"They say to know thyself. But what if you find a stranger staring back?"
—Gareth Lancer
The lab was a temple of sterile white and gleaming steel, smelling of ozone and antiseptic. It was the kind of clean that made Gareth feel like a contaminant. He sat in the center of a diagnostic cradle, bare from the waist up. Wires snaked across his chest and spine, feeding into a halo of scanners that circled him like mechanical vultures.
A technician's voice echoed from the observation booth above. "Lancer, vitals are stable. Neural sync will commence in sixty seconds."
He nodded once, his fingers curling against the cold metal armrests.
Behind the reinforced glass, Vice Commander Rael watched, arms crossed. To his right stood Commander Vale and Dr. Keira Vance, the head of Bio-Neural Systems. Her expression was a mask of clinical fascination.
"His readings are irregular," she murmured, her eyes fixed on her console. "The adaptive field isn't just responsive—it's recursive. It's not just reading the system; it's reading him."
Vale's frown was subtle. "Explain, Doctor."
"He's not just processing data. He's integrating with it on a fundamental level. His neural pathways are... conversational."
Rael's gaze remained locked on Gareth. "Start the scan."
The cradle lit up. Lines of light crawled across Gareth's skin, tracing the circuits beneath his flesh. A sphere of blue glyphs and shifting code projected around him.
[Neural synchronization: 5%... 12%... 24%...]
The hum grew louder, a physical pressure in the air. Gareth's pulse quickened. His eyes flickered from their usual blue to a sharp, digital cyan.
Then, the change.
[Warning: Unauthorized access detected.]
The lab lights dimmed. The scanners flickered.
Dr. Vance's hands flew over her console. "We're losing control of the interface!"
"Kill the feed," Vale ordered, her voice sharp.
"I can't! He's overriding the controls!"
Inside the cradle, Gareth wasn't moving, but his system was. Streams of raw code poured from his neural band, coalescing in the air. A child's face, pale and terrified. A lab burning. The sound of a woman screaming a name—his name.
"Gareth—no, shut it down!" Vance shouted, her composure cracking.
His breathing hitched. Flashes, faster and more brutal: white coats, blaring alarms, a glass tank shattering. A smaller version of himself floating inside, wires burrowed into his skin like metallic parasites.
[Memory fragment identified — EXPERIMENT L-01.]
Rael slammed his fist on the console. "Vance!"
"He's pulling archived memory data from outside the Academy network!" she cried out, her voice tight with panic. "This isn't in his file! This is... this is from the Black Archive!"
Vale watched, her stoic face a fortress, but her knuckles were white where she gripped the railing. "Let it run."
Rael and Vance stared at her, dumbfounded.
Gareth's voice was a ragged whisper, torn from a place deeper than memory. "I... I know this place."
The holographic images twisted, sharpening into a symbol—a black and red virus emblem, devouring code like fire through silk. And through the chaos, a whisper cut through, clear and intimate, meant only for him:
"You are the key, not the error."
The entire cradle exploded in a silent burst of light.
When the systems rebooted, Gareth was still in the chair—alive, breathing, eyes open. The readouts stabilized, beeping with a mundane regularity that felt obscene.
Dr. Vance exhaled, shaking. "Scan aborted. Neural feedback cycle reached catastrophic thresholds. He should be brain-dead."
Rael just stared through the glass. "But he's not."
Vale remained silent, a single, unreadable tear tracing a path down her cheek before she swiftly wiped it away.
Gareth slowly sat up, the wires falling from his skin like dead serpents. His voice was hollow, the sound of a foundation cracking. "I saw them."
Rael leaned closer to the mic. "Who?"
"The ones who made me." He looked up, and for a brief, terrifying second, the faint reflection of circuitry glowed behind his pupils like ghosts in a machine.
[System sync complete — 100%. Hidden partition unlocked.]
Dr. Vance stiffened. "Made you?"
Gareth's whisper was the only sound in the sudden, heavy silence. "I'm not infected. I'm... part of it."
---
Hours later, Vale and Rael stood alone in the darkened observation deck, the security footage of the event frozen on Gareth's face—calm, unreadable, too composed for what he had endured.
Dr. Vance's report glowed on a tablet between them. "If what we saw is accurate," her voice came through the speaker, quiet and strained, "Lancer's system isn't derived from the Erebus Virus. It's the original scaffold. The architecture that the virus was built on."
Rael didn't turn from the screen. "You're telling me he's the source of the thing we've been fighting for eighteen years."
"Or the only part of it that stayed human," she countered, though she sounded unsure.
Rael watched the frozen image of Gareth. "That depends," he said, his voice low. "On whether he knows which side he's on."
---
Down in the dorm wing, Gareth sat in the dark, the faint pulse of his system the only light.
A voice, the same one from the lab, whispered in the confines of his mind. It was gentle, almost maternal.
"Do you remember the name I gave you?"
He whispered back, "Lancer."
"No. Before that."
His holo-display flickered to life without his command, forming one word before vanishing, leaving the afterimage burned into his vision and his soul.
L-01.
Gareth sat perfectly still for a very long time, the silence around him filled with the echo of a truth he could no longer outrun.