The pressure door creaked open, seawater running in rivulets along the floor. Jonsy stood just inside the threshold, the artificial lights catching faint reflections off her repaired body. Beside her, Serge shifted, eyes scanning the murky blue behind the reinforced gss.
The faint buzz of a ping echoed through the comms.
"Inbound," Serge muttered.
Simon’s voice crackled in his ear. "Remember the story. Survivors at Upsilon. Keep it tight. I'm watching."
Serge exhaled slowly, forcing down the tension coiling in his gut. "Copy that."
They stood in silence as the submersible approached, its lights growing brighter through the gloom.
The submersible emerged from the deep like a dark leviathan, its hull matte-bck and angur—built less for elegance and more for resilience. It was shaped like a cross between a manta ray and a stealth bomber, gliding through the water with unnatural smoothness. Pulsing bands of white-blue light traced across its fnks. Instead of traditional propellers, it used quiet magnetohydrodynamic drives—barely a whisper as it maneuvered.
A narrow cockpit was embedded seamlessly into the front, its armored gss tinted to opacity. Reinforced docking cws extended from its undercarriage, gripping the station with a hydraulic cnk as it settled into pce. Small fins folded inward like insect limbs, locking into a defensive posture. Along its spine, modur compartments shimmered with energy fields, capable of adapting to cargo, personnel, or weapon storage.
It looked like something built to survive the end of the world.
Jonsy adjusted her posture, making herself look vulnerable—less threatening. Her hands trembled slightly.
"You’ll do fine," Simon said trough the comms. "Just remember what we talked about. Let Serge handle the hard questions."
The docking cmps tched with a solid cng. A moment ter, the inner door hissed open.
Two men stepped out. They were cd in dark armor, helmets smooth and alien, and they armed. One gnced around warily.
"Report," he said.
Serge stepped forward, waving them in. "We found survivors. She’s one of them."
Jonsy lowered her gaze, pying the part well.
The taller of the two moved closer, visor scanning her. "You alone?"
"Yes," she answered, voice tight but steady.
The other checked a portable scanner. He offered a nod.
"Bring her aboard."
Jonsy followed without resistance, gncing once—briefly—back at Serge. He gave the barest nod.
"You coming?" the tall one asked.
Serge shook his head. "No. My team’s moving to a nearby site. They’re waiting for me at the shuttle station. I’ll report if I find anything."
A beat of silence. The man stared for a second too long. Serge kept his expression bnk.
"Suit yourself."
The door shut with a heavy thud. Through the small window, Serge watched the submersible drift backward, lights disappearing into the bck.
A long silence followed.
Then came a crackle in his ear.
Simon’s voice, low and calm: "Good work, Serge. Don’t do anything stupid."
Serge gave a shallow nod, whispering back, "Understood."
Then came a sound—soft cws tapping metal.
Serge turned.
A bck rat, but not any ordinary one. Its mid section was slick, covered in tex-like material, and there was a strange hump on its back. The creature scurried forward on all fours before rising upright, bancing on its hind legs like it understood exactly what it was doing. Its beady eyes locked with Serge’s.
Simon’s voice returned, deadpan and heavy with warning. "Jerry will keep his eyes on you."
Serge’s throat tightened.
"Don’t. Do. Anything. Stupid."
The line went dead. Serge stood still, the creature’s gaze unblinking, a sentinel with fur.
Simon clung to the underside of the manta-ray-shaped submersible like a predator riding the tide. Bck structure gel slithered from his fingers—alive and invasive—seeping into a maintenance port beneath the vessel. The sub systems didn’t react—yet. The gel curled like smoke, slowly threading itself through circuits and systems, a parasite preparing to nest within its host.
Inside the submersible, Jonsy sat in silence.
The pilot, tall and rigid, kept his focus on the controls. Across from her, another man cradled one of those electromagnetic weapons. His helmet masked his expression, but she could feel his eyes on her.
They traveled in silence.
Jonsy stared out through the reinforced cockpit gss, watching the dark water peel away.
And then, light bloomed.
A city rose from the bck.
SITE PROMETHEUS
A submerged city. Towers of steel and gss spiraled skyward beneath a giant pressure dome, aglow with bioluminescent circuitry. The skyline shimmered like a mirage, reflecting across the ocean floor in fractured patterns. Walkways crisscrossed the air like veins. Drones hovered like fireflies. The pulse of machinery and order filled the deep with artificial life.
It looked like salvation.
To Jonsy, it looked like betrayal.
They had lived here. In light. In warmth. While the people of Pathos-II had died screaming in the dark.
The submersible glided into a docking cradle. Mechanical cws tched onto its hull. The bay filled with a hiss and drained.
The hatch split open.
Two armed guards waited. Between them stood a man in a b coat, rail-thin and composed, clutching a datapad to his chest. His hair was meticulously combed, his eyes pale and sharp behind sleek gsses. There was a twitch in his jaw, something that hinted at chronic stress or a conscience.
He nodded. "Bring her."
The pilot motioned, and Jonsy rose. She followed.
"Come with me," the scientist said, not sparing her a gnce.
The guards did not follow.
They walked down a gss-paneled corridor. Beyond the walls, the city came alive: maintenance staff in crisp uniforms, children ughing in confined pygrounds, hydroponic gardens bathed in artificial sunlight. People lived here like the world hadn’t ended.
Jonsy's throat tightened. Her footsteps echoed louder than they should.
The corridor ended at a sterile examination room—clean, white, utterly lifeless.
"Sit," the man instructed.
She did.
He activated a console. Soft lights scanned her body. Heart rate, brain activity, thermal imaging—all normal. Simon had ensured her deception would hold. She was, to every sensor, alive.
The questions began.
Name. Date of birth. Personal history. Cognitive assessment.
Then—Pathos-II.
She answered everything.
The AI gone mad. The dead walking. The memories of friends trapped inside machines. She spoke of Carl and Amy, of screaming corridors and flickering lights. She didn’t cry, but the words felt like wounds.
The scientist listened in silence. When she finished, he was pale.
He tapped his datapad with trembling fingers, not meeting her eyes.
Then he cleared his throat. "Remove your helmet, please."
Jonsy hesitated. This was it.
She reached up and released the seal.
The helmet came off.
The man gasped.
There was no human head. Only a framework of metal. Cameras where eyes should be, lenses focusing and retracting like breathing things.
The datapad cttered to the floor.
He turned and bolted.
His footsteps echoed down the corridor.
Jonsy sat still.
Silent. Unmoving.
Watching the door he had vanished through.
Waiting.
The submersible drifted silently toward the hangar bay of Site Prometheus, its smooth, manta-ray silhouette slicing through the water like a phantom. Simon clung to its underside, still and invisible, cloaked in shimmering distortion. His hands and feet, magnetized until now, released their grip with a faint click.
He let go.
The submersible glided into the docking bay, and the massive hangar doors sealed shut behind it. Simon watched it vanish behind reinforced pting.
With practiced grace, Simon turned in the water, his body carving a silent path through the gloom. Serge had provided coordinates—there should be a maintenance hatch nearby. Simon found it nestled in the shadowed edge of the bay, barely visible.
The hatch was sealed tight. But not for long.
Simon pced his hand on a small control panel beside it. Bck tendrils of structure gel coiled from his palm, slithering like roots over the circuits. The hatch hissed open, and he slipped inside.
The passage was tight—just wide enough for a single person. More of a drainage tube than a proper hallway, but Simon moved with fluid precision. It led him to a small decompression chamber. Another hatch loomed before him. As the chamber drained, he prepared himself.
The door opened.
Beyond it, a room lined with underwater drones—sleek, gssy-eyed machines resting in cradles along the walls. A pair of robotic arms mounted on a ceiling rail extended in curiosity, scanning for movement.
They found nothing.
With cloaking engaged, he slipped past the machines. At the far end, a reinforced door stood closed. Beyond it, he knew, was the server nexus—the heart of the drone control systems. He entered.
Rows of servers hummed in cold, clinical precision. Red and green lights blinked in sync like the heartbeat of a sleeping giant. Simon moved to the nearest rack. He pced a hand on the metal casing.
The structure gel responded.
It slithered from his fingers like liquid ink, spreading across the terminals, probing, infiltrating. It formed a swollen node, pulsating like an octopus head, its tendrils burrowing deep into the circuits, linking him to the station.
Simon pulled his hand away. The connection held.
He was in.
Data flowed like a second bloodstream. He scanned quickly, accessing camera feeds, logs, encrypted transmissions.
His view snapped into one of the facility’s rooms.
Jonsy.
She sat rigid in a chair, her helmet off. Her face exposed—clustered sensors shifting gently like a breathing eye.
Simon’s gaze sharpened.
Another camera feed: a hallway.
Six armored figures approached. Weapons ready. Leading them, a gaunt man in a pristine white coat—expression unreadable, but pace urgent.
Simon turned.
He walked calmly out of the server room, his form briefly flickering as his cloak adapted to the interior lighting. Each step measured, precise.
If diplomacy failed, if they id a hand on her—
He would be there.
And nothing in Site Prometheus would stop him.
The door slid open with a pneumatic hiss, slicing through the sterile quiet of the room.
Six armored figures swept in like a wave of steel, weapons raised and pulsing with faint blue light—the unmistakable glow of Electra-Lock Disruptors. Jonsy had felt what they could do. They didn’t just shut you down; they unraveled you, tore through yers of protection like paper, burned through circuits with precision cruelty.
Behind them, a gaunt man entered.
He was dressed in a stark white b coat, the name SITE PROMETHEUS shimmering faintly on his colr. His features were sharp, almost skeletal—sunken cheeks, a beak-like nose, eyes that shone with cold calcution. A man of intellect, untouched by the grime of necessity, yet drunk on control.
His eyes nded on her with the weight of ownership.
“A neurograph that believes it's a real being,” he mused aloud, voice cool and velvety, sharpened by arrogance.
Jonsy stood slowly. Her helmet was gone, revealing the sleek skeletal frame of her head, the delicate cameras moving like eyes—zooming, adjusting. Watching.
“I am a real being,” she replied. Her voice didn’t tremble. It didn’t need to. Every word carried the ache of remembered humanity.
The man tilted his head slightly, as if humoring a particurly na?ve child.
“No,” he said. “You’re a simucrum. An echo. Data strung together to mimic the living. You can’t cry. You don’t dream. You don’t decay. Your memories are algorithms, your feelings—reconstructions. Flesh is the price of being human. You are only wearing its shadow.”
Jonsy didn’t speak. Her fists clenched at her sides.
She wasn’t shaking from fear.
She was shaking from anger.
The guards began to move forward, boots thudding against the floor.
“Do not damage it,” the man ordered. “No Electra-Locks. I want the system clean. Functional. I want to know how deep the delusion runs before we strip it down.”
The guards surrounded her. Six against one. Eyes behind visors. Heartbeats irrelevant.
Jonsy backed away, each step heavier than the st.
They didn’t see her. They saw a machine, an experiment.
Not the woman who once ughed, who once cried.
They didn’t see Jonsy.
And just as the first armored hand reached for her shoulder, the lights above flickered.
Then dimmed.
Then—complete darkness.
He was nearby.
A machine was already moving.
And he was coming for her.
The door smmed shut behind the st guard with a thunderous cng, echoing like a verdict. One of them turned, helmet tilting toward the entrance.
"What the hell?" he muttered, his voice crackling through the comms.
"Comms just glitched," another whispered. "Readings are clean but… I don’t like this."
Their suit sensors swept the room—no movement, no heat signatures. The air felt too still.
Then—movement. A whisper in the dark.
A faint electric scent. Something burning.
Before anyone could react, a sharp electrical hum shattered the silence. Two of the guards convulsed violently, arcs of blue lightning dancing across their suits. Electra-Locks—their own weapons now turned against them, integrated into something far more lethal.
Their systems crashed in seconds. Helmets locked. Comms dead. Power nodes shorted out. They crumpled to their knees, disarmed and dazed.
"EMP discharge!"
"Where?!"
"No visual—it’s cloaked!"
Then came the blur.
Simon.
He surged out of the shadows like vengeance made synthetic flesh. No face—only obsidian pting and twin bck lenses glowing with purpose. He moved with terrifying precision: fluid, silent, absolute.
He drove a fist into one soldier's gut, the armor folding with a sound like cracking ice. The man dropped, gasping, stunned but breathing.
Another raised his weapon—but Simon was already there. He seized the man’s wrist, twisted it with mechanical grace, and disarmed him in one motion. He spun him into a third soldier, sending them both crashing to the floor.
The air reeked of ozone and scorched metal.
A fourth tried to retreat.
Simon leapt—silent, surgical. He caught the man mid-stride by the back of his neck and eased him into the wall. No cruelty. No rage. Just control.
Only one remained, fists raised in desperate defiance. No weapon, just the primal fear of knowing he was next.
"What are you?!" he shouted.
Simon said nothing.
He stepped forward, caught the punch mid-air, and brought the man down in a sweep so fluid it felt like choreography.
And then… silence.
Jonsy stood in the corner. Her optics were wide.
Simon rose slowly from the st subdued form. The blue glow from his optics faded into a soft pulse.
The scientist, pinned to the wall, trembled. He squinted into the dark but saw nothing—only a pair of blue lights watching from the bck.
Simon turned to Jonsy, voice low, moduted, calm.
"Are you alright?"
She nodded slowly.
Simon moved toward her, stepping through the field of bodies like a ghost made of metal and ink. He paused near one of the unconscious guards, crouched, and briefly checked for a pulse. Still alive.
He stood again, tall and quiet.
To her—
To the woman they had tried to break—
He had never looked more human.
Lord_Turtle_the_first
