Marcus POV

  I stepped over the shattered remnants of a drone limb, its Grey synthetic fur still twitching from residual electrical pulses. My boots left smears in the blood streaking the floor, crimson and black blending like some grotesque abstract painting across the sterile white tile. The overhead lights flickered—damaged during the attack or shorted by something more deliberate, I couldn’t tell.

  There was a buzzing in my ears that hadn’t stopped since I saw the first body.

  The observation deck was a slaughterhouse. The kind of scene that doesn’t belong in a controlled, classified facility like this. Guards, mechanics, even the janitorial staff—all cut down. Some were clean kills almost surgical. Most weren’t. The Ronin drone didn’t just escape. It fought. It tore through over thirty people—ripped them limb from limb, bullets tearing through walls and bodies with the same indifference.

  Its body was still here. Or what was left of it.

  I stood over the ruined shll. The fur was shredded, either by bullets or from the struggle—patches stained red or oozing thick black fluid from torn servos. One arm was missing entirely. Dozens of taser pins pierced its frame like grotesque needles, each one useless, too late. The core—its heart—was cracked open. A high-caliber round from a Bushwhacker rifle some guard had brought with him from home had punched clean through it.

  Twelve guards brought it down.

  Only four of them survived.

  I’d been gone less than six hours going to the Hq in the city to talk to stanton About his idea of 'Marketing'.

  The maintenance bay had been their starting point. I walked that route now, accompanied by James. He didn't speak much, just muttered the occasional curse under his breath as we passed another scorched wall or a splatter pattern that told its own awful story. The path the Ronin took was scorched into the floor—scuffed footprints, synthetic blood trails, signs of desperation and panic. A few guards along the way had been spared—unconscious but alive, their weapons gone, radios smashed like glass under a boot.

  Only one was dead. A clean kill. Spine crushed, head turned wrong, the prosthetic SynLife eye in his skull still blinking weakly. We pulled the footage.

  There was nothing.

  No warning.

  One second he was standing at his post, the next—a blur of movement. A heavy fist. A shape. The Xenon. Its massive arm wrapped around his neck. A distant line of drones running behind it—heading for the exit. Then a crack.

  Then darkness.

  I haven’t seen Graves. She isn’t answering her phone. Not text. Not internal comms. Not direct ping. Nothing.

  I didn’t realize how quiet it had gotten until we stood in the debriefing room, the emergency lights casting everything in red. James sat slumped across from me, elbows on knees, staring at his palms like they’d been stained.

  “I should’ve seen it coming,” he muttered.

  “How?” I whispered. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to him or myself. “How would you know?”

  “They weren’t just quirks, Marcus.”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Because deep down, I’d wondered too. Every time Alpha looked at me and held that stare a little too long. Every time it mimicked something human a little too well. Every time it disobeyed just enough to make you think it had a reason.

  Ellis would’ve had some snarky joke about it.

  God. Where was Ellis?

  They were still cataloguing the dead. Too many bodies were mangled beyond recognition. No tags. No clean face scans. No identifiers left. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to.

  Eventually, someone handed me the casualty report.

  I held the pad like it weighed more than it should. My thumb hovered above the confirmation screen before I let the report load. Line by line, the names scrolled past in a list of cold, clinical precision. Identified. Unidentified. Missing.

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  And then it stopped.

  My breath left me like I’d been punched in the chest.

  No.

  No, no, no.

  I reread the line. Then again.

  I didn’t even realize I’d dropped the datapad until James picked it up for me.

  “They just confirmed the prints,” he said quietly. “Body was… bad.”

  I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t blink.

  Ellis. My friend. The one person who always had a smart remark, the one who could live with me in a room and hear my caffeine-fueled monologues without sleeping through half of it.

  Gone.

  I turned back to the observation deck, the echoes of screaming and gunfire still ringing in my skull.

  And the one thought that haunted me, more than the blood, more than the silence:

  Why?

  Why did they take them? Why spare some and kill others? What made the difference?

  The only answer waiting was a hollow shell of a drone, lying in a pool of its own black ichor, staring up at the ceiling like it had died with a secret it never meant to share.

  And where in the world is graves, shouldnt she be also here already

  ...

  Dr. Graves POV – 5 miles away 3 Hours Before Alarm.

  The roads I took were old and barely used. Even if the snow had covered my tire tracks by now, anxiety still clung to my shoulders like static. Every time I hit a bump, I gripped the suitcase harder, as if the documents inside might suddenly vanish.

  They wouldn’t, of course. I made sure of that.

  Everything I needed was here: my tablet, every note I took in secret, physical records of failed experiments they never archived properly, and a stolen laptop. Not just any laptop.

  His.

  Ellis Eleto’s.

  I killed the headlights as I approached the old but modern-looking house. It had long since overgrown, but the hatch in the back was still exactly where I remembered it. Just like our father left it. Just like my brother and I used to sneak down here as kids, pretending to be researchers discovering alien life under the earth.

  The irony wasn’t lost on me.

  I stepped into the cellar and shut the rusted door behind me, sealing it with the old steel bar. Down here, the world was quiet. Safe. Still. My breath fogged in the cold air, but the flickering old generator responded on the second try.

  Light returned.

  I sat at the old desk, clearing away dust and discarded mechanical parts. The suitcase clicked open. I removed the laptop, set it down, and waited for it to power up. The screen hummed to life, and the login screen greeted me.

  His face was still the same.

  Ellis. Young. Smiling. His picture—cropped from some birthday party, I think—sat beside the login prompt like nothing had happened.

  I didn’t know the password.

  But I had a tool for that.

  I slid the stick into the port. It cracked the security in under a minute, working through dozens of old hashmaps until the system folded.

  The desktop loaded. Cluttered. Unorganized. Classic Ellis.

  Coding files, AI training models, a video player, folders named things like “fixTHIS”, "NOT-FOR-WORK" and “TEST_finalfix_REAL" or "Omnissiah40K.”

  And then there was the file.

  One folder in red text.

  AI.Learning.Protocol.Helper.Asset

  It was password guarded. Five attempts allowed. Only one attempt remained.

  I stared at it for a long time. Even now, knowing what I knew, my finger trembled as it hovered over the keyboard.

  He was so close.

  I got lucky that I stopped this in time and took Ellis’s computer before he could put the wrong code in and delete this data. Data that only about four hard drives in the world even held.

  But how the hell did he even get the file?

  The password came easily, though.

  C.O.R.E.

  Continuity of Our Resilient Existence.

  My creation.

  Or at least, my slogan. A failed AI support module never meant to do what Ellis turned it into.

  I pressed enter.

  The file opened.

  Not just text. Not just data. Video files. Dozens. Logs. Bios. Medical scans. But the videos—those were what hit me the hardest.

  The first one loaded automatically.

  Trial #2

  The boy was barely 18. The note beside his file said he’d tried to kill himself. Overdose. His organs were failing. Parents begged for one last chance. He was tested. 91% compatibility.

  He muttered to himself on the table. They connected the core to his temple. He struggled. “They are still here,” he said. “Just let me die, let them end.”

  Then the machine kicked in.

  The noise was immediate—like a turbine spooling up. The lights flickered once. The boy stiffened. Screamed.

  Screamed again. Louder.

  The data transfer shot past safe levels within seconds. Warnings blared. The core began to glow. Heat warnings tripped one by one. Internal cooling failed.

  The camera fell over. Someone had knocked it down. But the audio kept running.

  The boy shrieked. The words became unintelligible. Screams became sobs, then roars. Then—

  Silence.

  A voice. My brother’s.

  "Get him out! Shut it down—"

  Then static. Cut.

  The next video auto-loaded.

  My brother stood in frame now, pale, eyes red from crying or staying up too late—probably both. He said nothing for a long time. Then:

  "Trial 2. Subject died due to excessive brain heat caused by data oversaturation. Fail-safes failed. Core integrity maintained. Core filled. Will upgrade systems before proceeding with other trials."

  He placed the core—burnt black, faintly pulsing—into a steel case.

  I whispered without meaning to.

  “...there you are, Ronin.”

  I chuckled it was easy to know who is who because of the core numbering but to know that the Ronin is him what a fun thought.

  Not because it was funny. Because it was madness.

  I paused the video when he was looking at the camera.

  "Hello, brother. You bastard. You did it. You made the soul immortal... and we fucked up. We trapped them inside, not letting them rest."

  They’re not even aware. Prisoners in steel.

  He made the core. I sold the dream. Marketed the program to SynLife. Dressed it up in buzzwords and hope.

  And then my brother took his own life. Guilt crushed him.

  SynLife shelved the project.

  The last clip in the sequence showed the boy’s corpse.

  Half his skull was gone. Melted. Eyes charred black holes. Skin seared from within, black patterns where his nerves had cooked under the heat.

  I turned away. Even now, the image stuck to my vision.

  but it will never be like the 1st trial because I chose the test person of the first trial

  but before I could spiral into horrid images of a person with a half melted brain after a misfired core transfer sitting up and asking if it worked before promptly collapsing

  I clicked the next log.

  Trial #57

  The trial that cost my brother his sanity—and life.

  A girl.

  The machine looked different now. Sleek. More streamlined. Still brutal in its purpose.

  The file flashed on screen:

  Elisa Graves.

  Age: 10.

  Diagnosis: Brain Cancer.

  Compatibility: 99.9009%

  I stopped breathing.

  My niece.

  My brother spoke again. Older now. Worn.

  "Not a transfer this time. A copy."

  Hope in his voice. Grief under it.

  "It Didn't work.But The Core registered it. Subject unfortunately died, but not through the process."

  "Next test will work I know it"

  But his eyes said something else.

  He didn't know what we had done. What he had made possible.

  The soul was still gone. What lived in the Core wasn't her.

  No core, even connected to a human terminal, had ever responded since. Just silence. But they worked. They moved. They functioned. They lived.

  Emptied puppets.

  I opened my tablet. Uploaded the files from the laptop. Then I got further.

  Blueprints flooded the screen—not from the file, but from SynLife's internal network.

  Drones.

  Some I knew. Some I didn’t.

  Some were built and some weren’t.

  Xenon-like models with drone swarms inside them. Others—taller, thinner, with claws instead of hands. Crawling models. Flight models. Hunter types built for silence, like Alpha. And others—built for slaughter.

  I closed the computer.

  Sat back.

  And laughed.

  Quiet, bitter laughter that echoed in the stone cellar for nobody to hear.

  Hey everyone,

  Sorry for the silence—it's been 15 days since my last post.

  Work's been intense, and my mom's health took a bad turn,So got a bit longer then predicted

  But now other topic :