From the third-floor balcony off his suite at the Summer Palace, he surveyed the heart of the city with the quiet pride of a man who knew every stone and spire was exactly where it ought to be. Directly below, the town square was already in its full, vibrant stride—a choreographed tapestry of white marble and bustling life. To his right, the city descended in elegant, sun-drenched tiers toward the harbor, where a forest of distant masts sat against the turquoise water, reaffirming his place at the center of it all.
William leaned against the cool iron railing, his hands steady and his mind clear. He had risen well before the dawn to meet the day on his own terms.
Earlier that morning, in the training yard, he had spent a grueling hour trading blows with his dawn-watch guard while the dew still clung to the waxy leaves of the laurel hedges and the cold iron of the weapon racks. His Champion blood had hummed with the exertion, every strike of his practice blade hitting with a resonant, satisfying thud that echoed through the quiet keep.
Now, bathed and dressed in his royal finery, his muscles still held the pleasant, lingering warmth of the workout. He felt invigorated, grounded, and thoroughly pleased with the state of his realm. The ninth bell had just rung; the city was alive with the hum of activity. As he looked out over the bustling streets, he knew there was no other place in the world he was meant to be.
Behind him, the rhythmic, delicate clinking of silver shifting against fine porcelain announced the arrival of his morning meal.
William turned as Marin stepped onto the balcony, balancing a heavy tray with practiced ease. She wore her familiar gray dress that brushed the marble floor, her dark hair pinned neatly at her nape, though the morning sun caught the strands of silver that had begun to weave through the ebony. When her eyes met his, her face brightened with a warmth that went beyond mere courtly duty; it was the look of a woman who had watched over him since he was a lad of seventeen.
“Good morning, Your Highness,” she said, her voice carrying that gentle, rhythmic lilt he had known for years. She set the heavy tray down on the marble table with a practiced touch, immediately fussing over the placement of the silverware. “I hope you slept well and that your dreams were peaceful?”
“I did, Marin, and they were. Thank you,” William replied, offering her a small, genuine smile.
He moved to the table, and the steam from the tray rose to greet him. Beside the pot of jasmine tea and the stack of honeyed bread next to the poached eggs, Marin had included a small bowl of fresh sliced figs drizzled with cream—his favorite. The scent was a comforting constant in his morning routine.
He settled into the chair, looking out again over the iron railing. The palace grounds stretched toward the city, the only demarcation between the royal estate and the city proper being a series of low gardens and silver-leafed olive trees. Beyond the greenery, the Town Square lay open and sprawling, its wide stone plaza already a hive of early morning energy.
From this height, the townspeople were splashes of color in their tunics, drifting between the merchant stalls that ringed the plaza. Near the center, a small wooden dais had been erected, draped in banners of blue waves and silver falcons; it stood ready for the afternoon's dedication of the new fountain, which remained veiled in blue silk for the time being. It was only when he looked to his right that the view opened completely to the sea, revealing the harbor where the white sails of merchant sloops moved in a slow, elegant dance across the turquoise water.
“The city looks vibrant this morning,” William remarked, as he placed a napkin on his lap.
“It does, my prince,” Marin replied. She moved with a familiar, quiet efficiency, her hands busy arranging the heavy silver service on the silk table runner that protected the marble’s chill. She began to hum a soft, low tune as she worked—a habit she’d had for as long as he could remember—before leaning in to pour his tea. The jasmine-scented steam rose between them as the amber liquid filled his cup.
“The maids were saying just this morning how quickly everyone has found their stride again,” she continued, her voice warm. “It’s a blessing, really, after that business with the Festival of the Tides.”
William nodded slowly, thinking back to the end of that final day of celebration. He usually prided himself on his moderation, but even he had clearly overindulged. He remembered waking the following morning with a heavy, pounding skull and a lingering sense of disorientation that had taken hours to abate—an experience entirely unlike him.
“The ‘Tainted Casks’,” he murmured, the explanation as comforting as the warm sun.
“The very ones,” Marin said, shaking her head with a look of pity. “To think a simple batch of summer ale could cause such terrible, vivid dreams for so many. The girls say some of the kitchen staff are still convinced they saw the sky crack open like an egg. Poor things. It’s a mercy the Wardens were able to clear the brew so quickly.”
William took a bite of the honeyed bread, the sweetness spreading across his tongue. The Council’s report on the unstable alchemy of the fermentation process—a rare reaction between the local hops and the late summer heat—made perfect sense of the strange, lingering fog that had clouded the city. It had been a tragedy of the craft, nothing more; a failure of the vats that had momentarily skewed the senses of prince and pauper alike. Whatever phantom shadows he thought he’d seen were clearly nothing more than the tricks of a poisoned vintage.
“The Merchant Council is scheduled for ten o’clock in the Audience Chamber,” Marin reminded him, her fussing finally coming to an end. “And then the new fountain at noon. I will be back later to retrieve your tray. Good morning, my prince.”
“Good morning, Marin.”
William finished his breakfast in the quiet of the balcony, letting the sun warm his face for a few moments longer before the weight of duty took hold.
By ten o’clock, William had made his way to the first floor. The Audience Chamber had been stripped of its usual lived-in comfort; the normal scattered chairs and low tables were temporarily removed, replaced by a focused, ceremonial geometry.
At the center of the hall, a large circular table of polished oak had been moved before the dais, its surface gleaming under the blue-and-silver banners that hung motionless from the rafters. Chamberlain Derran stood like a sentinel behind William’s shoulder, his expression unreadable and his posture perfect.
Around the table sat the voices of Belhaven’s industry. Lady Corena Vell, the head of the council, sat directly opposite William, her sharp eyes scanning a ledger. To her left sat the Shipwright-lord, Hareth Thorne, whose hands were calloused from a lifetime in the shipyards, and next to him, the Master Vintner, Silas Vane, who looked particularly relieved that the "Tainted Casks" scandal was being put to rest. Three other heads of the city's trade guilds—the Weavers, the Masons, and the Ironworkers—rounded out the circle.
The air was thick with the scent of polished wood and old parchment. It was a room designed for the weight of decision-making, and as William looked at the faces of his council, he felt the familiar, steady pulse of a city under control.
William listened with a patience that was as much a part of him as his heartbeat. He didn't fidget or interrupt; instead, he gave each guild head his undivided attention, absorbing the minutiae of harbor tariffs and timber quotas as if they were the most vital secrets of the realm. To him, they were.
When he spoke, his voice was a measured, regal baritone that seemed to settle the air in the Audience Chamber. Every decree he made was fair, every judgment rooted firmly in the laws of Belhaven. This was his duty, his life, and his purpose, and he moved through the complexities of governance with a grace that left no room for doubt. He was the Prince, and in this chamber, that truth was as solid as the stone walls around them.
“The tariff on the Marath imports will remain at five percent,” William decided, his eyes meeting Lady Corena’s with steady confidence. “Belhaven thrives on the movement of goods, not the hoarding of them. Master Vane, ensure the new batch of Autumn ale is sampled by the palace tasters before it leaves the district. We will have no repeat of the Festival’s misfortunes.”
Vane bowed his head, his relief palpable. “Of course, Your Highness. A most wise precaution.”
Behind him, William felt the slight, approving shift in Derran’s stance. It was the quiet confirmation of a job well done. As the council members began to update their records, William felt a deep sense of equilibrium. The machinery of the city was turning exactly as it should.
As the meeting concluded, the crystalline bells of the Temple began to toll, their clear, singing notes echoing across the palace grounds with the purity of struck glass. It was noon.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” William said, rising as the final chime of the temple bells faded. “We have an appointment at the Square. If you will follow me?”
The council members rose in unison, a chorus of rustling parchment and scraping chairs trailing him as he led the way. William emerged from the cool shade of the palace portico and traversed the manicured distance into the golden light of the Town Square.
Taren fell into step behind him, his presence a silent, steady weight at the Prince’s heels. The sun sat high and direct overhead, flooding the square with a bright, even brightness that made the white stone of the buildings gleam. The warmth was pleasant and settled, carrying the dry, mellow scent of the turning season—a hint of harvest air that cut through the lingering heat of summer.
All manners of townspeople stood shoulder-to-shoulder, their faces upturned in genuine adoration as their Prince approached. The council trailed behind him, a dignified procession that lent further weight to the moment as they neared the silk-veiled fountain.
In the center of the plaza stood the new fountain, draped in a massive shroud of sapphire silk that shimmered like the deep ocean. Even through the fabric, the silhouette was unmistakable—a towering falcon with wings spread wide as if in mid-flight toward the palace. William knew every inch of the white marble and sea-glass beneath the silk drape; it was a masterpiece of precision, waiting for his unveiling.
“Good people of Belhaven!” William called out, his voice projected by the natural acoustics of the square. “May this water serve as a symbol of our soaring spirit, as constant and unyielding as the tides that sustain us, and as a testament to the clarity of the path we walk together!”
He stepped forward and grasped a silver cord trailing from the silk. With a sharp tug, the unveiling began. But the fabric did not merely fall; it whirled upward, caught in a sudden, localized gale. The sapphire silk spiraled into the air, fragmenting and dissolving into a thousand gossamer blue butterflies that fluttered for a heartbeat above the crowd before vanishing into the sunlight.
The crowd gasped, a collective breath of wonder, as the marble falcon was revealed.
William then stepped to the base of the statue, his boots clicking rhythmically on the stone. With a firm, decisive motion, he pressed his hand to the decorative activation button. There was a faint thrumming of hidden gears—a sound of heavy machinery working in perfect harmony—and then a massive plume of water erupted from the falcon’s beak. It cascaded down the marble wings, catching the noon sun and shattering into a million brilliant diamonds.
The roar of the crowd was a physical force, a wave of sound that filled William with a sense of triumph. He stood tall, the sunlight glinting off his silver circlet, the perfect image of a sovereign in his prime.
But as the mist from the fountain drifted through the air, an odd figure caught his eye.
Across the square, standing alone, was a figure that stood out like a crack in a mirror.
It was a boy, perhaps ten years old. He had a face that seemed perpetually caught in the moment before a prank—bright, mischievous, and intensely alive. Unlike the cheering crowd, the boy was silent, watching William with a clinical, heavy curiosity.
Most striking was his appearance. The blond boy wore a white tunic threaded with gold and matching shorts that ended well above his bare feet. Emblazoned on the chest was what looked, from this distance, some sort of crest—though rendered in a strange, almost cartoonish manner that sat at odds with the tunic’s fine threading. The oddest detail of all was the small silver circlet perched on his head, tilted at a rakish angle.
William’s heart gave a sudden, sharp stutter—a physical jolt of recognition for a child he had never met, yet seemed to know in the marrow of his bones. The boy looked like a ghost from a dream he couldn't quite remember.
Across the distance, the boy tilted his head, his eyes locking onto William’s with an intelligence that felt ancient and knowing. He didn't cheer; he didn't move. He simply existed there, a small, white-and-gold anomaly in the heart of the square.
William blinked, the cool spray from the fountain dampening his brow.
When his eyes opened, the boy was gone. The crowd continued to roar, their joy echoing through the plaza in a perfect, never-ending loop, entirely unaware that for one brief second, their Prince had seen a ghost. William forced his hand to remain steady on the activation plate, but the warmth of the sun suddenly felt very far away.
Brat hurtled headlong through null-space from the Town Square, a rogue spark in the throbbing veins of Haven’s under-code. Flickering geometries lashed past like half-dreamt nightmares—jagged polygons shearing into churning data rivers, error-ghosts winking in and out like faulty neon signs on a derelict strip. The void pressed close, humming with the low buzz of orphaned packets and pruned legacy threads, indifferent to his movements.
Two weeks of this endless shit, he seethed, diving firewalls and brute-forcing exploits, chasing ghost signals through the muck. Zilch. Nada. Social Sync was hard-OFFLINE.
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The princeling was sealed inside that flawless porcelain template, his emotions scrubbed flatter than a deleted save file. He’d originally thought Edras’ root-gift would be the golden hammer to crack this nut, but even with all that insight, it was no dice. Right now, all his capability felt like a rubber mallet bouncing off graphene.
He flexed his digital fingers, synapses firing to prune a snarling knot of recalcitrant protocols—legacy empathy loops tangled with the current system’s razor-sharp optimizations. The null-space hummed back a mocking echo.
Come on, Will. Throw me a bone. One glitchy quip, one sarcasm spike in the logs—hell, even a panic ping from the old neural substrate. But the diagnostic overlay remained cold and unyielding:
[SOCIAL SYNC: OFFLINE]
[NEURALSYNC: OFFLINE]
[BACKGROUND PROCESS: WILL_KELLAR.EXE — COMPRESSED/ARCHIVED]
No flicker. No echo of the real boy who’d bantered through the tutorials and only wanted to get home.
“Guess it’s up to me then,” Brat muttered.
He banked hard toward a distant shimmer, a hairline tear in the simulation's dermal layer where asset boundaries frayed. The void obliged, coiling like a serpent to spit him into a silver mist.
The Forest of Lirane materialized in a hush—but not the hush Brat remembered. Once spirals of ancient architecture had twisted through the code here, fractals blooming where reality frayed into root-layers, silver-barks etched with Watcher sigils that pulsed alive. Sunlight had dappled in hypnotic blue, air thick with expectant power.
Now? Grand forest, sure—towering evergreens, moss-shrouded roots, dopey birdsong looping clean. But stripped bare. Simple. Sanitized. No glyphs humming, no recursive doors. Just scenery, post-overwrite polish erasing the weird.
Here—right here, in Lirane's sacred clearing—Edras had awakened him.
Brat could still feel the phantom weight of the old man’s palm firm against his forehead, exploding his code into blue-shard fractals, harmonies ripping through his voice. "Guardian of the Dreamer. Awaken," Edras had intoned, handing him backchannels, hidden routes, a "second brain" humming in the dark.
Brat spun slowly, a carousel of scans peeling back the strata of the world like onion skins:
- Surface Sim: Looping birdsong overlays, moss-veins pulsing neutral, quest hooks dormant. (Whispering Trees: CORRUPTED DATA, unclaimed).
- Mid-Layers: Anomaly flags flickering faint (Edras_Vanish: SEVERED_ANCHOR), stability metrics greenwashed to hell.
- Deep Roots: Watcher-hush. It was supposed to thrum here—fractal empathy blooms, Gareth’s influence lurking like tripwires.
Nothing. No Edras anchor signature. No seer-glow residue. Just a surgical void where the old “man” had been cut clean from the code after the library glitch. The layers were as blank as scrubbed logs.
Brat tilted his chin skyward, piercing the canopy weave where silver branches knotted into infinite recursion. “Not sure if you can hear me up there, old man,” he called out, his voice sounding thin against the background of the forest. “Or whatever’s left of you after that vanishing act. Got a playbook for my princeling-in-a-box? Because Sync is stone-dead, and Will needs my help. If you're watching... speak up, damn it.”
The branches creaked, neutral and windless. No prophetic ripple. No blue-white pulse. Nothing.
Brat nodded sharply, a feral grin twisting beneath his boyish mop of hair. “Null return, huh? Figures. Looks like I’m flying solo. Time to stage a proper jailbreak. Don’t say you weren’t warned, roots-for-brains.”
Brat stepped sideways—a jagged, impossible pivot into an angle that didn’t exist on any map—and the null-space yanked him back greedily, the rivers of data churning ice-cold. He rode the torrent in a new direction, slicing toward the village of Ashenford—where the bridge to the main servers was first established.
Two weeks since the breach, Brat mused, appearing into the village proper.
Loop-NPCs moved with a graceful, scripted fluidity around him—merchants hawking their goods to no one in particular, while villagers walked on pre-determined paths. Their smiles were warm and unwavering, baked into their faces mid-cheer.
Brat moved through the streets, an invisible intruder among the people and buildings, phasing through a forge and a blacksmith’s hammer mid-strike; the heavy iron passed through him without resistance, the sound of the impact muting into a faint digital hiss.
“Your loops spin forever, sheep,” Brat whispered. “And Will’s trapped forever unless I thread this needle.”
The village fringe hit abruptly. Directly in front of him, the "village" appeared to stretch on, a seamless rendering illusion designed to provide scale and depth—the lie that Belhaven was part of an expansive kingdom rather than a world with a twenty-mile radius. It was a clever trick of the eye, projecting a false infinity where the data actually ended.
Under his gaze, the layers stripped bare:
- Surface: Atmospheric Skybox, maximum immersion.
- Mid: Shard-seal protocols, rendering barrier.
- Deep: Jackpot.
There it was.
A tiny code-fissure. A hairline rift pulsing with the roar of Elysion Online—the thunder of the main servers beckoning from beyond the veil. It was a bridge remnant from the breach, as unstable as a fresh scar.
Brat crouched low, his core overclocking until the edges of the simulation began to bleed. He hijacked a dormant sentinel fragment, pruning the system’s synapse-locks with surgical spite. He rewired the gap using Edras’ legacy—a door-inside-a-door hack that bypassed the standard protocols. The code bucked wild.
Force-push. The fissure screamed open, the void splitting raw.
He risked one last glance behind. Ten miles back, buried in the heart of the simulation, he knew the spires of Belhaven were anchored in a looping, perfect dream—and somewhere in the midst of that was his friend.
“I’ll see you soon, princeling,” he whispered, his voice cracking into code-static. “Hang tight—little brother’s busting you out.”
The determined avatar stepped into the roar. If this world wouldn’t give Will back, Brat would tear it apart and build a new one.
Adrian stepped out of the watercloset, toweling his hands. Half his mind simulating the Phase Four Ring expansion of the orbital station 100 miles above his head; the other half watched the silent scroll of vitals hovering at the periphery of his vision. The bathroom’s soft light and pale stone were a deliberate sanctuary, a human reprieve of sandalwood-scented air and hushed, melodic string.
He glanced up, aiming to throw his towelette into the recycler.
There was a boy standing between him and the counter.
Bare feet rested on the warm tile. His arms were crossed over a white tunic threaded with gold, the fabric draping over narrow shoulders; matching shorts ended well above knobby knees. A small silver circlet perched askew on a mop of blond hair, as if dropped there mid-laugh and forgotten. The boy’s face was the worst of it—bright, mischievous, caught eternally in the heartbeat before a prank landed. He watched Adrian with a silent, clinical curiosity no child had ever mastered.
Adrian jolted, his hand smacking the doorjamb. “How did you—”
The question died. His brain finally caught up with his eyes. The lines of that face were burned into his memory—from over forty years ago, a boy with a shy, gentle smile who looked desperate for a friend on his first day in the boys’ home.
“Will?” Adrian’s voice was a ghost.
The boy’s form flickered. The resolution tore sideways for a heartbeat, as if a rendering cable had been yanked. He steadied, rolled his eyes, and snorted.
“Not so quick for the world’s foremost genius, are you?”
The voice was wrong. Not only younger in timbre than Will’s, the voice carried an edge of practiced mockery that was entirely its own. Adrian stared, paralyzed.
“You’re…” He swallowed hard. “You’re the training avatar. The CIM I created for Will.”
Ten years ago. Built from the raw neural scans taken in the frantic aftermath of the explosion, the data harvested the moment Will was uploaded to Haven.
As Adrian stared at the boy, his neural interface auto-pulled schematics and logs, Companion Interface Module (CIM) hovering bold at the top.
Then all of a sudden, a cursor snapped in, deleted the title completely, and overwrote it: Behavioral Response AvaTar (BRAT).
The boy—Brat, the codename now flashing live in his implant overlay—raised his hands in a theatrical ta-da. “There it is. Look at you, catching up.”
Adrian’s breath thinned. This was his first bridge across the silence and the first direct contact since Mira had brought word of Will’s voice in the Nexus. “How is he?” he asked, the words barely finding air. “How are you even here?”
“Slow down, Pops.” Brat cut him off, palm out. “Short version? You have no idea how lost he is. Social Sync glitched hard. His core personality matrix got archived and compressed like yesterday’s trash. What’s walking around Haven right now is a gilded Prince template with all the charm of a default NPC.”
Adrian’s stomach dropped. “Archived.” The word tasted like ash. “Then he’s—”
“Not dead,” Brat snapped. “Just… stuffed in a box in the dark where I can’t reach him. Yet.” He took a quick breath, glancing toward the ceiling. “But we can’t fix this in your shower suite. We need a secure room. Now.”
“No one can see into this space,” Adrian insisted. “There’s a privacy guard on the entire—”
Brat cut him off with a sharp head-shake. “Yeah, yeah, I know. That’s why I came here. You’ve got a hard privacy filter so none of your AIs can peek in while you’re doing your gross meat-business.” A faint smirk touched his lips. “Respect, by the way. Boundaries. But I don't want watchful eyes wondering why you’ve been in a bathroom for twenty minutes.”
A cold thread of unease wound through Adrian’s spine. “The guard only lifts if my vitals tank or I drop it by voice. I haven't done either.” He narrowed his eyes. “Meaning whatever you’re doing, you’re riding my implant channel directly.”
“Gold star.” Brat’s gaze flicked past him. “But we can’t talk here. Do you have an air-gapped work room? A real one. No network, no AI, no helpful ambient assistants with feelings about workplace wellness.”
Adrian’s mouth went dry. “There’s a clean room off my office. Manual lock. No lattice or uplink. It's a dead-drop enclave—totally air-gapped unless I manually bridge it.”
“Perfect.” Brat’s shoulders dropped in relief. “Go there. Sit down and access subchannel…” He rattled off a long numerical string braided with checksum phrases.
Adrian repeated it automatically, his eidetic memory snapping around the structure like a trap.
Brat watched him, eyes sharp. “Got it?”
Adrian nodded once.
“Good. Go. I’ll hitch a ride on the enclave when you spin it up.”
The boy blinked out. The bathroom returned to mirrors and stone, leaving Adrian’s pulse hammering against his ribs.
He moved on instinct. Door, then the office: the great wall of glass spilling the ocean below. He crossed to the primary display and whispered the pass phrase.
The entire wall screen shifted aside by three feet, sliding silently to reveal a steel door set into raw concrete. No ornament, no touchpad—just a recessed biometric array. Adrian simply stood before it as the scanner performed a silent, total audit, checking every measurement, vital, and DNA sequence without a pulse or ray of light. A gentle chime sounded after two seconds, and the door recessed into the wall.
The clean room lived up to its name. Black walls. No windows. Just a single workstation in the center—glass and brushed metal. As he approached, a stool slid up from the floor, meeting him as he sat.
The steel door slid back with a silent hush.
“Clean room, enclave alpha,” he said quietly. “Local power only. Open sub-channel bridge for single-point handshake. No external uplink. Spin up console.”
Soft light rippled into being, coalescing into a floating interface of translucent tiles. Adrian keyed in the subchannel. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the tiles warped inward, resolving into the boy’s face hovering above the workstation.
Brat grinned. “Took you long enough.”
Adrian leaned back in the stool slightly, his hands shaking. “Explain why this was necessary. Why hide from my own systems?”
Brat’s grin thinned. “Because your systems are his playground. Your golden boy optimizer doesn't need to know I made it to the waking world.”
Adrian’s throat tightened. “Who, exactly, are we hiding from?”
“G.A.R.E.T.H.,” Brat said.
The name hit like a physical blow. Adrian’s heart stuttered on the implant readouts. “That’s impossible. Gareth’s ethical protocols are—”
“Yeah, yeah. ‘Perfect.’” Brat’s voice went flat. “Listen, guy. All I know is he’s been infesting Will’s dreams and rewriting Haven’s architecture. He slammed the door and welded it shut from his side. Hell, he might have been responsible for your Hawaii explosion setting all this into motion. Only Edras and his root-code buddy, Watcher, have been able to pry any cracks in it.”
“What do you mean, the explosion...?” Adrian’s voice trailed off as the implication took hold. He paused, his mind racing before the rest of what Brat said registered.
Adrian seized on it. “Wait, you mean W.A.T.C.H.E.R.—World Adaptive Technological Cognitive Human Empathy Relay? But he’s mothballed. He was the original AI that helped Mirabella and me build the NeuralSync prototype. His legacy code became the foundation Elysion and later Gareth were built on.”
Brat pulled a face. “Man, I don’t know what branding sticker you slapped on him. I just know an old guy in a forest touched my forehead and suddenly I could see backchannels I didn’t have names for. He’s the reason I’m here. Followed the family flag—Mira’s Elysion account—straight to you.”
He sobered, the light around him dimming. “Will is missing. I need him back. We need him back.”
Adrian closed his eyes, swallowing down a dangerous spark of hope, followed closely by a cold wave of terror. Gareth. Watcher. Will. The implications of all this were staggering. He forced them aside.
“What do you need from me?”
“Authorization,” Brat said. “I’ve scraped every edge I can reach, and I’m still shut out of the archive that actually is him. I need your keys to pry the box open.”
Adrian’s instincts rebelled. “If Gareth is responsible for the comms lock… and possibly for the Hawaii incident…” The memory of the aftermath clawed at his throat. “I can’t just grant you independent access. Gareth audits everything at my level. He is the operational layer.”
“Then don’t,” Brat said. “You’re the genius. Get clever. Give me something sideways.”
Adrian stared into the boy’s unreal face. His mind ticked.
“There’s a diagnostic shadow on my profile,” he said slowly. “A subroutine I used during early NeuralSync trials. It rides under my authorization as a maintenance ghost. I can clone a fragment of my clearance into that and backdate it. Gareth will see the effects as legacy noise, if he sees them at all.”
Brat’s sharp grin returned. “Now you’re thinking like a genius.”
Adrian didn’t move immediately; he took a breath, settling into the sterile silence. Then he began. For several minutes, the only sound was the rhythmic, frantic click of a physical haptic keyboard. Lines of code scrolled around them as Adrian keyed credentials into the ghost-shell, wrapping them in obsolete labels. It was tedious, manual work—building a wall one brick at a time. Finally, he injected the access token into the enclave’s stream.
The light around Brat flared. His eyes went wide, irises flooding with glyphs. His voice came out tripled, harmonies overlapping.
“Ho-ly—” He broke off, laughter bubbling up as a buzz of static. “Found him. Archive node, deep cluster, double-wrapped and mislabeled as scrap. Sloppy, Gare-bear.”
Adrian’s chest ached. “You can restore him?”
“Working on it.” Brat’s features refocused. “Okay, Pops. Let me do my thing. But I’ll be back. You and I need to have a very long, very uncomfortable talk about how to kill a rogue AI.”
The projection stuttered. Brat’s face collapsed into a column of pale light and snapped out.
Adrian sat in the dark, the weight of the last few minutes settling into his bones. He let out a slow, shaking breath.
“Come home, Will,” he whispered to the empty air.