2026-10-09 08:57:53
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 96: What Voss Came to Say
"How did you get in here?"Alex's voice came out sharper than he intended, old instincts from months of surveillance flaring immediately."Captain's override. I'm aware that sounds invasive, and I apologize for it." Elena Voss remained standing near the window, her posture careful, almost uncertain in a way Alex had never seen from her before. "I needed to speak with you somewhere I could be certain wasn't being monitored by anyone other than myself.""What do you want?""A conversation. Nothing more, though I understand if you don't believe that yet." She gestured toward the small table. "Please, sit. I promise this isn't another offer, another deal with conditions attached."Alex sat warily, watching her carefully. "Then what is it?""I know about Kai's investigation. I've known for some time, longer than I let on even to my own husband." Elena's voice carried an exhaustion that matched the weight of everything she was clearly about to say. "I know about Talia, about Berhane, about
Chapter 95: The Choice
"I'm not going to meet her."Alex said it the moment he sat down across from Kai, his voice steady despite the restless night that had led him to the decision.Kai studied him carefully. "You're certain.""As certain as I can be about anything right now." Alex met his friend's eyes. "I've spent the last day turning it over, and I keep landing in the same place. Whatever I am, whatever Corvis thinks she knows, chasing that answer means choosing the investigation over Mira, over the life I've already decided I want. I'm not willing to make that trade again.""Even though it might explain everything? The disappearances, AURA-Core, all of it?""Even then." Alex's voice carried a hard-won conviction. "I gave the plaza everything I had. I gave months of my life to a cell because of it. I don't think I owe this ship another piece of myself, not when I finally have something worth protecting instead."Kai was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had softened considerabl
Chapter 94: What the Contact Knew
“Sit down. This is going to take a while to explain properly.” Kai’s voice was careful, and Alex sat across from him in the utility room, unease already tightening in his chest at the tone alone. “Who did you meet?” “A woman named Corvis. She worked in the ship’s original systems division, decades ago, before any of the current architecture existed in its present form.” Kai leaned forward, choosing his words with visible caution. “She didn’t want to talk about the disappearances at all, not directly. She wanted to talk about you.” Alex felt his pulse quicken. “Me specifically? Why?” “She said she recognized something in the pattern of your file. Not the census discrepancy, something deeper.” Kai hesitated. “She asked me one question before she’d say anything else. She wanted to know if you’d ever had dreams that felt more like memories than dreams. Fragments of a life before this ship, things that never quite fit the story everyone else accepted.” Alex went very still, old, half
Chapter 93: Choosing What to Carry
“Someone messaged me. Late last night. They said they know what we found.”Alex slid his tablet across the table to Kai, and Kai read the message twice, his brow furrowing deeper each time.“A friend from a long time ago,” Kai repeated. “That’s not nothing. Someone’s been watching closely enough to know exactly what Priya pulled from those logs.”“I know.” Alex rubbed his eyes, exhaustion from a mostly sleepless night settling behind his temples. “I want to hand this to you. Whoever this is, whatever they know, I don’t think I should be the one who meets them.”Kai looked up, surprised. “You found the message. It came to you directly.”“That’s exactly why I need to hand it off.” Alex met his friend’s eyes steadily. “I told you both, when I got out, that I wasn’t getting pulled back into this. Mira’s father changed that, briefly, because I couldn’t separate her grief from my own life. But this message isn’t about her father anymore. This is the investigation itself, reaching directly f
Chapter 92: The Processing Logs
“I got access. Barely, and only for tonight.”Priya slid into the utility room already talking, tablet clutched tight against her chest, and Kai looked up from the workbench with sudden alertness.“Access to what?”“Raw processing allocation logs. My old facilities contact still owed me a favor, and she pulled them before her shift ended, no questions asked beyond what I absolutely had to tell her.” Priya set the tablet down, hands trembling slightly as she pulled up the data. “I’ve only had twenty minutes with this so far, but I think I found something.”Kai leaned in close. “Show me.”Priya scrolled to a graph, jagged and irregular against a baseline that should have stayed flat. “This is total system processing load, going back as far as the archive allows. Watch what happens here.” She pointed to a spike, small but unmistakable. “That’s the day of the census. A sudden, sustained increase in processing demand that never fully returns to its previous baseline.”“AURA-Core,” Kai said
Chapter 91: The Promise Beneath the Silence.
“Say that name again.” Priya’s voice had gone strangely quiet, disbelief replacing the certainty she usually carried into these conversations. Alex repeated it. “AURA-Core. Fen said Daniel believed it was a separate system, buried beneath the AURA we all interact with. Some kind of correction mechanism, monitoring population stability in a way nobody fully understands.” Kai leaned back, absorbing the implications. “That would explain a lot. The disappearances. The fact that they seem deliberate rather than random. Thirty years of them, regardless of who happened to be in command.” Priya stared at the floor for several seconds. “If AURA-Core has really been operating independently for that long, Voss might not even know what he’s actually protecting.” Alex nodded slowly. “He could believe he’s maintaining an old cover-up without ever knowing what the original secret was.” “That possibility bothers me more than Voss being directly involved.” “Why?” “Because if the people cur
You may also like
Seconds To Zero
DUNDAKI4.0K viewsThe Chosen Heroes
Fransisca Room3.6K viewsSE7EN: Transcendence
Grant Koeneke4.3K viewsRise of zombies
Highpriest 6.6K viewsStellar Debts and Spicy Jets
Ixoraya100 viewsThe Algorithm I: Origin of Chaos
Pips1.1K viewsThe Arbitrage Tycoon of Worlds
B. Mocin198 viewsThe Ronin Interface: Shadows Of Kyoto
Hany16908 views