when you're right about things being terrible."
"I'm starting to hate it too," he admitted, surprising himself.
The team advanced through the mist in a loose formation. Every sound seemed amplified—the mechanical hum of a distant droid, the scrape of boot on stone, the whisper of the wind. Gareth's awareness stretched thin across the noise, his mind processing information at speeds that should have been impossible.
And then it hit.
A flicker in his peripheral vision, followed by a cold jolt behind his eyes.
[PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS: ENGAGED]
[WARNING: EXPERIMENTAL SUBROUTINE]
The world lurched sideways.
For one disorienting second, everything doubled—one layer real and solid, the other ghosted in translucent blue light. He saw a drone's trajectory before it moved. The arc of its strike mapped out in his vision like a mathematical proof. The exact point where Lyra would duck—and where Riven wouldn't.
He blinked hard. The vision dissolved like smoke.
"Left!" he shouted, voice cutting through the fog.
Lyra dropped without hesitation. A drone's blade carved empty air where her head had been a fraction of a second earlier, the sound of near-miss making everyone's survival instincts scream.
Gareth was already moving—intercepting the swing, pivoting on his lead foot, driving his elbow into the drone's joint with surgical force. Sparks erupted like angry fireflies. The machine's arm bent at an angle joints weren't designed to bend.
Riven stared mid-reload. "How the hell did you—"
"Reflex. Focus," Gareth cut in, already scanning for more threats.
But it wasn't reflex, and he knew it. The predictive feed pulsed again—brief flashes of movement mapped out milliseconds ahead of reality. Not control. Not omniscience. Just enough warning to cheat death if you were fast enough to use it.
[Adaptive Counter: Offensive and defensive modes fully integrated.]
[Predictive Field: Stable at 1.8 seconds forward projection.]
The fight devolved into the chaos all real fights did—simulated explosions that felt too real, plasma bolts streaking through mist, the metallic smell of overheated servos. His team fought well, but Gareth moved through the chaos like he'd memorized choreography everyone else was improvising.
His boots left almost no sound on the hard-packed earth. His timing was perfect—not superhuman, just precise. Like he'd calculated every variable and executed the optimal path through probability.
[System Integration: 72%]
[Predictive Field: Stable]
Then something new appeared in his vision—not in front of him, but behind his eyes where thoughts lived. A symbol he didn't recognize, pulsing angry red.
[Memory Node — Locked Segment Detected.]
[Attempting Access...]
Pain shot through his head sharp enough to make his vision white out. A flash—sudden and unwelcome—of a metal room with walls too white, the echo of a voice he almost recognized:
"Subject Lancer prototype online—"
"He's not supposed to wake yet—we need more time to—"
"We don't HAVE more time! Initiate the—"
Static consumed the rest.
He stumbled, nearly went down. A drone lunged at his moment of weakness.
Lyra's hand caught his shoulder, steadying him while simultaneously firing past his ear with a photonic burst that turned the attacking drone into expensive scrap. "Hey! You with me?"
He forced his breathing to steady, pushed the pain back into whatever box it had escaped from. "Yeah. Just... memory spike. Happens sometimes."
"Cute." She fired again, dropping another drone with precision. "Maybe stop lagging before you die. I'd miss having someone to make fun of."
Even through the chaos and the headache trying to split his skull, he felt a genuine smile touch his lips. "Copy that."
They reached the beacon first—a tall spire that pulsed with faint blue light. Vale's voice crackled over the comm, interference making her words stutter:
"Squad three—mission complete. Good work. Lancer, report to my office after debrief."
That tone wasn't praise. It was curiosity mixed with concern, which was somehow worse.
---
Later, under the quiet hum of the academy's night lights, Gareth stood in Vale's office—a room built from metal, glass, and history that neither side wanted to discuss.
Vale watched him the way engineers watched prototypes that showed unexpected behavior.
"Your system demonstrated predictive capability in the field," she said without preamble. "Precognitive combat analysis."
"I noticed," Gareth replied carefully.
Vale leaned forward, elbows on her desk. "Be careful what you notice. Some systems aren't just tools, Lancer. They're memories wearing different skins." Her hand unconsciously went to her cybernetic eye. "I know what it's like when technology starts remembering things you've forgotten. It doesn't always end well."
Gareth processed the implications, feeling a genuine chill that had nothing to do with the room's temperature. "Meaning?"
Vale's mechanical eye clicked softly, focusing and refocusing. "Meaning the last time we saw that kind of predictive patterning in combat systems, it was eighteen years ago. During Project Aurora. Right before the world almost ended." She paused, letting that sink in. "Your system isn't just adapting, Lancer. It's remembering how to adapt. And that suggests it learned from something that shouldn't exist anymore."
Outside, rain began to streak across the training dome's glass—impossible rain that the weather systems should have prevented, falling anyway because Aeria's broken infrastructure was a metaphor nobody wanted to acknowledge.
Gareth pressed his palm against the cold glass of the overhang, watching droplets distort his reflection—too calm, too precise, too designed.
[Calibration: 72%]
[Subsystem: Predictive Combat — Active]
[Memory Lock: Level 1 breach detected.]
Somewhere in his neural code, something stirred again—a memory he didn't choose to have, wearing the voice of someone he'd never met:
"Hello, Subject Lancer. Do you remember your first command?"
The voice wasn't his.
And it definitely wasn't human.
But it knew his name.