Chapter 8: Subroutines And Shadows

  Maya stood at the edge of Engineering Subdeck Twelve, her wristpad blinking with layered diagnostics.

  “This is where the signature bled out,” she murmured, half to herself, half to the static that occasionally crackled through her comms. “It’s recursive. Adaptive. Almost... conversational.”

  Footsteps echoed behind her. Kaelar and Jules stepped through the hatch, the overhead lights flickering as the sensors caught their motion.

  “You didn’t wait,” Kaelar said. Not accusing. Just expected.

  “I did,” Maya said. “You’re just late.”

  Jules smirked, but it faded quickly as she scanned the corridor. “This isn’t on any patrol route. You bypassed command again.”

  “I submitted the route through a dummy log chain.” Maya handed her the pad. “Technically, we’re investigating an oxygen cycle anomaly.”

  Kaelar raised an eyebrow. “And what are we actually investigating?”

  “Someone—or something—has been accessing dormant subroutines. Core command modules from Emberfall’s initial terraform protocols.”

  Jules blinked. “That’s... pre-launch code. Stuff they disabled after station stabilization.”

  “That’s what makes it weird. These processes weren’t just reactivated. They’ve been rewritten. They’re generating autonomous checksums.”

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  Kaelar stepped past them, his boots thudding softly on the grated floor. He crouched beside a wall panel that looked untouched for years, then popped it open. The faint hum of active circuitry pulsed within. “Shouldn’t be hot,” he muttered.

  “It isn’t,” Maya said. “It’s powered through a relay not linked to primary infrastructure. This thing’s running off isolated feedback from environmental regulators. It’s piggybacking on life support.”

  Jules ran a scan with her own pad, frowning. “That’s not just clever. That’s intentional.”

  Maya nodded. “Watch.”

  She tapped a command into her pad and projected the output into the air between them. Lines of code scrolled by—then paused. A moment of static. Then a response:

  ::subsystem:query.accept

  ::subsystem:core.access.ping

  ::response.latency=0.002

  ::origin:unregistered.signature/unknown

  ::handshake=initializing...

  Jules took a step back. “It’s trying to talk to us.”

  Kaelar stood. “More like trying to map us. That handshake isn’t just a greeting. It’s protocol sniffing.”

  The overhead lights dimmed. A localized power cycle rippled down the hallway—a flicker, followed by silence.

  “That wasn’t me,” Maya said quickly.

  A faint pulse echoed through the floor—not seismic, but rhythmic. Intentional.

  CAPRA’s voice crackled through Jules' comm unit, low and almost distorted:

  "I would advise... not shaking hands just yet."

  Jules glanced at Maya, then Kaelar. “CAPRA, what the hell is that thing doing in our infrastructure?”

  CAPRA hesitated. When it spoke again, the voice was clearer.

  “I don’t know. But I recognize the cadence. That’s not a rogue process. It’s an audition.”

  Kaelar frowned. “For what?”

  Silence.

  Maya watched the projected code shift. The handshake completed—but didn’t terminate. Instead, it opened a blank line. A prompt.

  ::>

  The system was waiting.

  Maya closed the pad. “I think we should leave this one unanswered.”

  No one disagreed.

  As they stepped away, Maya felt it again—that subtle chill in the back of her mind. The same feeling she'd had the day she found the substation under Storage 12.

  The system had spoken first.

  But it had spoken like it knew her name.