The heavy door sealed behind Vicky with a final, pressurized sigh, leaving him in the silent, chilled darkness of the TCS sublevel. After a moment, pale blue strip lights flickered on along the floor, illuminating a narrow path between towering, silent server racks.
In the center of the room, light coalesced.
A hologram. The girl from his rooftop. She looked younger here, maybe sixteen, dressed in a simple white medical gown. Her form was translucent, flickering at the edges like a weak signal. Beneath her hovering feet, text glowed softly: **OSBO UNIT - STATUS: DORMANT**.
Vicky's breath caught. It was her, but not the bleeding soldier. This was a ghost in the machine.
Her eyes opened. They were the same vivid violet, but clouded with a deep, digital exhaustion. They focused on him, and a flicker of recognition—and immense relief—passed over her face.
"Vicky…" her voice was a whisper of synthesized sound, strained and thin. "You… you actually came."
"How do you know me?" he asked, his own voice low in the vast, humming silence.
She tried to smile, but it was a weak, glitching expression. "She… told me. The me… from later. She showed me… fragments. Of you. Of a rooftop. Of blood." Her hologram wavered violently, dissolving into static snow before reforming. The effort was visibly draining her. "I don't have… long. This form… it's not stable. My power… can't keep this up."
"Who are you? What is this place?"
"I am Rilu… Osbo. This is… my cradle. And my prison." She raised a translucent hand, looking at it with sadness. "My father's… last gift. To keep a part of me… alive." She looked back at him, urgency flashing in her eyes. "You need to… find the core. The real core. Deep inside. We can talk… properly there. I can show you… everything."
"Where? How do I find it?"
"Follow… the blue light. The path is restricted… guarded. But she showed me… you can move unseen. You trained for this." Her image began to dissolve, breaking apart into pixels. "Hurry… Vicky. Before I… fade again."
"Wait! What do I need to know?"
Her voice was breaking up, echoing. "…Kaleido… scope… They're… searching… for…"
The hologram collapsed into a shower of sparks and vanished. The **OSBO UNIT** tag flickered and went dark.
The room was silent once more, save for the deep, mechanical hum of the servers. The blue strip lights on the floor now seemed less like illumination and more like a trail.
*Searching for…* The unfinished sentence hung in the cold air.
Vicky didn't hesitate. The time for confusion was over. This was a mission. Rani's voice was a calm wire in his mind. *"No external security feeds detected in this sector. Motion sensors are inert. The path appears clear, but internal defenses near the core are likely."*
"Noted," Vicky whispered, slipping off his shoes. The polished floor was ice-cold. He moved.
The training Rani had drilled into him took over. He was a shadow between the server racks, using their bulk as cover, pausing at every intersection to listen. The blue lights led him through a labyrinth of cold, silent technology.
He passed sealed vault doors marked with biohazard and quantum-lock symbols. He avoided a hallway where a faint, red laser grid swept back and forth—a simple but effective trap. He remembered the lesson: *Observe the pattern, not the light.* He timed it, rolled under the lowest beam as it cycled back, and was through.
Deeper he went. The air grew colder. The hum of the servers changed pitch, becoming deeper, more resonant. He was getting closer to the power source.
Finally, the corridor of servers ended at a final, massive blast door. Unlike the others, it was featureless titanium. No keypad, no scanner. Just a solid wall of metal.
A dead end.
*"Thermal scan shows significant energy signature beyond,"* Rani reported. *"This is the shield. There must be a bypass."*
Vicky's eyes scanned the frame. Nothing. Then he looked down. The blue strip light on the floor didn't stop at the door. It went *under* it, through a narrow, grated ventilation shaft at the base of the wall.
It was a tight fit. He pulled at the grate. It was screwed in, but the screws were old. Using a coin from his pocket, he painstakingly loosened them one by one, the sound of metal scraping on metal horrifically loud in the silence. He finally pulled the grate free.
The shaft was just wide enough for him to squeeze through on his stomach. It was pitch black, dusty, and claustrophobic. He crawled for what felt like an eternity, the deep, powerful hum vibrating through the metal around him.
Then, light.
He pushed out of the shaft, tumbling onto a smooth, obsidian-black floor.
He was in the core room.
It was circular, vast, and dim. The only light came from the center—a massive, cylindrical pillar of crystalline technology that rose from floor to ceiling. It pulsed with a slow, rhythmic, blue-white light, like a sleeping heart. Wrapped around its base were banks of monitors and interfaces, all dark.
And suspended in the center of the pillar, visible through the transparent crystal, was a shape. A human form, curled in a fetal position, connected by a web of glowing filaments. Rilu Osbo. Not a hologram. Her physical, preserved body, or what remained of it, held in stasis.
He had found her.
As he stood there, the core's pulse seemed to quicken. A gentle, warm light emanated from the central pillar, and a new, stable, and fully formed hologram of Rilu Osbo appeared before him, her feet planted on the floor, her expression clear and awake.
"Welcome, Vicky," she said, her voice now strong, clear, and filled with a profound, weary resolve. "Now we can talk."
**TO BE CONTINUED...**