A cold breath of recycled air brushed Elira's skin as she stepped further into the sublevel. The walls pulsed faintly with residual energy, as if the floor itself was alive, humming with long-forgotten code.
Rows upon rows of stasis pods extended beyond sight, their glass visors misted from within. The lighting was low, filtered through a blue-tinted haze. The silence wasn't comforting—it was expectant.
She blinked once, activating her internal overlay. With the surge of connection came data. Old data. Corrupted data. But not completely gone.
"System interfacing… Standby…""Uplink bypass achieved. Manual override active. Analyzing local logs…"
Elira's eyes flickered as unreadable strings of data began resolving themselves. Names. Models. Deployment numbers. She stepped closer to a terminal beside a pod and touched the cracked surface, allowing her neural link to dig deeper.
"These aren't baseline units," she murmured, pulling information to the front of her mind. "Design architecture is… pre-Memory Core. Autonomous logic stacks, no centralized control. Look at this, Brakka—manual moral locks."
Brakka gave a low hum of interest as he pried open an exposed panel from another terminal. "Which means they didn't use the core pillars. These were failed experiments. Or… forbidden ones."
She nodded. "Which begs the question—who brought them here?"
Brakka didn't answer, but his lens glowed faintly as he worked. "This interface hasn't been used in over a decade. Until recently. Partial logs restarted four months ago. Same week the global blackout began."
A soft chill ran down Elira's spine. "Same as Siberia."
"Exactly."
They continued deeper into the chamber, the stillness oppressive. Then Elira stopped cold.
A shattered pod lay ahead. Its frame twisted. Glass splinters littered the floor, and dark, half-dried fluid stained the tiles beneath it.
She knelt beside the broken chamber, fingers grazing the cracks in the glass. Her crossbow stayed on her back, but her body was tense.
"Brakka," she said quietly, "this one's empty."
Brakka joined her and scanned the remnants.
"Impact suggests an internal force broke out, not in."
They followed a trail. Another pod. Also broken. A third, scorched at the sides by some form of localized detonation.
None of the chambers looked recent. The servitors they had fought earlier now had an origin.
Elira stood slowly. "The infected servitors upstairs… they came from here."
Brakka turned. "Which means someone opened this place before we got here."
She exhaled sharply, reviewing system logs again, pulling timestamp metadata from her overlay. "Opening sequence was masked. No linked access trail. Whoever did this was careful. They scrubbed their entry."
He looked at her. "But not their mess."
More than one pod was cracked. More than one missing occupant. But not all were shattered. Some still had flickering lights. Hibernation. Dormancy.
She found herself staring at the face of one unit inside a pod near the far wall. Its design was different. Sleeker. Not infected. Not altered. Almost... peaceful. Preserved, like a relic.
"Why hide them?" she whispered. "Why erase their records and keep them frozen?"
Brakka gave a mechanical shrug. "Because someone was waiting."
Before either could say more, her internal system pinged sharply. A secure alert.
INCOMING TRANSMISSION: VIREX HQ // PRIORITY-ONEMessage from: DRAY"Elira. Brakka. Abort investigation. Return to HQ immediately. Satellite scan complete. Global human census report: Negative variance. Margin: 71%."
Elira's heart stilled.
Seventy-one percent.
Brakka read the same message. His tone remained level, but she sensed the shift.
"That's not a blackout," he said. "That's a harvest."