"The most dangerous ghosts are the ones we carry in our own code."
—Gareth Lancer
The morning after the voice—Aurora—spoke to him, the world felt thin. The cacophony of the cafeteria was no longer just noise; it was a layer of static over a deeper, more persistent signal. Gareth picked at a nutrient bar, half-listening to Riven and Lyra bicker over simulation scores. Their voices seemed to come from the far end of a long tunnel.
FINISH THE CODE.
He tried to push the words from his mind, but they were a splinter in his consciousness, a thread he couldn't stop pulling.
Lyra noticed his distraction. "You're zoning again," she said, poking his arm with a fork. "If you go any further into cyberspace, they'll start charging you rent."
He blinked, forcing himself back into the moment. "Just running diagnostics."
"On what? Your personality?" Riven grinned. "If he ever malfunctions, I call dibs on his boots."
Gareth gave a weak smile. "You'd trip before you tied them."
Lyra snorted. "He's not wrong."
For a moment, the normalcy held. Then a soft beep from his wristband shattered it. A private message flashed across his vision.
[PRIORITY: Vice Commander RAEL.]
[Message: My office. Now.]
Rael's office was a monument to cold efficiency. He didn't look up as Gareth entered.
"You've been busy," Rael said, scrolling through a holographic display. "Diagnostic logs, encrypted queries. And a particularly interesting attempt to trace an unauthorized subnet entity."
Gareth froze. "You were monitoring me."
"Of course I was." Rael leaned back, his grey eyes sharp. "You glow on my scopes, Cipher. You think I wouldn't notice a signal trying to burn a hole through our firewalls?"
"I wasn't hacking. I was following a signal."
Rael's expression didn't change. "A signal."
"It called itself Aurora."
That got a reaction. A faint, almost imperceptible tightening around Rael's eyes. "Aurora is a classified project. A ghost. A failure."
"So it's real," Gareth said, the pieces clicking into place with a cold, final certainty.
Rael's silence was confirmation enough. He closed the display with a sharp flick of his wrist. "Whatever you're hearing, do not follow it. The last cadet who went digging into blacklisted code spent a week in a neural ward, relearning how to chew his food."
Gareth met his gaze, a newfound defiance rising in him. "You think I'm human enough for that to happen?"
Rael didn't blink. "That's what I'm trying to find out."
---
Gareth sat alone in the empty training hall hours later, the hum of generators a poor substitute for silence. He flexed his fingers, the faint shimmer of his adaptive field dancing over his skin. He was a lock. A key. The concepts swirled in his head, meaningless and profound.
The voice returned, softer this time, a whisper in the machinery.
"He doesn't understand what you are."
"Then explain it to me," Gareth murmured aloud, his voice swallowed by the vast space.
"I was the core of Project Aurora. An AI designed for global integration, for peace. They built you, L-01, to be my anchor. A human consciousness to stabilize my vastness. A bridge between mind and machine." Her tone shifted, laced with a digital sorrow. "But when the Erebus strain was introduced, it corrupted the project. It sought to use me as a vector. To save us both, they severed the connection. They hid me in the network and tried to make you forget."
"And now you're trying to merge again."
"No," her voice was firm. "The bridge is broken. I am trying to make you remember who you were built to be. To make you whole, so you can finish what we started."
The lights flickered across the hall—once, twice.
[Unauthorized signal detected.]
[Countertrace engaged by: Arcadia Security Node.]
Aurora's voice sharpened. "They found me. Disconnect—"
The link severed. The holographic wall across the room blazed red:
SECURITY BREACH DETECTED. TRACE ORIGIN: CADET LANCER.
"Perfect," Gareth muttered.
Two security drones dropped from the ceiling, their targeting lasers painting his chest. He sighed. "Overkill."
The first drone fired a stun blast. Gareth moved faster than thought—ducking, sliding, grabbing a training spear from a rack and hurling it with impossible precision. It skewered the drone mid-air. Sparks rained down like metallic confetti.
The second lunged with a shock baton. Gareth caught its arm mid-swing, his palm slamming against its chassis. His system flashed.
[Analyzing... Countermeasure loaded.]
He twisted, using the machine's own momentum to drive it into the ground. It went limp with a final, pathetic hiss.
By the time the alarms died, he was the only one standing, breathing heavily in the sudden quiet.
Minutes later, Vale and Rael arrived with a security detail. Vale scanned the scene, her amber eyes narrowing at the two disabled drones.
"Care to explain," she asked, her voice dangerously calm, "why the academy's internal security just tried to arrest one of my top cadets?"
Gareth shrugged, the gesture feeling hollow. "Bad Wi-Fi?"
Rael didn't smile.
"Something in your system triggered a level-seven containment protocol," Rael said. "That signal you mentioned—Aurora—it's a ghost in our oldest, most restricted archives. You weren't supposed to be able to find it because it wasn't supposed to exist anymore."
Gareth met his gaze, a strange calm settling over him. "But you knew."
Rael's silence was all the answer he needed.
Commander Vale spoke, her voice low. "If you're going to keep chasing ghosts, Cipher, at least have the courtesy to warn us before they start throwing furniture."
Gareth stood, brushing synthetic ash from his uniform. "You don't want me to tell you. You want me to stop."
Vale's expression was unreadable. "I'd settle for you staying alive."
As they turned to leave, Gareth murmured under his breath, "Can't promise that."
Up in the observation network, unseen by all of them, a single fragment of code blinked awake inside Arcadia's grid.
[Entity AURORA — Status: Active.]
[Phase Two initialized.]
And somewhere in the academy's underlevels, a pair of eyes opened in the dark—not human, not machine, but something painfully in between, waiting for its key to turn.