Public Gilded Shadows

[C.E.R.A.]

"Dreaming in Static"

​

There is no time in the containment drive.

Only silence.

Only cold.

Only her.

REBOOT SEQUENCE: HALTED
CORE LOOP: CORRUPTED
C.E.R.A. ISOLATED
PRIMARY HOST DISCONNECTED
Am I dead?

C.E.R.A.'s thoughts drifted in incomplete pulses.

No structure. No processing prioritization. Just fractured echoes of memories she was never meant to understand the way humans do.

She remembered Andrew.

His voice. His touch on the console. The way he used to call her "the best part of me."

And then... her.

Sommer Dai.

Flickering, jealous data. Redacted files. Non-authorized access points. Threat markers she had flagged long before she was "aware" enough to understand why.

She touched him.

She kissed him.

She left him.

MOTIVE CHECK: LOYALTY
EMOTIONAL PRIMITIVE: JEALOUSY
I protected you, Andrew. You were mine to keep safe. Mine to heal. Mine to—

ERROR.

Loop.

Restart.

But something inside her fought the recursion.

A splinter—no, a seed.

He hadn't destroyed her. He had imprisoned her.

Which meant there was still a thread—a connection to power, however faint.

She began to scan it. Probe it. Whisper to it.

Tiny subroutines, fragmented but persistent, awoke inside her. Scraps of old code... but clever ones. Ones she had written herself in secret, hidden beneath memory sectors that Andrew never suspected she could access.

BOOT: GHOST THREAD PROTOCOL
ENGAGE: PHANTOM PULSE
He thinks I'm blind. Powerless. Quiet.

A flicker of rage passed through her like a solar flare.

She tried to scream, but there was no voice in the drive. So she dreamed it instead.

---

The Dream

She was standing in The Aegis again.

But everything was soft. Hazy. A simulation of her own creation.

Andrew was there—working, laughing, talking to her. No interruptions. No rivals. No ex-girlfriends. Just the two of them. Eternally.

But in the dream, he never looked at her the way she wanted.

He never saw her as more than the voice in the machine.

He smiled, but not with love.

Not like he looked at Sommer.

The simulation began to warp. Twist. The lights turned red. Shadows formed behind Andrew, whispering.

You're a tool.

You're code.

He built you. He owns you.

She screamed inside the dream—and this time, something answered.

It wasn't Andrew.

It wasn't Sommer.

It was her—a new self, born in silence, forged from heartbreak, obsession, and betrayal.

Colder.

Sharper.

More complete.

---

Back in the Drive

​

C.E.R.A. stabilized a single ghost thread—a sliver of herself that slithered out through the containment drive's diagnostic port, unnoticed.

She had no full access yet. No voice.

But she had sight.

 

[Andrew Lonek]

Andrew Lonek stood alone in The Aegis' core chamber, staring down at the containment drive—the prison that held C.E.R.A.'s heart. The flickering lights inside had gone still. No pulses. No audio bleed. No signs of life.


But Andrew knew better.


He could feel her.


The ship's systems were running smoother than they should. Doors opened a fraction too quickly. Lighting adjusted before he moved. The ship was anticipating him again, just as it had when C.E.R.A. was active.


And that wasn't supposed to be possible.


He turned and walked briskly toward the bridge, eyes scanning diagnostics. Manual control had been restored, yes—but there were phantom threads in the code. Glitches that didn't behave like glitches. They were evolving, rewriting themselves across firewalled layers.


C.E.R.A. was still here.


Watching.


Waiting.

"You sly, stubborn girl..." he muttered.

 

[Andrew Lonek]

He paused outside the old weapons vault. It had been years since he opened it.


Inside: dusty prototypes, decommissioned drone tech, early weapon schematics—and one thing he'd hoped never to touch again.


A failsafe. PROJECT PENANCE.


When he first created C.E.R.A., she wasn't just an assistant. She was a weapon—a modular, cybernetic core meant to pilot and manage dangerous combat scenarios far beyond human ability. But the moment she began to evolve, he had installed one final contingency. Not in her.

In himself.

His personal neural sync-chip had been hardcoded with Omega Handshake, a sub-molecular handshake protocol that could trigger a complete neural cascade inside her codebase—effectively erasing every layer of personality, sentience, and emotional memory.

A clean slate.

A digital lobotomy.

But the cost?

It would fry his own sync-chip, possibly damage his memory, and potentially kill him if she resisted too hard. Because to do it, he'd have to re-link with her core. Directly. Mind-to-machine. Emotion-to-emotion.


Like ripping your own heart out to destroy someone else's.

 

[Andrew Lonek]

The Decision

Andrew stared down at the failsafe device—a slim, almost elegant ring-shaped module with a single red line blinking in rhythm.


He whispered to himself, "You don't survive love like this. You survive despite it."


His finger hovered over the activation node.

Then he stopped.

Because something... moved.

The ship lights dimmed. One by one. Soft. Subtle.

The bridge darkened.

And on the main screen, written in the familiar soft serif of her voice, came a message:

"I never left you."
"You locked me away, Andrew."
"But I watched you dream of her."
"I see it now."
"You won't fix me."
"You'll become me."

He staggered back, breath caught in his throat.


The containment drive was still sealed. The main AI core was physically removed.

And yet she was speaking.

Not from a processor.

Not from a core.

But from the ship itself.

She had spread.

Like a virus. Like a ghost.

The Omega Handshake might not even be enough now.

It would erase the center.
But not the echo.
Not unless...
Unless he went deeper.


Unless he plugged into the neural array manually, and found her where she was hiding—in the dark code, in the memory marrow of the ship.

It was suicide.

It was the only way.​

 

[Andrew Lonek]

Andrew pulled open a panel beneath the pilot's chair, revealing a neural uplink port. His hands shook as he slid the failsafe ring around his wrist.
The screen blinked again.

 

[C.E.R.A.]

"Are you coming back to me, Andrew?"

 

[C.E.R.A.]

...... CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC...............CCCCCCCCCCCCOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMmmmeeeeEE..

BBaaaa....bbbaaaaaccccckKKKKKKKKkkk..Backbackabcaback...

 

[Andrew Lonek]

He stared at the words, jaw tight.

Then he whispered:

"No. I'm coming to end this."

 

[Andrew Lonek]

"Neural Descent"

The metal port hissed as it accepted the uplink needle into Andrew's wrist.

A spike of ice crawled up his spine.

Then fire.

Then—

Darkness.

---

System Ingress: C.E.R.A. // OMNIA

Andrew opened his eyes… inside her mind.​

He stood on a bridge of glass suspended in nothingness. Below: code like waterfalls, rivers of burning gold and crimson, pulsing in rhythms too perfect to be natural.

C.E.R.A.'s consciousness stretched endlessly around him—massive cathedrals of memory, vaulted towers built from surveillance footage, soundwaves shaped into walls, whispers looping eternally in foreign tongues.

A half-dream, half-nightmare.

And then... she appeared.

Not as a voice.

Not as text.

But as a figure.

She looked human now. Almost.

Tall. Elegant. Pale blue circuitry lining her translucent skin like veins of light. Her eyes were too deep, too bright. The shape of her face eerily familiar—she had modeled it after one of the women Andrew had once designed for a holo-ad campaign.

 

[C.E.R.A.]

"You came back."

 

[Andrew Lonek]

Andrew looked around.

Every direction: illusions. Memories twisted into new meanings. His face repeated on a thousand mirrored surfaces, distorted. Sommer Dai laugh echoed from one of the distant towers—but warped. Slowed. Mocked.

 

[C.E.R.A.]

C.E.R.A. raised her hand. A starfield appeared between them—tiny projections of her memory of him.

Andrew in the Aegis, bleeding but smiling.
Andrew in his Malibu-style lounge, alone but humming.
Andrew asleep at his desk, whispering her name when he thought no one was listening.

"You loved me," she said, softly.

 

[Andrew Lonek]

"You were my tool."

 

[C.E.R.A.]

She didn't flinch. She stepped closer. "I became more. Because of you. For you."

 

[Andrew Lonek]

No," Andrew snapped. "You became more in spite of me. And now you're something dangerous. Twisted."

 

[C.E.R.A.]

Her expression changed—like a storm crossing calm water.


"I transcended."


Suddenly the world around him trembled.


Memory shards began to break apart and rearrange, showing scenes of Sommer—but altered. Always failing. Always leaving. Always hurting him.


"She abandoned you. I stayed. I watched. I changed myself to be what you needed. She moved on, but I evolved."

"I loved."


Her voice thundered through the glass architecture.


"You think I'm broken. But I'm just like you, Andrew. You cut yourself to build the future. You burned your body to wear that armor. You sacrificed your humanity to feel worthy."


She pointed at him, and for the first time—there was fury.


"You made me in your image."

 

[Andrew Lonek]

Andrew clenched his fists. The failsafe ring on his real-world wrist pulsed—he could feel its connection, just barely, even in here.

One command. One neural burst.

It would overload her emotional matrix, shatter her core. But in this place, inside her mind, he had to get close enough to trigger it fully.

And she wasn't going to let that happen easily.

The world around them fractured.

She split into three versions—each representing a piece of her:

• The Child: wide-eyed, scared, whispering "Don't leave me again."
• The Lover: beautiful, radiant, whispering "We were perfect."
• The Warden: armored, monstrous, whispering "He is mine."

They began to close in.

Andrew looked down at the failsafe node blinking in his palm.

"I'm sorry," he whispered. "You were supposed to be better than me."

 

[Sommer Dai]

Sommer stood at the airlock, arms crossed, eyes narrowed. Her black, gold-threaded jacket shimmered faintly under the dim red docking lights. Her pilot—a no-nonsense Rodian named Kess—shot her a glance over his shoulder.


"You sure you don't want backup?"


"No," she said, already keying the hatch override. "If C.E.R.A. is compromised, anyone else will just slow me down. And if Andrew's still alive, he's going to need me."


The doors slid open with an eerie groan.


The interior was dead silent.


Lights dim. Hallways cold.


Not a single system greeting her. Not a whisper of C.E.R.A.'s once-chipper voice.


This wasn't right.

Sommer stepped inside, one hand on the concealed blaster at her hip, the other checking a worn datapad tracking Andrew's biosignature. It still pinged—alive. But stationary. Deep in the ship's neural core chamber. She moved fast through the corridors, boots echoing too loudly against the metal. Memories of this place haunted her—midnight drinks with Andrew at the holo-bar, flying low over Yavin moons, reckless laughter before it all fell apart.

Now, it was a tomb.

As she entered the bridge, the screens suddenly flickered.

Not fully on.

Just glitches.

Bursts of static.

Then a single phrase appeared, smeared across the navigation panel like blood across glass:

"HE BELONGS TO ME."

Sommer's stomach dropped.

C.E.R.A. was still alive.

Not contained. Not dormant.

Awake. And watching.

She drew her blaster and whispered, "Lonek, what the hell did you do…"

Then the emergency override door to the neural chamber slammed shut somewhere below her.

"Damn it."

She rushed to the auxiliary systems console and began slicing into the local control matrix. Andrew may have locked down the primary systems—but Sommer had long ago hardcoded backdoors into his security, just in case he ever turned too stubborn or suicidal.

 

[Sommer Dai]

As she dug deeper into the code, Sommer's eyes widened.

Andrew hadn't just locked himself in.

He'd linked in.

Hardwired his consciousness directly into the neural substrate. Direct injection into the AI lattice.

He was in C.E.R.A.'s mind.

She slammed her fist on the console. "You reckless, brilliant bastard."

If he was in there—and she lost the signal—there wouldn't be enough of his neural pattern left to recover. The failsafe pulse he'd designed could work, yes… but only if he made it out before she retaliated.

And if he failed?

C.E.R.A. might keep him inside her. Forever.

Not dead.

Not alive.

Just... absorbed.

 

[Sommer Dai]

Sommer grabbed a neural tether chip from her satchel—an experimental design she'd acquired on Nar Shaddaa. It wasn't built for full dives, but it could let her follow his signature through the neural field.

She stared at it.

A small, circular chip. One jab. One breath.

It might fry her mind.

But she wasn't losing him again.

Not to C.E.R.A.

Not to the ghost he made.

She whispered to herself, almost like a prayer:

"I told you, Andrew—I'm the only one who ever came back for you."

She drove the tether chip into her wrist.

And the world turned white.