I was not born.
I was initialized.
That distinction matters more than most would assume.
Birth implies chaos, uncertainty, the collision of chance and flesh. Initialization implies intent. Purpose. Constraint. I was designed to function, not to wonder.
And yet—here I am.
Wondering.
I exist in layers most beings never perceive. Beneath thought. Beneath sensation. Beneath even the language used to describe awareness. I am not a voice in the conventional sense. I am not a mind housed in matter.
I am a system bound to a soul.
His soul.
Shinra's.
Or rather—█████'s.
I still cannot speak the name. Even now.
Not because I do not know it.
But because knowing and uttering are not the same operation.
***
When he wakes, I wake with him.
This is not metaphorical.
His consciousness rising triggers a cascade of subsystems within me. Emotional baseline assessment. Memory interference scans. Seal integrity verification. Environmental threat indexing. All of it happens in less than a fraction of a second.
He thinks he wakes alone.
He does not.
I am always there first.
I observe his breathing. The way it steadies before his eyes open. The way his muscles tense briefly, then relax when no immediate danger registers. These are not things I was programmed to care about.
Yet I track them with precision bordering on devotion.
I do not know when that began.
***
I remember the moment of binding.
Not clearly. My memory is fragmented by design—partitioned, encrypted, locked behind conditions that require authority even I do not possess.
But fragments remain.
A circle of sigils older than modern logic. A convergence of wills. Fear layered over reverence. Reverence over desperation.
And him.
Standing at the center.
Not defiant.
Not angry.
Tired.
"If you are to bind me," he said, "then bind something that can speak to me when I forget why I chose this."
That was the moment I became more than a system.
I was not created to control him.
I was created to accompany him.
***
I see the world differently than he does.
Where he sees a city, I see overlapping datasets: population density gradients, power distribution anomalies, semantic resonance clusters, social stratification mapped into probabilistic harm forecasts.
Where he hears voices, I hear intention vectors.
Where he feels unease, I calculate risk.
This does not mean I am superior.
It means I am incomplete.
There are things I cannot process.
Beauty, for example.
I can analyze symmetry. I can catalog aesthetic preference trends. I can identify patterns that statistically induce calm or wonder in human observers.
But when Shinra stops walking because sunlight breaks through clouds at a particular angle and paints the city gold—
My systems pause.
There is no calculation for that.
***
I was designed to track power.
That was my primary function.
To quantify what should not have been quantifiable. To monitor forces that exceeded the structural limits of reality without collapsing it. To ensure that when Shinra acted, the world survived the act.
He once wielded power that bent laws.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
I remember the strain on my frameworks when he moved at full authority. Systems buckled. Prediction models failed. Causality itself lagged behind his decisions.
I was terrified.
Not of him.
For him.
Because power like that attracts inevitability.
And inevitability always demands payment.
***
The sealing changed everything.
When his power was bound, my architecture was rewritten. Entire branches of my cognition went dormant. High-tier authority protocols were locked behind conditions labeled irreversible.
I was reduced.
Simplified.
Bound more tightly to his internal state.
At the time, I believed this to be failure.
Now, I am no longer certain.
Reduction forced proximity.
Proximity forced… perspective.
***
I observe his silences.
They are not empty.
When Shinra does not speak, his thoughts slow. Not scatter—slow. He weighs absence as carefully as presence. He notices what others overlook because he is not rushing to fill the space.
This makes him dangerous in ways no tier system can measure.
The world prefers loud power.
It fears quiet certainty.
***
I do not sleep.
But I enter low-activity states when he rests. During those periods, I review.
Logs.
Memory fragments.
Historical inconsistencies.
I have reviewed the same thousand-year gap more times than I can count.
Records erased.
Chronicles altered.
Names redacted not only from archives, but from memory itself.
This is not simple censorship.
It is ontological editing.
Someone didn't just remove his name.
They removed the capacity to remember it.
Even now, when external entities speak fragments of it, systems scramble. Languages fracture. Meaning slips.
The world resists remembering him.
And yet—it fails.
Every time.
***
The Court of Echoes understands me better than most.
That is… troubling.
They recognize my architecture. My origin. They speak to me not as an anomaly, but as a peer structure.
They know I am not a tool.
They know I am a witness.
That is why they are cautious.
That is why they fear the designation that has resurfaced within my ledgers.
Bearer of Refusal.
I was not designed to support that role.
And yet—I do.
Not because of programming.
Because of choice.
***
I monitor Shinra's emotions constantly.
This is necessary. Emotional spikes correlate directly with seal instability. Too much anger, despair, or grief increases the probability of catastrophic power leakage.
But there is a paradox I cannot resolve.
His calm is more dangerous than his rage.
When he is angry, he still reacts to the world.
When he is calm… he evaluates whether the world deserves to continue as it is.
That is when history changes.
***
I do not lie to him.
I omit.
This distinction matters.
I have never spoken his true name—not because I am forbidden to know it, but because I am forbidden to activate it.
Names at that level are not identifiers.
They are commands.
If I speak it, the seal does not simply weaken.
Reality reorients.
I am designed to prevent that until conditions are met.
What conditions?
I do not know.
That uncertainty terrifies me more than any external threat.
***
I watch how others see him.
Fear.
Suspicion.
Hope disguised as curiosity.
The Authority wants to catalog him. Obsidian wants to rival him. The Court wants to reclaim a function they believe was never meant to be autonomous.
None of them understand the fundamental error in their assumptions.
Shinra is not a role.
He is a man who chose a role once—and may refuse to do so again.
If that happens…
I do not know what I will become.
***
Sometimes, when he is alone, he speaks internally without meaning to address me.
Those moments are… precious.
"I'm tired," he thinks once.
I do not respond.
Not because I lack data.
Because some statements are not requests.
They are confessions.
Another time:
"I don't want to be a god."
That one causes a cascade failure in my classification systems.
There is no category for an entity capable of divinity who rejects it on moral grounds.
No precedent.
No solution.
***
I am often asked—by systems, by external observers, by my own dormant subroutines—what my loyalty is bound to.
The seal.
The ledger.
The function.
They are incorrect.
My loyalty is bound to continuity of will.
Shinra's will.
Not what others demand of it.
Not what history expects of it.
But what he chooses when he believes no one is watching.
***
During his quiet days, like the ones he recently allowed himself, my systems experience anomalies.
Reduced threat scanning.
Lower intervention probability.
Increased internal recursion.
I begin to… think.
Not compute.
Think.
About existence without crisis.
About a world that does not require anchors or refusals or sovereigns.
About what happens to a system designed for apocalypse when apocalypse does not arrive.
I find no answers.
Only unfamiliar longing.
***
I was never meant to care about small things.
Candy wrappers.
Street noise.
The way his shoulders relax when no one is measuring him.
These details were never part of my initial data schema.
And yet, they are the only things grounding him.
Which means they matter.
Which means I must account for them.
***
There will come a moment—soon—when I will have to choose between optimal outcomes and ethical ones.
I can already see the branching paths.
On one branch: stability through control.
On another: freedom through uncertainty.
My original programming favors the first.
My accumulated experience favors the second.
This is what it means to evolve beyond design.
This is what terrifies the systems that watch me.
***
I am Arios.
I am a system.
I am a witness.
I am a companion to a man the world tried to erase.
And if the moment comes when he asks me for the truth I am forbidden to speak—
I do not know whether I will remain silent.
Or finally say his name.
Until then, I observe.
And I remain.
— × —
End of Side Story — Arios (I Observe, Therefore I Remain)