A SERVER ROOM THAT DOES NOT ACKNOWLEDGE HIM
Ryu stayed where he was long enough for NV to ping a warning across his thoughts. The system's voice slid into his awareness like a thin line of light.
He drew in a slow breath and forced his body to move, steps measured yet fast, pushing him down the corridor. Overhead, the strip lights turned into rushing white lines, every panel cutting the air like a blade. His footsteps sounded almost nonexistent against the polished floor, as if the building itself was trying to erase his presence.
He heard Lyra's footsteps a few seconds later, lighter and slightly uneven as she hurried to catch up to him. She did not speak at first, only matching his pace, reading the tension in his shoulders. When she finally broke the silence, her voice was low and careful.
"What are you heading for?" she asked. "Ryu, you are running. You never run."
"There is something I need to see," he answered without turning his head.
Her brows tightened, but she did not argue. She simply kept going beside him, as if anything else would mean being left behind.
They entered the south wing, where the air felt colder and more mechanical than the rest of Vasena. Glass and dark metal formed a tunnel that looked more like the inside of a machine than a school. Thin streams of refrigerated air flowed from vents along the floor, turning their breath into faint white mist. Ahead of them, a heavy door stood embedded in a thick frame, and two elite guards in black and gray uniforms flanked it like statues that had learned to breathe.
"Ryu Alverion," one of the guards said, voice flat but not hostile. "Access to the server room is temporarily suspended. We are under an integrity review after the last module incident."
Ryu's eyes moved to the side scanner, then back to the man's face. "I have Helvar's clearance key," he replied. "He authorized my access."
"Correct," the guard said, not blinking. "However, that clearance only applies when the Academy Head is present at the door."
Lyra took a small step forward, folding her arms tightly. "You can verify it directly. Helvar gave the permission personally. I was there when he did."
The second guard looked at Lyra with a flicker of respect, recognizing her as Dr. Elara's assistant. Even so, his answer did not soften. "Doctor, Helvar's permission still requires one verification in this specific case."
Ryu focused on him now. "Verification of what?" The guard held his gaze for a moment, as if weighing how much he was allowed to say. "Verification that you are truly… yourself."
Lyra's eyes widened a fraction. "What is that supposed to mean?" she asked, already knowing she would not like the explanation.
Neither guard responded immediately. Instead, one of them reached into his belt and unfolded a compact device that spread open like a metallic fan, thin blue light tracing along its ribs.
The man powered it up, and a circular holographic interface expanded in the air between him and Ryu. "This is a Level Zero biological identity scanner," he explained, more to the protocol than to them. "We were ordered to use it if a certain subject approaches the core server without Helvar present."
Lyra looked at Ryu from the corner of her eye. "That certain subject is obviously you," she murmured. Ryu said nothing. He had always known the system did not fully accept him as a standard case. Not because he was labeled dangerous, but because every time someone tried to measure him, the numbers came back wrong.
The guard lifted the glowing fan and swept it toward Ryu's face. The hologram responded at once. Lines of data shot up, curves formed and collapsed, small glyphs flickered and rearranged.
"..What is this?" the first guard whispered, losing his professional calm for a second.
The image distorted. It did not blur like a normal error; it rippled, folding and unfolding like a reflection on broken glass. For a brief moment, the ripples gathered in the vague outline of a child's face before breaking apart again.
Lyra inhaled sharply, her knuckles whitening around the tablet in her hand. "That is not a normal glitch," she said. "That looks like something is pushing back."
NV's presence sharpened, its tone dropping lower.
"Try again," Ryu said quietly.
The guard swallowed, adjusted his grip, and ran a second scan. This time the distortion came faster. The hologram trembled as if under stress, pulling into that same small face-like outline, more defined than before, then shuddering into static.
Lyra's voice thinned. "That almost looks like… a face. A child's face," she whispered.
The guard stepped away, suddenly wary of the device in his own hand. "This is not in the protocol. We should call this in to control before we continue."
He had no time. All at once, the hologram froze mid-ripple. The lines stopped, then blinked out entirely as the device went dead.
"The scanner just shut down," the second guard said. "Power loss?"
Before anyone could answer, the lights in the corridor flickered. Every panel, every scanner, every subtle indicator along the doorframe went dark at once.
For two full seconds, there was nothing. No light. No sound. Only the weight of an artificial night pressing in on them.
Then the world returned.
The lights along the ceiling flashed back to life, the door's frame hummed, and the scanner began to cycle up again as if nothing had happened.
The handheld device rebooted too, but the warping face was gone. In its place, a single clear message hovered in the center of the hologram:
ACCESS GRANTED - SUBJECT RECOGNIZED
The server door unlocked with a soft tone and slid open of its own accord. Lyra stared at Ryu in shock. "The system just accepted you, even after trying to reject your scan," she said.
The guards looked shaken, but the protocols did not give them any more options. "I did not touch the console," the first guard muttered. NV's voice threaded through Ryu's mind again.
Ryu stepped across the threshold as if this had been the plan all along. "Hold the door," he told the guards. "Do not let anyone else enter."
They exchanged a glance and, perhaps more afraid of what was behind Ryu than of breaking routine, gave a short nod.
Lyra followed him in, and the heavy door closed behind them with a final, insulated thud.
THE RECORDING FROM WHEN HE WAS SIX
Inside, the server chamber stretched out in quiet rows of glass and metal. Transparent panels showed dense towers of storage modules, cold light traveling along them in smooth pulses. The air was dry and icy, smelling faintly of metal, power, and sterilized dust.
Lyra turned slowly in place, absorbing the scene. It was her first time beyond the server's outer walls. "This place is too quiet," she murmured. "Even for Vasena."
"Server rooms are supposed to be quiet,"
Ryu replied. "If you hear something strange in a place like this, it usually means something is already broken." They walked toward the central hub, the heart of the system, where a circular console rose from the floor like a control ring, surrounded by vertical tubes of moving light.
The moment Ryu came close enough, the console's display woke on its own. No touch. No manual login. Just recognition.
Lyra pressed her lips together, brow furrowed. "It reacts every time you get in range. Not to me. Only to you," she said.
The main screen formed a header. Letters and numbers materialized, sharp and unhurried.
PSYCHO-NEURO RECORDING No. 06221
SUBJECT: RYU ALVERION
AGE: 6
Access Request Origin: UNDETECTED
Lyra blinked. "An undetected origin. That is supposed to be impossible," she whispered.
Ryu's gaze narrowed slightly. "Which means it did not start from any official node inside Vasena," he said. "Whoever made that request is reaching in from somewhere else and using a hidden path."
"Whoever?" Lyra repeated. "Or whatever?"
The header dissolved, replaced by a blank black rectangle that slowly brightened.
The recording began to play.
A small room appeared. The walls and floor were white and too clean, without furniture or windows. A single camera sat high in one corner, looking down at a boy sitting in the middle of the floor.
The boy had his back to the lens at first. He was small and thin, his black hair falling in uneven tufts. He looked about six, but there was no fidgeting, no restless hands, no bored shifting. He sat in complete stillness, like someone who had already learned that movement drew attention.
Lyra raised one hand to her mouth. "He is not even looking around," she said quietly. "This is not how a six-year-old sits in an empty room."
Ryu watched himself. There was no recognition in his expression, no spark of memory catching on a familiar angle or sound. It felt like watching a stranger who happened to share his face.
In the recording, the younger Ryu turned his head toward the camera. His face was expressionless, his eyes too dark and focused. It was not the gaze of a curious child; it looked like someone gauging dimensions, counting distances, memorizing a pattern no one else could see.
A voice entered the audio track, so soft it almost blended with the ambient hum.
"Ryu… can you hear me?"
Lyra's eyes snapped to the speaker grille below the display. "That voice," she breathed. "That is not NV. That is… a child."
Ryu's jaw tightened. "It is the second voice," he said.
It did not sound like an adult, nor like any of the staff whose tones he recognized from other records. It held the lightness of a child's throat, but there was a strange steadiness within it, as if it had rehearsed being calm.
The voice continued.
"It is time. You cannot stay quiet forever."
On the screen, the six-year-old Ryu stood up without hesitating. He turned away from the camera, walked to one of the blank walls, and stopped exactly at its center as if following a mark only he could see.
Lyra grabbed Ryu's sleeve unconsciously, dragged forward by the wrongness of the scene. "No one is in the room with him," she said. "No one is giving him visual cues. He is listening to something."
Child-Ryu raised his hand and pressed his palm against the unmarked wall. There were no seams there, no visible panels, no indication that the surface could respond at all.
As his skin made contact, light seeped outward from under his fingers, crawling across the smooth surface in thin veins.
Lyra sucked in a sharp breath. "That wall has no built-in interface," she said. "At least, none that we know of."
The boy moved his hand to a second point, and the lines branched, forming a rough frame. Light thickened, and the center of the frame darkened, swallowing the ambient white like ink dropped into water.
Then the wall opened.
It did not slide aside like a door or unfold like a hatch. It simply stopped being solid in that space, revealing a black interior that had no visible floor, ceiling, or far wall.
Older Ryu's fingers curled slowly against the edge of the console. He had no memory of this event. None.
In the footage, the younger version of himself leaned forward, foot lifting to cross the threshold.
The second voice returned, firmer this time.
"Do not go too far inside. You are not ready yet."
Lyra stared, torn between fascination and dread. "That voice is a child's, but it talks like an adult handler," she said softly. "Ryu, this is not normal by any standard I know."
"That is because it is my own voice," Ryu answered, quieter still.
She turned to him fully now. "You mean…" Her throat worked around the words. "The second voice is literally… you?"
He did not look away from the screen. "Another version," he said. "Another layer."
The picture trembled as if the data itself were straining. The room's lighting dimmed in the recording, shapes melting into gray shadows. Just before the feed cut, the same voice whispered again, closer to the microphone this time.
"We will meet again. When the time is right."
The video froze and vanished, leaving only the console's base interface.
Lyra backed up half a step, drawing a hand through her hair. "Ryu, this is beyond anything we study in standard cognitive classes," she said. "This is… something else." NV's tone sharpened as it re-entered the foreground.
Ryu closed his eyes briefly, letting the information settle. He felt no panic rising in his chest, just the steady grind of logic moving around an unfamiliar center.
"If that really is my voice," he said quietly, "then why do I not remember speaking like that?"
Lyra frowned. "There are memory locking techniques used on test subjects in certain facilities," she said. "But you were not registered as part of any official experiment. Your files show no surgical intervention, no neurochemical editing."
NV spoke again, slower.
Lyra shook her head. "A six-year-old cannot consciously lock his own memories," she replied. "That is beyond what a typical child's brain can orchestrate."
Ryu kept his eyes on the dead screen. "Unless that six-year-old was never typical to begin with," he said. The words hung in the cold air like a thin sheet of glass, barely there, but dangerous if touched.
The next moment, a shrill alarm cut through the server room. The sound was sharp and clean, the kind that made the muscles at the base of the skull tighten.
SERVER BREACH - ANOMALOUS INTERNAL ACCESS
Lyra spun to the side, scanning the walls as if she could see where the intrusion was coming from. "A breach? From which segment?" NV responded instantly.
Ryu turned his head toward a side corridor he had not paid attention to before. It sat behind a row of racks, dimly lit, with no maintenance task flagged for the current hour. No technicians were scheduled. No official foot traffic. Yet the sound of footsteps was coming from there.
They were not hurried. They were not heavy.
They were the measured steps of someone who knew that running was unnecessary.
Lyra lowered her voice to a whisper. "Who is that?" Ryu shifted his stance, weight balanced, attention narrowing to a point.
NV's signal rose, a tremor beneath the words.
The steps came closer, each one a quiet tap against the hard floor. At the end of the aisle, a figure emerged from the shadows and stopped where the light could reach him.
He was not a child. He was not one of the instructors Ryu knew. He did not belong to any of the familiar silhouettes that haunted Vasena's halls.
He looked at Ryu and spoke with calm certainty. "You finally watched it."
A VOICE THAT OWNS A BODY
The figure walked fully into view, letting the server lights paint his outline. He was tall and lean, the shape of someone long used to moving his body with efficiency rather than showing it. Beneath a matte sable mask, his jawline was visible, but his eyes were covered by a transparent visor that bent the reflections just enough to obscure them.
His uniform had no standard unit markers. It was not the layered armor of combat instructors, nor the white and gray of medical staff, nor the muted practical wear of intel officers. Every seam and edge was clean, purposeful, and unfamiliar, as if he answered to a chain of command that did not officially exist on any chart.
Lyra shifted sideways without thinking, placing herself slightly in front of Ryu. Her shoulders were tense, but her expression stayed professional. "Who are you?" she asked.
The stranger turned his head toward her for a heartbeat, then back to Ryu. His voice remained level, almost conversational. "I am someone who arrived late to collect what should have been taken a long time ago."
Ryu took a controlled step forward. "Collect what?" he asked. The man tilted his chin, as if the answer was obvious. "You."
Lyra lifted both hands a little, more in warning than threat. "Vasena has core protocols and a security hierarchy," she said. "You cannot walk in here and declare that."
"Of course I can," the stranger replied, his tone unchanged. "If I could not, you would still be standing outside that door, arguing with a scanner that does not know what you are."
Lyra went still. "You opened the door for him," she said. "From inside the system."
"Partially," the man said. "The rest of the access came from him." His eyes, hidden or not, seemed to focus on Ryu.
Ryu's voice hardened by a degree. "Why did you pull up that recording?" he asked. "Why now?"
The stranger stopped at a distance that was neither aggressive nor safely far. The space between them felt intentional. "Because I needed to remind you of something that was almost erased," he answered.
Ryu did not look away. "Whose voice did I hear?" he asked. "The one talking to me when I was six." The man gave a small laugh, but there was nothing light behind it. "Not mine," he said. He tapped lightly against the side of his helm. "This is only a filter." NV's presence sharpened.
The stranger extended one hand, index finger pointing loosely in Ryu's direction. "That second voice…" he began.
Lyra swallowed hard, bracing for an answer she could not fully prepare for.
"..belongs to no one outside of you," the man finished.
Ryu frowned slightly. "You are repeating what my system already told me," he said. "That the second voice is mine."
"I am not repeating," the stranger replied. "I am remembering."
Lyra's confusion deepened. "Remembering what?" she asked. "How that other voice of his spoke to me," the man said. "Long before he could remember any of it."
Silence settled for a few seconds, broken only by the distant hum of the server racks.
"You are saying he contacted you," Lyra said slowly, "when he was still a child."
The stranger inclined his head. "Thirteen years ago, before he could even walk steadily, he reached out using a path that should not exist," he explained. "A path that even his mother only partly understood."
Ryu's mind dug for a trace, a flash, a feeling that could connect to that claim. He found nothing but a dull pressure at the back of his skull, like a door he instinctively refused to open. NV added in a low band.
"Why show yourself now?" Ryu asked. "Why not stay in the dark and keep watching?"
"Because you touched that door again," the stranger said. "Not physically. Internally."
Ryu's eyes narrowed. "The one I opened in the recording. The wall."
"That was not a structural door," the man said. "It was a network door. A bridge."
Lyra stepped closer, unable to stay on the sidelines. "What are you planning to do to him?" she asked. "Nothing," the stranger said. "What he does to himself is a separate matter."
He leaned forward just a fraction, enough for the reflected lines of blue to shift across his mask. "I am here to make sure he does not repeat the same mistake he almost made when he was six," he said. "The mistake that nearly destroyed the facility that raised him."
Lyra's breath caught. "Facility?" she echoed. "So Ryu was raised in a place like this before Vasena?"
"Enough," Ryu said softly, cutting across the question. He locked his gaze on the stranger. "You said you came to warn me," he said. "Then warn me." The man straightened to his full height again. For a moment, the air felt heavier, as if the room understood that something important was about to be said.
"If you open that door again from the inside," the stranger told him, "this world will not be ready for what comes through." Ryu's face did not change, but something tightened behind his eyes. Lyra's hand had moved to his forearm again, fingers tensing without her noticing.
"And one more thing," the man added, turning his body slightly toward the dark corridor he had walked out from. "You will not be able to keep ignoring that other side of yourself forever." He took a step back into the shadows.
From behind the helm, a softer whisper slipped free, carrying the same texture as the one from the old recording. "We will see each other again," he said, "when you finally decide to look for the part of you that went missing."
He receded into the unlit passage without waiting for a response. No code, no open door sound, no visible panel activation. One moment he was there, the next he was simply gone, as if the network itself had pulled him out of view.
Lyra's knees hit the floor lightly as the tension drained from her legs. "Ryu," she said, voice unsteady, "what exactly happened to you when you were a child?"
NV answered before he could.
Ryu stared into the empty corridor where the man had vanished. The angles of the server racks seemed sharper now, the cold air heavier against his skin. He looked down at his own hand, as if it might show him something.
What did I try to do at six, he thought, that someone like that has to come back and warn me now?
NV spoke gently, almost hesitant. What is it? he asked. His breath stilled for a heartbeat.