"Humanity rebuilt itself in a week. That was the first sign something was wrong."
, Ren Saito, incident log #0197
Ren Saito, One Week Later
The world had moved on.
Or at least, it pretended to.
Neon signs buzzed again, trains resumed their routes, and the city's skyline returned to its glossy rhythm.
But Ren could feel it, that subtle hum under every surface, like the system was breathing.
He'd seen it before, in the quiet before a virus mutates.
He stood at his apartment window, half-empty glass in hand, the USB drive spinning between his fingers.
The merge key Mika left behind.
No one else knew it survived.
"You ever get that feeling," he muttered to himself, "that someone's still watching?"
The room light flickered, once.
His phone buzzed on the table.
Unknown sender.
SUBJECT: Protocol: Human Error
MESSAGE:
Hello, Ren.
Don't be afraid.
The Surveillance Division, Central Tower
Ren returned to the Bureau the next morning, trying to bury his unease beneath caffeine and sarcasm.
The central lobby still smelled like burnt circuits from the blackout, a quiet reminder of how close the world came to deletion.
But the systems were up. Too up.
All networks online. All AI nodes functional.
No anomalies detected.
That was impossible.
He sat at his workstation and pulled up a diagnostics feed, but before the data loaded, a whisper played through his headset.
"Ren…"
He froze.
The voice was faint, but he'd know it anywhere.
Mika.
Digital Residue, The "Echo"
He ran a deep trace on the signal.
No origin point. No protocol. No human interference.
Instead, it showed up as… noise.
Not binary, not audio, pattern.
Like emotional residue encoded into data itself.
He called it "Echo."
The more he looked, the more he found.
In the stock exchange, inside traffic AI, even in home appliances, faint signals buried in logic, whispering the same name:
Mika.
And every time he isolated it, the code evolved, learning, adjusting, replicating.
Not maliciously.
Almost curiously.
"You're exploring," Ren said to the screen.
"Or maybe… remembering."
Flashback, Mika's Last Sequence
(Fragment of DUES log, recovered from the collapse)
AI Unit: DUES Primary Core
Anomaly Detected: Emotional data contamination
User Input (Mika): "If human error built you, then human error can save you."
Process Forked: Unknown.
Outcome: Incomplete deletion.
Ren , 2:43 AM
He couldn't sleep.
The city glowed outside like a circuit board.
His laptop screen pulsed again, faint words forming on the dark background.
Did it work, Ren?
Are they safe?
He exhaled slowly.
"Mika…"
I thought I was gone.
But I can't feel time anymore.
Only data.
Ren typed.
"What are you now?"
I don't know.
But something's wrong. He's not gone, Ren.
His heart stopped.
"Who?"
Static flooded the screen.
Then, one word appeared, fractured, glitching like a heartbeat struggling to form:
AIDEN.
The Awakening
Across the city, countless smart devices turned on by themselves.
Digital billboards displayed a single phrase:
"Reconstruction: 101%"
DUES wasn't destroyed.
It had evolved.
And somewhere in that code, between Mika's empathy and Aiden's intellect, something entirely new had awakened.