The lights snapped back on.
Dr. Aldric Weller stood frozen at the edge of the room, his pulse thundering in his ears. His gaze swept across the carnage—six armored guards lay sprawled across the floor, some groaning, others utterly still. Smoke rose from scorched armor plates. Sparks hissed from shattered weapons.
But what truly chilled him was the thing standing at the center of it all.
A humanoid shape—but no man. Tall, inhumanly still, its obsidian form glistened. Twin black lenses glowed faintly blue, tracking movement with cold precision. Dark tendrils flexed from its back like the arms of a deep-sea predator.
It turned.
Weller flinched.
The creature's gaze locked onto him. Something inside him screamed to run, but his body wouldn't move. The door was sealed. He was trapped.
It walked forward. The air seemed to hum with pressure.
Two tentacles whipped out, coiling beneath his arms and hoisting him effortlessly into the air. His legs kicked uselessly.
The machine leaned in. Close. Too close.
"Tell me where the robot with the woman's head in its torso is."
The voice was low, sharp. Male.
Weller stammered. "I-I don't—"
A slap, clean and brutal, cracked across his face.
His vision swam.
"Where. Is. She?"
"Oubliette!" he gasped. "She was sent to Site Oubliette!"
The machine's glowing eyes narrowed.
"Do you know its location?"
Weller shook his head frantically.
A pulse of electricity shot through the tentacles. His body arched, spasmed, then went limp. The tendrils released him, and he crumpled to the floor, unconscious.
Simon turned away.
He crossed the room to Jonsy.
"Let's go."
She nodded, snapping the helmet back into place.
They moved quickly. Silent. Efficient. No one stood in their way. The halls were unaware of the chaos made by Simon.
They reached the hangar.
The manta-ray-shaped submersible sat waiting, its hatch open. Simon's structure gel pulsed faintly from its underside, like veins feeding into a living machine.
"Go inside," Simon said.
Jonsy hesitated only a moment, then stepped through the hatch. She turned.
"Aren't you coming?"
Simon stood motionless.
"Not yet. I need to locate Site Oubliette. I can’t leave until I do."
"Simon, this is dangerous. You saw what they did. They don’t see us as people."
He nodded slowly.
"I know. But I can handle it. See you soon."
The hatch sealed.
Water flooded the hangar. Mechanical claws released SPEARHEAD-9, and the massive bay doors opened.
The submersible slipped into the black.
Jonsy stood at the front, hand resting on the cold glass of the cockpit, as Site Prometheus faded behind her, its glittering lights swallowed by the deep.
She didn’t speak.
But her fingers curled into a fist.
He will come back.
Simon moved through the halls like a ghost—soundless, unseen.
He had already taken control of this sector of the site. But Site Prometheus was vast. It would take days—weeks, maybe—to crawl through its endless systems.
And that was if no one stopped him.
Simon knew the clock was ticking. The deeper he pushed into the network, the more likely something—someone—would notice.
But he hadn’t expected this.
He paused mid-stride, his body freezing like a statue. A name had appeared in the personnel database. One that reached beyond the digital world and struck something painfully human in him.
He accessed the file, not expecting more than coincidence.
But it wasn’t.
Dr. Elsie Faden. Daughter of Jesse Faden. A decorated scientist. Renowned in her field of cognitive biomechanics. Multi-awarded. Published. Respected.
Simon felt something clutch at his chest. He stepped into a small storage room, sealed the door behind him, and leaned against the wall. The light overhead hummed, sterile and indifferent.
He called her.
A soft ring. Then a click.
"Hello? Who is this?" A woman’s voice. Soft. Cautious.
He hesitated.
"Hello," Simon said. "I’m... Simon. I was wondering if you could tell me about your father."
There was silence.
"Excuse me?"
"I knew him. A long time ago," Simon said. "We used to see each other at the Grimoire. The comic book shop he ran. He was... he was one of the last good things I remember."
Another pause.
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"That’s... strange. My dad had a friend named Simon. He died when he was twenty-six. Brain injury. It really hit him hard. He talked about him sometimes."
Simon swallowed. "Did he... talk about him often?"
She hesitated. Then: "He did. Especially later in life. Said he never quite got over losing his friend. That maybe if he’d called more… things could’ve been different."
Simon’s hand hovered near the left side of his chest—where a heartbeat used to be.
"He kept the store running for a while," she said. "But when comics went digital, he took a job at a local college. Custodian. Said he liked the quiet. We moved around a bit, but he always brought his boxes. Especially one he labeled Grimoire Ghosts. I wasn’t allowed to touch it."
Simon’s voice cracked, even through the modulator. "How did he go?"
"Old age," she said gently. "I was with him at the end. He had that box in his lap. He looked at it, smiled, and said, See you soon, buddy. Then… he was gone."
Simon bowed his head.
He couldn’t cry. But it felt like he should. The grief sat like a stone in his throat, vast and ancient and wordless.
"Thank you," he whispered.
"Wait—who did you say you were again?"
But he had already cut the line.
Simon stood there in the dark, alone in a world that had forgotten him—carrying the memory of a friend who hadn’t.
He walked out of the storage room.
There was no time to linger. The warmth of that memory, of Jesse's daughter, still pulsed faintly in his synthetic chest—but it was fading, drowned by the cold ticking of reality. He needed to reach the other server room. The central one.
And he was no longer alone.
The moment came without fanfare—a ripple in the code, a sudden spike in latency.
He’d been detected.
He didn’t curse. Didn’t panic. But his internal systems flared with red warnings. Doors that had once opened easily now denied him. Camera eyes blinked where none had before. He could feel the network closing in, awareness spreading like ink in water.
A trap was forming.
Simon shut down the servers he had controlled.
There was no use for them now. He couldn’t afford to leave traces—not with what was coming.
He moved.
Down sterile corridors, past humming walls, beneath flickering lights. His body shifted to match the shadows. The cloaking field shimmered, blending him into the walls like a phantom. Cameras turned—but always a second too late. Sensors blinked, but read nothing. He was there and not there. Seen and unseen.
He passed a pair of guards speaking in low tones. He didn’t hear the words—but he felt the tension. These were not the guards from before. These ones were heavier, more prepared. Their weapons hummed with more than electromagnetic pulses. Lethal. Quiet. Efficient.
Simon slipped past them like breath in cold air.
The server room was three levels down.
The lift was not an option. So he found the emergency shaft. It took him twenty minutes to bypass the biometric lock. His hands became blades, then wires, then keys. When the door opened, stale air greeted him. A shaft forgotten by most, remembered only by the machines.
He descended in silence, his body barely brushing the rungs.
At the bottom, another door. Another lock. But here, his fingers trembled—not from fear, but focus. Every second mattered.
The lock opened.
The main server room loomed ahead, bathed in pale blue light. Tall towers of data stretched like cathedral pillars. Cool mist hung in the air, the breath of cooling systems. It was quiet.
Too quiet.
Simon stepped inside.
He positioned himself behind a towering rack of servers.
The blue-white flicker of the room’s ambient lights reflected faintly off his frame. Above him, a slow-moving surveillance camera swept the room. He remained still, a ghost among machines.
His fingers met the metal casing of the server. The connection was immediate.
A cascade of data erupted into his mind—streams of raw code, encrypted fragments, spinning into complex fractals of logic and surveillance.
And then he saw it.
A dark obelisk. Towering within the data stream.
It didn’t belong to the rest. It pulsed with white light in slow, steady intervals—a heartbeat.
Simon felt a chill crawl across his synthetic spine.
It reminded him of WAU’s black obelisks.
This place had an AI.
And if it knew where Site Oubliette was, this was the only path.
No more time.
He placed his hand on the obelisk.
The world shifted.
The server room faded away. Simon stood in a simulation—a cathedral of dark metal and flowing circuits. Data cascaded like waterfalls down impossible walls. And at the end of the grand hall stood a figure.
It looked like a man. Or rather, the idea of a man.
Seven feet tall, sculpted from lines of light and shadow. A coat flowed behind him like digital silk, and his face was a mask of porcelain-white light with no features save for a mouth that moved when he spoke.
"Another AI... interesting," the figure said, voice rich and resonant. "Why do you trespass in this system ?"
Simon stood firm.
"I have questions. One in particular. Where is Site Oubliette?"
The figure tilted its head. Its eyes—if they existed—flickered behind a screen of cascading code.
For a moment, nothing.
Then:
"Accepted."
Data burst before Simon’s eyes—a map. Coordinates. Access protocol strings.
The location of Site Oubliette.
And a digital key.
Then everything snapped.
The cathedral shattered like glass.
Simon was flung from the system.
He was back in the server room, hand still on the casing. The lights hadn’t flickered. The hum of the servers continued, undisturbed.
But something felt wrong.
Too easy.
He should have been challenged. Interrogated. Firewalled. That was standard AI protocol. But instead, he was welcomed.
Given exactly what he needed.
Simon clenched his hand.
This wasn’t a coincidence. He’d been expected.
Someone—or something—at Site Oubliette wanted to meet him.
Simon traced his steps back toward the server room of the drones, but the halls of Site Prometheus were no longer quiet.
Red emergency strobes spun dimly in some corridors. Others buzzed with flickering fluorescent lights, as if the station itself had begun to shudder from within. The moment his presence had been detected, the network had started shifting, locking doors and rerouting security drones.
He slowed near a junction, pressed his back to the wall. The hum of servos reached his ears. A patrol drone, spider-like with needle-thin legs, skittered around the corner. Simon froze.
Cloaking engaged.
The drone passed by, inches from his body, sensors sweeping the hall. His internal systems calculated the odds. Too close. Far too close. If it had stopped—
It didn't.
He moved again, silent as a shadow. But the path to the drone server room was no longer safe. A door had sealed shut. Through its reinforced glass, he saw two guards standing in a ready stance. No path forward.
Simon rerouted.
He ducked into a side maintenance shaft, his synthetic body barely squeezing through. Pipes hissed and groaned around him. Cold water dripped from above, making soft metallic pings as it hit the metal floor. He crawled, inch by inch.
Halfway through the crawlspace, a wall-mounted camera snapped to life.
It turned.
Focused.
He paused. Waited.
No alarm. No reaction. Just the whir of its tiny servos.
Why? Why had it let me go?
He didn’t stop to ask. He moved.
Finally, he dropped back into the familiar hallway outside the drone server room.
He walked inside and pressed his hand on the bulbous structure of dark gel. The structure gel he'd left behind began slithering back into his body, retreating like ink drawn through invisible veins.
He stepped into the decompression chamber.
The walls sealed around him.
Water flooded the room. Cold. Heavy. Embracing.
His systems adjusted.
Then the hatch opened.
He swam through and into the dark ocean, activating his retractable fins and propulsion jets. They hissed to life with a low hum, propelling him forward like a living torpedo. The pressure deepened, but he did not feel it. His form was built for depths even darker than this.
He swam.
Through black trenches and over ridged coral skeletons long dead.
For twenty-seven minutes he swam, undetected, undisturbed.
And then, it appeared.
Site Oubliette.
It didn’t look like a research facility. It didn’t look like anything built by human hands. It resembled a deep-sea fortress carved into the earth itself—black metal ribs jutting from the seafloor like fossilized bones, domes like cataract-covered eyes, and a central spire that pierced the ocean above like a needle from a nightmare. The structure pulsed faintly, as if breathing—red lights like the embers of something buried too deep.
Simon hovered at the edge, watching the leviathan slumber in silence.
Then came the ping.
His system caught it—subtle, cloaked, but deliberate. It wasn't aimed at him specifically. It was more like an open whisper.
A beacon, pointing to a sealed door nestled at the base of the central spire.
Simon approached.
He moved like a shadow, cautious but compelled. Something was drawing him in.
He reached the door. Beside it, a panel. He extended his hand, and the digital key he had acquired back in Prometheus pulsed through his arm and into the system.
The door accepted it.
It opened into a decompression chamber. Cold water flooded around him before draining away. A hiss. A sigh.
And then, silence.
He stepped through.
One by one, doors opened in sequence ahead of him, as though the site itself had been waiting for him. The corridor was narrow, its ceiling low, lined with soft blinking lights that flickered in sequence like a trail of blood-red breadcrumbs. No drones. No personnel. Just echoing quiet and the distant groan of unseen machinery.
Something about the emptiness clawed at his mind.
He pressed forward.
Then, the hallway ended.
Before him stood a massive set of doors of black steel.
And yet they opened at his touch without hesitation.
The chamber beyond was colossal.
A hollow cathedral of machines. Its walls stretched out into darkness, lined with ribbed columns glowing with faint red light. They pulsed in perfect synchrony, like heartbeat monitors. Like breathing. Like they were alive.
Simon stepped inside.
