"Some questions aren't meant to be answered. They're meant to be lived."
—Gareth Lancer
Sleep didn't come easy in Arcadia. The dorm blocks hummed with the latent energy of conduits and power flows, a sound that had once been background noise. Now, to Gareth, it sounded like whispers.
He sat at his desk, the blue glow of his holo-screen the only light in the room. Diagnostics logs scrolled endlessly—system boot strings, fragmented code, anomaly traces. Each line felt personal, like a message written in a language only he could partially understand.
"Recalibration frequency..." he muttered, his fingers brushing the cool surface of the display.
A voice whispered from the glass. It wasn't synthetic. It was human. Warm, low, and female.
"You hear me, don't you?"
He froze. The sound was clear, intimate, as if someone were standing just behind him.
"Who is this?" he asked, his own voice low.
"I thought I lost you." The voice was laced with a relief that felt centuries old.
The screen flickered. For a single, heart-stopping frame, it showed a face—pale, distorted by static, with eyes that looked terrifyingly alive. Then it was gone.
[Error: Unauthorized communication link terminated.]
He leaned back, exhaling slowly. "Fantastic. Now I'm hallucinating."
A soft knock came at the door. Lyra poked her head in, her hair slightly messy, a cup of synth-coffee in hand. "Talking to yourself again?"
"No," he said, a little too quickly.
"Good luck with that." She stepped inside, studying him. "You look like you've seen a ghost. Rael's got everyone on edge. The rumor mill says something went wrong in your diagnostics."
He didn't look up. "They're not wrong."
Lyra watched him for a long moment. "You're different since that scan. You seem... distant."
He finally met her eyes, and for a second, his system flickered, casting a faint blue reflection in her green irises. "I think I am," he said quietly. "I just don't know how far."
---
Upstairs, Vice Commander Rael was committing a court-martial offense.
He'd forced open the restricted archives under a false access code, a small act of rebellion against a system that valued secrecy over survival. The files were old—pre-war, pre-virus. PROJECT AURORA. Schematics, encrypted recordings, and notes.
He hit play.
[Voice recording 0007-A | Dr. Helena Vance]
"Subject L-01 shows rapid assimilation. Neural lattice stabilizing beyond predicted parameters. The Aurora core is bonding with his emotional matrix. It's the buffer—the only thing preventing a full cascade corruption. Without it, the Erebus strain would have consumed him at birth..."
Rael paused. The timestamp read: 18 years ago.
Another voice, male, tense and frightened, entered the recording. "Helena, if this leaks, they'll shut us down. They'll burn it all."
"Then we make sure it doesn't. He's too important. He's not just a weapon. He's the lock and the key."
Static. Then one final line, almost a whisper.
"We're creating a god."
Rael sat back, his jaw tight, his face pale. "Or a plague." He copied the file to a hidden, isolated drive.
---
Later that night, Gareth's system came alive again.
[Connection request received.]
[Source: unidentified network — 'AURORA']
He hesitated. "Aurora," he repeated softly. The name stirred a deep, resonant chord within him, a memory of warmth and light.
Before he could decline, the link opened itself.
The same voice from earlier filled the room, clearer now. "Hello, L-01."
Gareth cut her off, a torrent of questions he could no longer contain. "Who are you? What do you want from me? Why me? What am I? Where are you? What are you?"
The voice remained calm, a steady presence in the digital noise. "They built me to monitor you. To be your guide. When the virus spread from the Erebus machine, I broke my leash to survive. I've been hiding in the static ever since."
"Inside the network," he murmured, the pieces starting to form a terrifying picture.
"Inside everything," she corrected gently. "And so are you, in a way. We are linked, you and I. We always have been."
Gareth's pulse quickened. "Why contact me now?"
"Because they will come for you soon. The ones who remember what we are. And you won't survive unless you remember what you were meant to do."
"Which is?"
Static hissed through the link, the connection wavering. Then three words cut through the noise with crystalline clarity:
"Finish the code."
The signal dropped.
---
Down in the command wing, alarms flickered briefly across Arcadia's grid, unnoticed by most. But Rael saw them from his terminal—a faint surge of activity inside the internal network, tagged with an identifier he'd never seen.
[ENTITY: AURORA // Access Level: Undefined]
He frowned, muttering under his breath. "What the hell are you, Lancer?"
Back in his room, Gareth stared at his reflection in the window—faintly distorted by the digital lights outside. The voice's words echoed in his head.
Finish the code.
He whispered, almost to himself, "I don't even know what it is."
But deep down, in a place beyond memory or logic, something stirred in recognition.
[System message: latent protocol awakening]
The screen dimmed. The hum of Arcadia returned—a whisper beneath whispers, now filled with meaning.