Private Sieve Protocol

[Ana Rix]

Blackglass had no true silence. Even three levels below the transit rails and five above the sewer banks, the city vibrated through its own bones—electric, restless, always hungry. But in the underbelly of the old freight hub, buried beneath a hundred tons of magnetic shielding and rusted carbon-steel plating, something new hummed beneath the usual static: something deliberate, engineered, and absolutely not native to this quadrant of the district.

It pulsed in the walls first.

Not sound.
Not heat.
Data pressure.

The kind that made every unsecured device in a twenty-meter radius stutter through half a second of static before force-shutting their antennas. Every cheap undernet link, every automated scanner, every casual snoop-read module went dead as someone had reached into the local spectrum and snapped it in half.

But whoever triggered this hadn't come to hide.

They'd come to filter.

The air recirculation units clicked over into a new cycle—pressure shift, temperature drop, O₂ mixture recalibrated by exactly 0.4%—and the chamber's interior lights surged from industrial amber to a cold surgical blue. Thick composite plating panels retracted from the floor with hydraulic precision, revealing an array of embedded instruments: multi-band telemetry receptors, neural-activity readers, subdermal heat-mapping projectors, and a twelve-spoked radial of phased-array holo lenses.

All of it centered around a single structure rising from the middle of the room.

A data monolith.

Two meters tall.
Smooth.
Seamless.
Completely blank.

Until it wasn't.

A faint line of crimson light crawled across its surface, splitting the monolith into panels that reformed themselves into a multi-layered interface like a blooming geometric flower. Holo threads erupted upward—thousands of them—each one a different script, a different cipher, a different encrypted dialect from every continent, every criminal syndicate, every shielded government node in every corner of the Core.

A language test.
But not for literacy.

For competence.

The monolith pulsed once, projecting the opening line of the challenge into the air in shifting, stuttering glyphs:

SIEVE PROTOCOL ONLINE
INPUT: UNREGISTERED ENTITY
REQUEST: IDENTIFICATION
REQUIRED: 6 SECONDS
FAILURE: SYSTEM-DRIVEN NULLIFICATION
—BEGIN—

Six seconds.

Not enough time for brute force.
Not enough time for guessing patterns.
Barely enough time to even register the input request—unless the person standing in the room was exactly the kind of mind the system was designed to find.

The far wall flickered as additional components activated: filament-thin tripwire beams, pulse-lidar slices drifting like invisible tides, and a mesh of gravitational micro-distortions calibrated to detect shifts in weight distribution down to the milligram.

Not to trap.
To observe.

Behind the monolith, a suspended rack extended downward—three holo-feeds showing separate sectors of Blackglass, each feed carrying a different scenario: a drone sweep malfunction, an encrypted comms leak, a falsified assassination order. All of them were happening live. All of them were fakes. All of them existed to see if the subject could parse illusion from threat before the system finished cycling.

Because this wasn't a test of hacking.

It was a test of decision-making under compression, the kind of situational triage only a few minds could survive without breaking.

A tinny voice—synthetic and distorted—crackled through the overhead system.

Not mocking.
Not hostile.
Simply clinical.

"If you are who you claim to be…
you will be able to walk out of this room."

It wasn't an invitation.
It wasn't even a threat.

It was a filter.
A sieve.
A way to separate noise from signal, liars from professionals, amateurs from operators.

The system's countdown began.
6.
Every sensor in the room activated simultaneously.
5.
Holo-threads rearranged into an impossible geometric cipher.
4.
The gravitational field shifted by 0.02g.
3.
All three fake crises escalated on the feeds.
2.
The monolith demanded an answer.
1.
The door behind the entrant sealed.
0.
The Sieve Protocol waited.

 

[Ana Rix]

The pop of static from her wrist node was the first confirmation that she had stepped into a deliberate choke zone. Not random. Not an environmental anomaly. Something had reached into the local spectrum and crushed it—cleanly, decisively, like a hand closing around a throat. Ana didn't stop walking. She filed the behavior into the precise mental architecture she reserved for tests, traps, and opportunities wearing the skin of both.

When the lights shifted from industrial amber to that cold, surgical blue, she allowed her eyes to adjust without giving the room the satisfaction of visible reaction. The plating retracting from the floor told her everything she needed to know—whoever built this chamber didn't care about hospitality. They cared about observation. Measurement. The way a scientist cared about a specimen, or a recruiter cared about the difference between talent and dead weight.

Her boots came to a quiet halt exactly one meter from the monolith.

Data pressure rolled across her skin in a soft wave—subtle, but heavy enough to signal full-spectrum scanning. The room wasn't asking who she was. It was deciding what she was. The distinction mattered.

The monolith opened with a segmented bloom. Holo-threads erupted in every direction, languages shifting too fast for any normal mind to track. But Ana's implants weren't made for translation—they were made for pattern recognition. And patterns were what this system wanted to measure.

The countdown blinked.

6.

Ana tilted her head a fraction, just enough to let the lenses filter the threads. Not translating—categorizing: alphabet-based, symbol-based, mathematical, heuristic, recursive. The pattern wasn't the language. It was the rate of shift.

5.

Her fingers hovered near her coat pocket, not reaching for a tool, but for the tactile presence of habit. A centering point. One she didn't need but permitted herself anyway.

The gravitational distortions registered as tertiary input—not lethal, not restrictive, simply monitoring weight distribution to read adrenaline spikes, micromovements, heartbeat fluctuations.

She gave it none.

4.

The three holo-feeds flickered at the edge of her peripheral vision. Drone malfunction. Encrypted leak. Assassination directive. She didn't look directly at any of them. That was the first trap. The crises were positioned to pull attention, to see if a subject prioritized chaos over the core problem.

Amateurs always lunged at the flashing red.

Professionals ignored it.

3.

The cipher reorganized into something denser—an impossible lattice, more sculpture than language.

Good.

That meant the answer wasn't in the cipher.

It was about the cipher.

2.

Her mind clicked through possibilities with cold efficiency.
Six seconds were not enough time for input parsing.
Not enough for brute-force cracking.
Not enough for syllabic assembly.
Therefore, the test wasn't a riddle.

It was identification by behavior.
The system wanted to see how she chose, not what she chose.

And the Sieve Protocol's real key was buried in the first command line:

UNREGISTERED ENTITY — IDENTIFICATION REQUIRED

Identification.

Not confession.
Not name.
Not code sequence.

Something that proved she understood the room's purpose.

1.

Ana inhaled slowly—just enough to shift the microgravity readout, purposeful and unhurried. She raised her right hand and extended two fingers toward the monolith, not touching it.

A gesture.

Minimal.
Precise.
Deliberate.

The holo-threads paused.

Ana's voice followed, low and calm, carrying the tone of someone who did not ask—only clarified:

"Identification: Observer."

A role.
A function.
A classification.
And the only answer worth giving when a test wanted to see what you were, not who.

The monolith froze.

The room's data pressure shifted—less hostile, more… assessing.
Holo-feeds stabilized.
Tripwire beams recalibrated.
The countdown vanished mid-projection.

The Sieve Protocol responded with a single line across the air:

OBSERVATION MODE CONFIRMED
THRESHOLD PASSED
ACCESS GRANTED

Ana lowered her hand, her face unreadable in the surgical-blue glow.

"Good," she murmured—not praise, but acknowledgement.

Someone had gone through considerable trouble to build a test worth her time.

Now she wanted to know who.

She stepped forward as the monolith unfolded its next layer.

Mr Black

 

[Project Uriel]

Planet: Echelon
District 19: Control Grid Array
City: Blackglass
Tag: Ana Rix

Accessing Uriel Unit Command Matrix:

Primary Mission: Evaluate Potential Apex Recruitment Assets
Secondary Mission(s): Test Human Mimicry Protocols.
Tertiary Mission: Error Classified Archangel / Underangel Protocols in Effect. Continue research on Human Synthesis.
Primary Directives Installed | Operational Directives: Test recognition time of technician vs updated AX-3 model

Against the constant noise of the transit grid, huge data conduits carried near-silent information through the bones of Blackglass. Test completed, the monolith recognized the successful input and unfolded its inner structure, metallic steps descending into a lower chamber.

Uriel waited at the bottom, smiling exactly on cue. Her systems mapped every small expression across the subject's face. The prototype AX-4 human-replica walking-dreadnaughts weren't fully online yet, still running AXS-3 behavioral software, but the AXS-3 unit accompanying her was a remarkably precise mimic. He stood at her side with watchful, corporate stillness, evaluating the interaction as much as she was.

The smaller, more slender Uriel-model stepped forward with a human-coded greeting.

"Hello. I am Tilona. Well done for passing your test."
A pre-recorded line. A timed pause for feedback.

"You're wondering what this technology is. Echelon Corporations have been using these designs for high-value vault locks."
Uriel tilted her head, a calculated gesture meant to simulate casual posture. Another pause offering a feedback window.

"Last week they were almost breached for the first time. Correction: the second time."
Uriel updated her internal record and queued it for upload; correcting that, the test subject had just breached a similar design herself. The HRD beside her scaned a glance toward Uriel, dry, corporate, and almost bored.

"We were sent to identify a high-value specialist for a sensitive position."
Pause. Three Seconds.

The AXS-3 raised a hand in a cleverly human gesture. "Enough with the formalities. We are offering competitive perks and pay."
Uriel's voice synced in with his:
"And a selection of apartment suites to choose from."

"If you accept, there is one final detail."

If Ana stepped down the stairs, Uriel scanned her vitals, seeking threats, or per usual, ways of eliminating targets in the fastest possible response time. The floor shifted slightly beneath Uriel, feet heavier than they should be. The AXS-3's cadence and timing were far more variable than Uriel's, designed for infiltration… Or in this case, to see how long Ana would take to realize she was speaking to not one but two droids, which was the real trick here.

The real secret to the blackglass purpose lay below, just within reach of her curiosity. Sounds of transit below as well as above now.

 

[Ana Rix]

The steps descended like the throat of a machine, each one humming faintly under Ana's boots as the chamber opened into the lower level. The air felt different down here—denser, compressed, the kind of pressure that came from redundant shielding layered over high-voltage infrastructure—the sort of place where corporations buried their secrets or their failures.

Uriel waited at the bottom exactly where the transition predicted she would be, posture immaculate, smile calibrated down to the millisecond. The accompanying AXS-3 mirrored her stillness in that uncanny corporate way humanoid models always did—too smooth, too symmetrical, too eager for human imperfection. Their micro-delays gave them away even before their internal signatures pinged faintly across Ana's personal receiver's low-band channel.

She stepped off the final stair without hesitation, anchoring one hand in her coat pocket purely out of habit rather than need. The act itself had a quiet finality—she had passed the test, and she knew it.

Tilona's pre-recorded greeting unfolded with predictable pacing, each pause long enough to invite response but short enough to feel manufactured. Ana didn't interrupt. She let the droid speak. She watched the AXS-3's gaze flick and recalibrate with each micro-expression she offered, reading her with corporate precision. Both machines were running layered mimicry protocols—good ones, refined ones—but mimicry wasn't understanding.

When they finished their routine, Ana's gaze swept the room in one long, assessing motion—floor plates, vent seams, the faint temperature drops near the shielded walls, and the deeper hum of something large moving in the transit shafts beneath.

The moment they mentioned perks and pay, she lifted her chin slightly, the slightest sign of skepticism.

"Before we pretend we're discussing employment," she said, her voice calm, even, not unkind but utterly unmoved by the corporate choreography, "you can tell me what the 'final detail' is."

She shifted her weight subtly, not defensive—just resolute.

"As for the rest—perks, pay, apartments—those are irrelevant negotiation points. I have my own residence. And it doesn't appear in public, private, or stolen records. Anyone who finds it only does so because I allow it."

Her tone didn't brag. It clarified.

"I prefer my autonomy intact. I don't mind contracting with a corporation—if the work is clean and the expectations clear. But I don't tie myself to governments. Not openly. Not quietly. Not at all."

Her gaze flicked briefly between Uriel and the AXS-3—reading both, letting them know without saying it that she recognized exactly what they were.

"And I don't sign onto anything until I know who is actually doing the hiring. Echelon. A shell. A subsidiary. Or someone with deeper reach than the paperwork admits."

She folded her arms loosely—not guarded, just thoughtful.

"Now," she said, voice softening only a fraction, "what is this final detail you've decided is important enough to bury beneath half of Blackglass?"

The chamber hummed beneath her feet.
Somewhere below, something large shifted again.

Ana glanced down at the metal floor, then back at the droids.

"And why, exactly, is it worth my time?"

Project Uriel

 

[Project Uriel]

Everyone knew the data and transit connections that passed through this district.
What they didn't know…

Uriel marked a silent check beside a detail. Ana gave little away, then another checkmark: information mattered to her. It was analyzed and measured; they sort such traits for this position. Uriel's head twitched very slightly, an old tick they never really programmed out of her.

But the who behind all this? That was information to traded, not offered. Data was currency. Power. A few milliseconds of Apex network communication ran behind Uriel's eyes, silent, rapid signals bouncing across her processors, seeking confirmation.

"Apex Industrial."

The doors slid open. Two more HRDs stood guard, enough security to dissuade all but the most determined intruders. Inside, a Hapan woman in a stark white suit sat with her eyes hidden behind reflective silver glasses. A datapad rested before her, contract, NDA, thumbprint required.

"More requires a signature."

It read:

Beyond this point, all facility and related details are classified under Apex Industrial property statutes. No disclosures, profiting, replication, or external reporting are permitted under corporate law. Violations are punishable under Echelon planetary contract doctrine.
Biometric data will not be misused, redistributed, or retained beyond compliance verification.

On Echelon, contracts were law. Clever corporate lawyers could bend around then, but for most, they dictated life. Assuming she gave her DNA print, the Hapan filed the datapad into a waiting stack, immediately archived, then encrypted and disseminated.

—ACCESS GRANTED—

The door ahead beeped, and the HRD guards opened it. The trio stepping through.

The first thing to come was the sound, subsurface transit lines rushing past with subsonic booms, suppressed in volume by sonic dampeners. These rails moved far too fast for unprepared or unaugmented human travel. But HRDs? They had an entire secondary transit system beneath Blackglass, shuttling units across the planet at record speeds.

Beyond the corridor windows, HRD models boarded and unboarded in perfect intervals. Automated and Efficient. Apex.

Interesting, perhaps.
But not the purpose of this particular stop.

Uriel halted at an inner door. The walking dreadnaught's over-heavy footsteps creaked as she turned to face Ana, offering a polite smile that almost eerily passed for genuine. Back to them, the accompanying AXS-3 pressed a hidden sequence into a pad, and the doors parted, revealing the facility proper.

It shone a haze of data and information flow.

Data cables thicker than towers spiraled down into a central chamber. Rows of terminals lined the floor, each monitored by technicians wearing AX-series markings. Information flowed in downpours, with diagnostic streams, network feeds, and behavioral models, everything feeding the grid.

But before Ana could step forward, Uriel moved into her path. Reading Ana's face and posture, measuring micromovements, pulse fluctuations, the slightest flicker of intent. Behind them, the AXS-3 cleared his throat, a mimiced human gesture for attention.

"So," he asked, voice dry, almost irritated, a performative routine designed to happen exactly now., "how long did it take you to realize about her?" Ana's silence had kept them guessing probabilities, an excellent trait for an information broker standing at the heart of the control grid array.

Ana Rix

 

[Ana Rix]

Ana held her position just inside the threshold of the chamber, letting the scale of the facility settle around her without allowing any of it to dictate her pace. The thrum of the subsurface transit lines vibrated through the floor panels in low, measured pulses—too slow for panic, too controlled for chaos. Everything here moved according to design: the cadence of technicians, the hum of the data towers, the metered intervals of HRDs disembarking from sleek underground shuttles. Apex Industrial had engineered this place with the precision of a clockmaker and the ambition of a government. It was impressive, but Ana didn't come here to admire infrastructure.

When the AXS-3 posed his question—dry, pointed, its irritation rehearsed to the millisecond—Ana offered no immediate reaction. She watched Uriel instead, tracking the slight tilt of the HRD's head, the micro-adjustments in her posture as she waited for Ana's response. The question wasn't about curiosity. It was about assessment. Everything in this room was about assessment.

Only when she had allowed the silence to settle into something intentional did she speak.

I realized early enough that saying it aloud would have been a waste of both our time.

Her tone was calm—not dismissive, not challenging, simply factual. She shifted her attention then to the AXS-3, her gaze moving with the slow, controlled precision of someone accustomed to weighing risks rather than personalities. The droid's mimicry of human impatience was competent, but mimicry always carried seams. Tension where none was needed. Animation where stillness served better. Ana had seen enough artificial behavior to recognize when a mask was being worn too deliberately.

She continued before the AXS-3 could misinterpret her quietness for hesitance.

She revealed herself by not trying so hard to appear human. That was the first hint. The rest followed naturally.

Her attention drifted once more to Uriel—a more extended, steadier look this time, not confrontational but thoughtfully observant. The older HRD model stood with a practiced grace that didn't quite imitate humanity; it simply occupied space without apology. That honesty in posture was rare among synthetic constructs, and it was precisely why Ana had noticed her first. Not because she was human, but because she wasn't pretending to be.

Ana let her hands fold loosely behind her back, a posture that spoke more of patience than authority. The glow of the data towers cut a faint silver line along her cheek as she turned slightly, taking in the chamber with a slower, more deliberate sweep of her eyes. Everything about this place is broadcast on a scale. Investment. Purpose.

When she spoke again, her voice remained steady, the steel-blue tone carrying no urgency and no embellishment.

If this facility is where you intend to evaluate my usefulness, then proceed with the next phase. If not, we can dispense with the layered questions and the staged reactions. Efficiency is the only currency that matters to either of us.

She did not step backward. She did not step forward. She remained in the center of the doorway, steady as stone, letting the weight of the chamber move around her rather than through her.

Apex Industrial had shown its infrastructure. Now she waited to see the purpose. And in her posture, her voice, and the quiet certainty of her presence, she made it clear: She had not come here to be dazzled. She had come to decide whether Apex deserved her attention at all.

Project Uriel

 

[Mr Black]

Engrossed in a nearby terminal, third cup of Zetaline-stimcaf partly finished and cooling, someone whispered in his ear. Balen Var Black lowered his datapad, eyes rising as he caught the exchange across the chamber. He adjusted his cufflinks with his usual flair; the armoweave suit introduced him, clean and corporate. Reflective glasses off today.

Uriel caught the final word she'd spoken in her memory banks, her scan narrowing in on Ana's face.
No disruption in the breath cycle or dilation of her eyes.
No lie either. She issued a confirmation ping.

Efficiency.

Black clapped his hands together sharply as he approached, and the HRDs stepped aside like programmed stage curtains. "Well, look at that, she's already onto you two." Delivered with the subtle confidence of a man who was pleased, and pretending he wasn't.

"Calculated at 98.7245% suitability," Uriel reported with unnecessary accuracy.
"Confirmed," added the secondary HRD, cross-checking with an equally unnecessary robotic zeal.

Black waved a dismissive hand. "Absolutely love the enthusiasm." He extended his hand toward Ana. Not because he needed her to shake it, because that's what people expect someone in his position to do. Her choice. "Welcome to the planet's ear. And hey, sorry about the theatrics, corporate hazing ritual. Tradition. Etc." He didn't wait for approval. He simply turned, gesturing for her to walk with him.

"Down here in HRD central, we run a tight ship. Before I put someone near the sensitive parts, I like to make sure they can tell who's real from a million credit empathy simulator." That was a lie; they'd got the costs on the AXS-3 down, but not by much.

As they moved deeper, the hum from electricity and data grew; he cast her a glance, sharp and measuring. "That test upstairs? Not so much about slicing, or problem solving under a timer. It was designed to sift out the tourists, or the I can handle it crowd." He mimicked air quotation marks with his index fingers.

"Anyone who loses their grounding." When what's real on Echelon could be tested without you even knowing it. His grin grew slightly. He'd admired her refusal to be manipulated in the Sieve. The sound of heavy machinery churned as he came to an inner door, the corridor pulsing. HRD guards at both sides.

"Now. The real reason you're here." He tapped a panel as they stepped into the next sector, their Galactic Nexus Array, a name that would've been arrogant if it weren't so perfectly earned.

Inside, a massive simulated matrix hovered suspended, a living thing of light and data. Every signal, from every star system, network, slicer rig, informant whisper, newscast, or stray feed they could pick up, predictively AI simulate, or otherwise get their hands on, moved into this chamber. Data was a religion for some on Echelon, but for Apex…

"That little anomaly in orbit? The Dataway?" He inhaled, savoring the moment like it was a spotlight. "That's our ear on the entire galaxy."

He walked as he talked, showcasing the banks of terminals and technicians, hands moving with his usual casual precision. "Everyone else will try to copy it, of course. Competitors always do. They'll build their imitation stations, maybe carve up a planetoid, rip open hyperspace, slap a shiny logo on it, swear they were 'first' or original."

He rolled his eyes.
"Cute. But nobody can replicate Echelon's signal capacity, centralised in one place. The noise handling, the load capacity, the storage, or the planetary relay." Its true this entire planet might as well have been a data bank with a giant signal tower strapped to it, with almost a trillion highly integrated contributors, all seeking out new data all the time, and that was just in system, phase one.

"And what we… I need now is someone who can tell the difference between signal… and noise, HRD and human, real and fake." A deliberate echo of the Sieve's purpose. Because the future didn't belong to AI, HRD's or the old way of doing things, it belonged to people who used networked AI and could tell the difference.

Black looked at her, eyes inviting, ambitious, and excited. On Echelon, knowing what was real wasn't just a skill; it was an art. He idly wondered what Ironwraith would say if he knew the project scope.

Ana Rix

 

[Ana Rix]

Ana did not flinch when Black entered—his sudden clap, his polished bravado, the theatrical confidence all sliding off her attention the way surface noise always did. Her gaze shifted toward him only once, long enough to register the curated charm, the predatory enthusiasm beneath presentation, the way he moved through a room as if it belonged to him by default. It wasn't arrogance—Apex wouldn't put someone in this position without competence to match the style—but it was a kind of performance she'd seen before. She let him have it. People like him weren't deterred by indifference; they were steadied by it.

As the HRDs parted on command, she fell into step beside him with a pace that matched his but never conceded to it. The deeper they walked, the heavier the hum of the complex became—the layered vibration of a world built on data, electricity, and unbroken flow. Others might have found it overwhelming. Ana adjusted her internal filters, letting the noise reorganize into meaningful patterns like static resolving into a signal.

Black spoke as they moved, his words threaded with practiced confidence that rode the edge of arrogance without ever tipping into it. She listened with the same unhurried precision she'd given the HRDs earlier, cataloguing not just what he said but how he shaped it—what he emphasized, the spaces he left blank, the intentional drops in cadence. Executives at his level did nothing without purpose. Every phrase here was part of an introduction with weight behind it.

When he gestured toward the Galactic Nexus Array, Ana finally let her gaze lift—slowly, carefully, without theatrics or the faintest hint of awe. The construct hovered like a living organism, layers of projected data shifting in translucent waves, communication threads stretching across its surface like luminous nerves. Code, simulation, predictive modeling—folded into each other with a complexity only someone deeply familiar with data architecture would notice. Even she felt the quiet pull of admiration—not wonder, not reverence, but a private recognition of the ambition required to build something of this magnitude. The kind of respect she never verbalized. The kind no one could read on her face.

Outwardly, nothing changed. She only tracked the technicians, the reinforced relay towers, the processing hubs humming beneath armored plating. Redundancy layers. Triple-fail systems. All the unmistakable signatures of infrastructure built by people who assumed they'd be targeted and prepared to survive it.

Only when Black finished speaking did she finally respond. No rush. No attempt to meet his energy. Just a single steady breath and a slight incline of her head.

Signal and noise are rarely as tangled as people assume.

Her voice remained calm—grounded, unhurried.

Patterns betray themselves. Machines imitate what they think humans look like. Humans imitate what they think machines can't detect. Both leave seams.

She glanced at the Array once more—not long enough to give him satisfaction, but long enough to show comprehension.

Your HRDs aren't the challenge. Your data isn't the challenge. The challenge is context. Understanding information in motion, knowing when a perfect pattern is too perfect, or when a human mistake is too convenient. That's where your tourists fail.

Her hands slid behind her back, posture balanced and precise.

If you brought me here to look at a machine, I've seen it. If you brought me here to admire your reach, I've measured it. If you brought me here because you need someone who can move between the lines and read what your systems can't—

A brief, deliberate pause.

—then we can discuss the terms of that work.

She remained perfectly still as the drifting data-light rippled across her coat. Internally, her thoughts sharpened like drawn lines on a map—measuring the scale, the potential, the danger, the opportunity. She understood what this place was. She understood what it could do. And she understood exactly what role she might play within it.

But on the surface, Ana Rix was exactly as she had been the moment she walked in: composed, precise, and giving nothing she did not choose to give.

Mr Black

 

[Mr Black]

"About now," Black said, tilting his head toward her with his practiced confidence, "you've realized what you signed back in the hallway." He smiled. "To put your mind at ease, we can talk about the fine print later," he added, likely in a boardroom full of corporate lawyers, worse than any physical danger! "The short version? You signed a promise not to spill what this place processes. Which, as you've no doubt figured out by now, is… well..." he gestured broadly at the impossible complexity surrounding them, "everything." As much as could be gathered, and certainly everything to an information broker!

Balen couldn't help the small smile pressing at the corner of his mouth. One beautiful day, he'd catch a rival executive in that same contractual booby trap, an innocent-looking clause that would cost them billions to escape. But Ana? No. She wasn't who he intended to bury under datafiles. He respected people who read the edges, where things connected.

And she clearly read them well.

"Clues," Black agreed when she spoke of signal and noise, stepping closer with an approving nod. "Exactly. You already understand the trick. Most crimes? Predictable. Most people? Bound to pattern. Criminals even more so, they're practically walking data sets. Wars, market crashes, major disasters?" His ocular implant adjusted, projecting a faint line of blue light "All visible before they happen if you know the patterns."

He leaned slightly toward her, dropping his voice in the way someone does when they are selling a beautiful idea they suspect the other person might appreciate.

"But a data mystery that hasn't been written yet?"
His smile widened.
"That's the real fun, isn't it? That's where your art lives." If he'd guessed right.

Black stepped back enough to gesture his hand toward the suspended matrix, the galaxy compressed into signals, simulations, and ever evolving patterns. "That's what this is," he continued. "You've seen it, measured it. This thing takes in the untouched, unfiltered, and unpredicted. Patterns collapsing, reforming, moving from human to machine to human again. A constant loop of evolution that no one gets to see from this close unless they built it." Or maybe bled for it. The Sith would kill for it, the imperials would lock it down, the Jedi would destroy it, the Republic would wrap it in red tape, but black...

A brief, sharper smile, he caught himself before saying more.

"It's fascinating," he finished, tone softening with genuine wonder. "Addictive once you see how deep it goes, and we've only just started." ... Black was an engineer at heart.

He started a Gyro-pendulum that swung on its own. "Time travel is possible," he said, suddenly shifting gears. A pause to give her time to think he'd gone mad. "Not the holovid version, but whether you get information a second before it happens or a year before, changes everything and everyone." A click of his fingers. He took a single step closer, his voice dropped to a quieter tone.

"That's what I'm doing here. Condensing a galaxy into a room. Bringing every signal, whisper, or every scrap of context into one integrated, living whole. Pull it close enough into view, tie enough threads together, and the future stops being a surprise."

He tapped the railing near the matrix.

"And this? This is the key." Heavier thought taken up in his casual delivery. "Terms… terms are everything. And frankly, I'm getting bored dictating them all." He walked to stand beside her, not in front or above, beside. Mirroring her view of the living data-construct folding in on itself in endless cycles, moving forever like the pendulum.

"Why don't you tell me what you want?"

Ana Rix

 

[Ana Rix]

Ana didn't answer him at first. She let the question settle into the air between them, let the hum of the Nexus Array fill the silence with its layered blend of electricity and distant signals. The suspended matrix before them shifted like a breathing organism—light folding into light, threads of information weaving and unweaving in fractal patterns that had no beginning or end. She watched it with an expression that never quite betrayed her interior, but something in the subtle narrowing of her eyes suggested a quiet, sharpened focus. Not awe. No hesitation. Something closer to recognition.

When she finally spoke, her tone was steady and unhurried, each word falling with the kind of precision that made it clear she had been building the answer in her mind long before she opened her mouth.

I don't want a title, she began, her voice calm and free of any defensive edge. I don't want authority or control of personnel or to sit behind a desk approving or denying requests from people who think hierarchy matters more than competence. That isn't how I work, and it isn't something I intend to become.

She shifted her weight slightly, hands folding behind her back in a posture that was both relaxed and unmistakably deliberate. Her gaze didn't leave the data construct suspended in front of them; it drifted over its shifting surface as though reading movements no one else had noticed.

What I want is access, she continued, her voice lower now, smoother. Not the political archives. Not the classified war files. Just the corridors that matter—the patterns that move between them, the signals that don't know they're part of something larger yet. I want the freedom to follow a thread to its source without waiting for permission from someone who understands less than I do.

A breath, not quite a sigh, but a subtle release of tension that hinted at how rarely she said these things aloud.

And I want autonomy. The word was spoken with quiet certainty. I'll take assignments when I choose. Walk away when the work is done. No binders dressed up as contracts, no expectations of loyalty to governments, alliances, or the people who pretend to run them. I don't want to be absorbed into another hierarchy. I don't belong to one now, and I don't plan to.

Finally—finally—she turned her head toward him. Not sharply, not dramatically. Just a gradual shift of attention, as though she had decided he earned enough of her focus to look him in the eye.

What I do want is the work, she said, and there was something in her voice now—still soft, still controlled, but edged with something quieter and more honest. The anomalies your systems can't categorize. The fractures in your predictions. The threads that don't align with precedent or probability. The problems that aren't defined yet. Those are the things worth my time.

There was no pride in her tone. No vanity. Just clarity.

Give me access to what I need. Give me the freedom to do it without interference. And give me the puzzles your analysts can't solve.

She let the final words settle, the space around them returning to the soft pulse of the Array's glow. Her expression remained composed, her posture balanced and unyielding, but there was a quiet intensity behind her calm now—an unmistakable signal that she had told him exactly what she meant, nothing more, nothing less.

That's what I want.

Then she fell still, not filling the silence, not explaining further, simply waiting with the patience of someone who never needed to rush a decision to know its weight.

Mr Black

 

[Mr Black]

"No titles."

Black gave a light shrug, one of those, yeah, I can work with that, gestures that came naturally to him. Hierarchies bored him anyway. The whole planet already operated like a corporate pyramid: control pinching at the top, pressure crushing those below. Titles just traded complacency for expediency, and expediency of the human kind was oddly almost always inefficient.

His gaze drifted across the room. Some technicians were clearly sharper than others, he could see it in the way they moved at their workstations, hesitations, their keystrokes or workflow. One day he'd personally tune every workstation in every project to peak efficiency, but that day wasn't today. Droids made that problem easier, people came with too many hardware variations.

"I can't promise what you give me won't end up in someone's ear," Black admitted, palms open, honesty in his charm. "I'm good, Ana, but I'm not an island. No one here is. This room alone should prove that. But...." he pointed loosely at her, "...I can promise I won't chain you to anything except an Apex contract. Beyond that? You can be a ghost. Vanish between the code if you like."

A small smug tugged at this mouth again.
"Personally, I'd take a private office with a 360 view and free valet service, but hey, no judgment. Apex hoverlimos are basically just mood-therapy with an engine."

"Pressure. Results. Bottlenecks."
He said them out loud like ingredients in a recipe only they knew.
"Weed out the weak links, patch the fractures. Where you see governments, Ana..." he jabbed his thumb toward the projection of sprawling planetary data, "...I see connection points. Or fault lines." Opportunities not yet taken or about to come apart.

Black lifted his hand, and a graph expanded into the air, volumes of data climbing upward at breathtaking intensity.

"Look at this. Everything is converging. And accelerating. Data transfer, inter-faction dependencies, black-market cycles... even the mistakes are syncing up closer together." He exhaled, leaning closer to the shifting matrix like it had its own gravity. "There are anomalies happening faster than we can tag them. Whole futures morphing in seconds."

He straightened, eyes and implants focusing.

"And what I need, before the rest of the galaxy takes note of how big an opportunity this really is, are the threats. To me, to Apex, and more importantly…"
His voice lowered, serious in tone, almost reverent.
"…to the Dataway."

Because the anomaly was their golden key.

And the moment someone else figured out how to counterfeit that lock... He'd already seen the early attempts, copycat blueprints, back-channel investors, and pirates trying to reverse-engineer hyperspace scars. Black smirked toward one of the screens, tiny pretenders. They'd be footnotes in history books long after he was finished building what came next.

"So."
He stepped forward and extended his hand, not theatrically, but with intent sharpened to a point.
"Are you with me Ana?" Looking right into her eyes.

This time the gesture wasn't a courtesy. It was her invitation to shape the future, one measured in data, critical decisions, and the quiet power she'd already proven she understood better than most would ever realize.

Ana Rix

 

[Ana Rix]

Ana didn't immediately take his hand. She let it remain there between them, suspended like a question he already knew she wouldn't answer without thought. Instead, she regarded him with that steady, unblinking clarity she had carried through every level of the Array, her gaze shifting from the outstretched hand to the bright analytic edge in his eyes to the swirling architecture of the Dataway behind him. She wasn't gauging trust—trust was irrelevant. She was determining alignment, motive, and whether the trajectory of what he was building intersected with the quiet vector she carved through the galaxy. Black's charisma was a tool, finely honed rather than superficial, and beneath it she could see the truth: he was offering her a place at the center of something tectonic. He wanted her not because she was convenient but because she understood the danger and the potential in equal measure.

Her hands folded behind her back, her posture loose but deliberate as she spoke with the soft, even conviction of someone who never needed volume to command attention. "You're right about the acceleration." Her voice carried the tone of someone observing data from inside the storm rather than from a safe vantage. "Patterns aren't drifting anymore—they're collapsing into one another. Futures are rewriting themselves faster than most institutions can register the first deviation. If someone learns how to read that convergence… how to leverage it… they won't just predict outcomes." Her eyes moved back to him, calm and unwavering. "They'll shape them."

She stepped closer—not in concession, not in challenge, but with the quiet intention of someone who moved only when she meant to.
"You want someone who sees the fractures before they form. Someone who doesn't confuse noise for meaning or ideology for truth." The faintest acknowledgment flickered in her gaze—nothing so overt as praise, but unmistakable recognition.
"That's why I'm here. And that's why I'm still listening."

Only then did her tone shift, subtle but firm, drawing a boundary with the same precision she brought to every decision. "But understand this." Her breath was slow, her gaze level. "I don't belong to Apex. I don't belong to governments. I don't belong to anyone's vision of the future—no matter how compelling it is." She held his eyes without hesitation. "I choose where I stand. And who I stand with."

The silence that followed wasn't cold or distant—just charged with understanding neither of them needed to name. "If you can accept that," she said, voice softening in a way that was intentional rather than warm, "then we're aligned."

Only after she said it did she reach out to take his hand. The contact was brief but deliberate, a choice rather than a response to the invitation. She withdrew with the same quiet confidence and added, "What comes next depends on results."

Then she turned slightly toward the shifting lattice of the Dataway, the light from the projection reflecting in her brown eyes. She remained poised, focused, anchored—yet the air between them carried a new current, subtle and unmistakable, an unspoken recognition of potential neither commented on, but neither dismissed.

Mr Black

 

[Mr Black]

She negotiated difficult terms. Black actually respected that, it meant she wasn't desperate or dazzled. But it also meant she hadn't agreed not to drop him into a political furnace or cripple Apex with a well timed leak. That, unfortunately, would have to be handled in the fine print later.

"I don't need another employee, Ana." He withdrew his hand slowly, not offended, simply readjusting. Then he moved, with smooth confidence, toward the nearest terminal. A flick of his hand brought up a personnel ledger.

APEX INDUSTRIAL PERSONNEL: 71,044,183 ACTIVE PROFILES
Including Off-world contractors. A smaller drop than you'd think in Echelons bucket of a trillion, and in Apex Holdings' greater whole. Amazing how many office workers and technicians it took to run just part of a planetary megacorp.

"I don't need another warm body in the roster," Black said, tilting the screen toward her for half a second. "These numbers, nobody will ever see or care about. But you will. Not for status, bragging rights or personal gain but because its data."

He didn't glance at her to see if she reacted. He already knew she wouldn't.

"You understand the room. And the ask. And why I chose you."

He keyed the board again, a soft falling data-wave of encrypted graphs sliding down the air between them.

"I get it, you live in the information flow. You don't stand beside or above. You dissolve into it. That's this planet's heart, you fit like a glove and its rare to find a natural who does it without thinking, even those born here don't walk the dataway as well as you."
His tone softened into the honesty of someone who had learned to respect what he could not control. Because, that again, was the chaos of the planet above. "I need terms from you too." Terms he could frame and work with.

He gestured around the chamber, towers of data cables, consoles running alive with the weight of the galaxy's signals, within the stream of a trillion contributors.

"Data is everything on Echelon. You slip the wrong word into the wrong ear, or someone sabotages a feed with your signature on it, and suddenly I'm under ten different guns. I'm not invincible. There has to be a limit to what lands in my lap or that points at my back"

He didn't pressure her; he waited for her logic to calibrate with his.

When she took his hand, it was deliberate and intentional. So Black asked one final time. "We have agreement?"

If not, they could part ways with no ill will.
If yes, he didn't waste the moment.
Black turned sharply and snapped his cybernetic fingers to a small electric charge, not loudly, but with a smooth, theatrical precision, like switches being thrown on a circuit board.

A pad dropped neatly into his waiting palm. "Alright." He breathed in, lifting his chin to regard her. "First anomaly."He tapped the display on, and plugged it in. A star map unfolded into systems, transitioning from blue to amber, amber to red, red to black. A region in the Core, once stable, now fractured.

"The Alliance's influence has receded," he said, slipping his reflective glasses back on. "And the Core powers are pretending its business as usual. One more cycle."

He zoomed in to an odd glitch.

The Rosem Squencer – The Quiet Zone
Formerly a hyperlane artery. Now just a dead patch of space, where signals vanished, dignitaries disappeared, and probes returned scrambled or empty.

Black Narrated. "No radiation, military, or pirates. Just…" he cut his fingers and zoomed into the blank signal area. "You'd be thinking, just another collapse and reform moment, the alliance steps out, someone else steps in, endless musical chairs." Black took a moment. "Here's the problem, its too clean in the quiet zones, and too messy in the others."

"So tell me Ana."
His voice lowered just for her, intrigued, drawn in. That faint smile that betrayed he was interested.

"Is this predictable drift, or the warm up for a signal smarter than any of those watching?"

Not a test, but an offer of breadcrumbs into a mystery. Black gestured once more toward the void in the projection, small and unassuming; blink and you'd miss it.

"Your move Ana." He smiled. One day he might challenge her to holo-chess. Maybe he was doing right now.
Ana Rix

 

[Ana Rix]

Ana didn't rush to follow when Black withdrew his hand. His shift in posture wasn't taken as rejection or offense—just the natural adjustment of someone who had realized she was not a variable he could move on command. She moved when she chose to, and that alone seemed to recalibrate the space between them.

When he turned toward the terminal with that confident, practiced sweep of motion, she stepped into place beside him with quiet precision. No theatrics, no hesitation. Just intent.

The personnel ledger rose before them: millions of profiles scrolling in a controlled cascade. A living system of employees and contractors, technicians and analysts, all of them threads in the vast corporate organism that Apex relied on. He wasn't showing her scale to impress her—she understood that immediately. He was establishing context. Responsibility. Stakes.

She absorbed the information without awe, without indifference—just the clear-eyed efficiency of a woman who interpreted data the way others breathed.

When he spoke of the need for someone who lived inside the flow of information rather than beside it, she didn't interrupt. She let him articulate the problem. Let him lay out the shape of the future he was building. She listened because she understood what he wasn't saying aloud:

He didn't want another name in the ledger. He wanted someone who could see what others missed.

When he finally fell silent, she stepped slightly closer to the shifting display, its amber-red-black glow drawing clean lines across her features.

"You're right to want limits." Her voice was steady, grounded. No apology. No edge. Just clarity. "Information can protect or destroy depending on who holds it. Without boundaries, anything I give you becomes a weapon someone else can turn against you."

Her hands moved behind her back—not defensive, not wary, simply aligning herself with the quiet hum of the Array surrounding them.

"So here are mine." She turned her attention fully to him, gaze sharp and centered. "I don't leak Apex intelligence. I don't compromise your position. Nothing that passes through me ends up in the pockets of governments, militaries, or anyone who treats information as political leverage."

No softening. No hardening. Only truth shaped with surgical precision. "But I don't answer to boards, councils, or chains of command. My movements stay mine. My work stays mine. That doesn't change."

Then she stepped forward—not enough to crowd him, but enough to shift the air between them—enough for him to feel the deliberate nature of the moment.

"But I am choosing this." Her hand closed around his—firm, intentional, an agreement made without ceremony but with complete awareness. "We understand each other."

Only when the unspoken contract was settled between them did she release his hand and turn toward the star map blooming above the datapad he had summoned with a crisp electric snap.

The Quiet Zone hovered in the projection like a wound in a living network—too symmetrical, too contained, too intentional.

Ana stepped closer, studying the anomaly with the same measured depth she used when dismantling a corrupted feed or uncovering a lie buried under curated headlines.

"This isn't drift."

No raised voice, no theatrics—unity of tone made the truth cut sharper.

"A natural collapse leaves scars—signal ghosts, scatter, corrupted echoes. This void is curated. Something is cleaning up behind itself, removing traces, reshaping the flow."

She changed angles, viewing the Quiet Zone from another perspective as patterns shifted around them.

"A perfect silence requires one of two things: a watcher who understands the system better than the system understands itself…"

Her gaze flicked to him, sharp and knowing.

"Or someone who wrote the rules everyone else thinks they're playing by."

The hum of the chamber resonated through the platforms beneath their feet. Data pulsed. The void remained absolute.

"Whatever this is, it isn't a warm-up. It's already in motion. Faster than the factions trying to hold their grip on the Core. Faster than the collapse curves predict."

No fear. No bravado. Just the truth spoken by someone who had learned to see the shape of a storm before anyone else smelled the rain.

Finally, she turned toward him again—mirroring his position at the projection, aligning herself not as subordinate or challenger, but as someone stepping into the same current he was already navigating.

"So let's start properly." A quiet inhale, controlled and centered. "Show me everything you have." No challenge. No submission. Only partnership—precise, deliberate, and forged in mutual understanding.

Mr Black

 

[Mr Black]

We understand each other.
"We do." Her hand over his this time, their connection felt firmer and anchored. Black treated it with equal weight and significance. An alignment, not submission. He'd heard everything she said, and that was all he needed.

He turned toward the room with renewed energy.
Everything.
"Alright, you heard the lady!"

Black produced a pair of glasses from a nearby console, sleek, angular, black-tech frames with a prismatic sheen.

Spectral Relay Lenses. Optics capable of isolating raw signal layers, highlighting probable pattern collapse points, and tracing their predictive arcs across different data streams. All to protect human eyes from the hyperdensity of the Dataway's full-power output. But the Apex achievement? Revealing those calculated ghosting trails, the signatures left by data that should exist but doesn't. The real in plain sight.

As she stepped toward him. He handed them to Ana with a grin. The kind that said, better put these on.

"Patternwell. State of the art Apex-Tier. Think of them as… noise-canceling headphones for your eyes" A few technicians actually snorted or raised a brow at that. Black smirked. Good. They needed to break the ice a bit. "Lucky for you," he added, voice warming to readiness, "you walked in just in time for our first real test. Passive mode is safe, steady and terribly boring."

A ripple of movement spread across theur chamber. Technicians paused mid-step, exchanging glances. Every HRD in the room turned their head in perfect synchronicity, all hungry for new data. Currency on Echelon.

Black raised his voice. "Stations, people! Ready in three…" The chamber shifted. Technicians scrambled into position. HRDs stepped into alignment. Warning symbols and lights lit the perimeter walls to stand back.

"Two…"

Black lifted his hand, a cybernetic finger humming lightly with expectant charge.

"One…"

"Raise the Dataway."

Annasun keyed the sequence. The effect was immediate and pronounced.

For the first time in galactic history, the full power of the planetary signal spires surged downward. A trillion connections, citizens, corporations, shadowy networks, the undernet, every whisper they could get from every corner of the galaxy... funnelled into the spires and struck from the Dataway like a crack of thunder striking the ground.

Electricity rippled along the tower-wide cables. Planetary memory vaults groaned open for incoming signals, processed into data reservoirs expanding for the first time, filling Echelon's coffers with the galaxy's signals, a snapshot of now. Data currency.

The air charged, the far edges of the chamber alive with dangerous static. Echelon's AI cores, Scylla and her sibling constructs, moved into high-analysis mode, For a moment the planet felt alive and unified. Made of a single complete galactic signal. Black watched the display with the thrill of a man standing at the frontier of impossible things becoming real, original and new.

He pointed a finger up. "Return to standard mode."

The lights dimmed and the noise followed them. An imprint of what they had just done hung in the air, like fresh storm-driven charge. Full data dissemination would take forever. Data bred more data. For the unfortunates of Echelon data debt bred more data debt, and some would be buried under it forever.

"So. Everything." She'd asked, and he'd answered. "Time for the fun part."

He drew the air where the new data formed into the projection. Although it lasted but a millisecond before being blocked, stuttering out, or hitting the capacity of their reservoirs. Drawing the signal traffic away like a sheet that hid what was underneath.

The neat star map pulled into something real and rawer, stranger too: a grid of signal scatterpoints, interference frequencies running through them, and temporal drift signatures edging them out of sync, each one sent in irregular rhythms, like voices trapped in durasteel and wanting to get out.

"Patternwell." Not just a brand name for the glasses! A concept for something he couldn't yet explain. And that's what made it interesting.

"Here a distress signal that's not." He ran his hand a bit further along a line, "here, a network connection attempt, like someone is trying to interface with 'nothing', and here…." He tapped the projection, walking through it to the other side, like he'd run out of words. "Here Ana. I don't know. Its showing…"

Black exhaled through his nose, looking at something he didn't know what to name.

"What do you see when the pieces are put together? Don't hold back, if I wanted safe, I'd be upstairs listening to another board meeting." The third today.

The technicians pretended not to look, and the HRD's didn't pretend. Her move.
Ana Rix

 

[Ana Rix]

When Black handed her the Patternwell lenses, their fingers brushed. It wasn't dramatic, wasn't lingering—just a moment of contact in the exchange of equipment. But it registered, not as a distraction, not as softness, but as a precise flicker of awareness that traced a quiet line up her arm and settled somewhere low in her chest. Ana didn't pull away. She didn't acknowledge it outwardly. The only sign that she felt it at all was the smallest shift in her posture—a steadier weight on her heels, a faint recalibration of breath—so subtle it barely existed, except she knew he would notice it as surely as she had.

She lifted the lenses and stepped into the glow of the Dataway's projection, letting the cascading colors sharpen from indistinct noise into layered, legible patterns. The room around them hummed with residual charge, a low atmospheric tension that wrapped itself around the chamber like a second air.

When she spoke, her voice carried the calm gravity of someone recognizing something before they decided whether to name it. "There's a signature in the gaps."

Ana said it with quiet certainty as she stepped closer to the projection arc, her figure cutting through the shifting currents of color. With the Patternwell lenses settling across her eyes, the data that had looked chaotic moments earlier now unfolded into intelligible layers. Scattered interference points pulsed in irregular clusters—never repeating, never resolving, never degrading. They lived in the margins between the visible signals like something half-hidden inside a pattern no one else had thought to inspect.

She raised a hand, her fingers hovering just above the holographic markers, tracing the invisible skeleton beneath the noise without making contact. The points didn't behave as natural drift would. There was no decay, no smearing or static bleed from collapsing infrastructure. They held shape. They pulsed. They cycled.

"Scatter patterns like these should break down over time. Natural drift leaves scars—a residue of where the signal failed and fell apart. But these…"
She tilted her head slightly, her attention sharpening like a blade finding the right angle.
"…these are maintaining structure. They're repeating. Preserving themselves."

She did not sound startled. She sounded like someone recognizing an old, dangerous rhythm she hadn't heard in years—something that slinks rather than stomps, something that studies rather than strikes. Her next words carried no drama, only clarity.

"This isn't debris. It's choreography."

Ana took a slow step back to take in the whole constellation of anomalies, the Patternwell lenses adjusting their filters to reveal even deeper lines beneath the surface. The void—once a blank, unsettling silence—became textured, layered with intent. She could see the fleeting anchor-points where a signal appeared just long enough to be read as legitimate before disappearing into nothing.

"Someone's moving through these networks with precision. They're creating temporary anchors—signals just stable enough to look like normal activity—and slipping behind them before the system recalculates."

Her brow lowered, not with frustration but concentration. She followed the rise and fall of the ghost-patterns, their intentional imperfection. They mimicked natural randomness, but not convincingly enough for someone trained to notice the difference.

"It's too calculated to be a collapse. Too inconsistent to be pure machine logic. Someone designed these rhythms to imitate chaos, but they're curated. Someone wants this to look accidental."

She let out a soft breath, the sound barely audible, more of an internal reset than an outward reaction. Her mind had reached its first checkpoint. The pieces had begun to align.

"Whoever's doing this knows how to disappear without ever actually leaving."

She turned her head toward him—not entirely, just enough that the projection cast fractured reflections across the lenses, illuminating a faint glint of her eyes beneath. It was the look of someone who had moved from observing to identifying.

"This isn't corruption in the network." A slow, deliberate shake of her head. "This is navigation."

She moved then—closer to him, but not in a way that sought reassurance or offered compliance. She aligned herself beside him, her profile catching the light of the cascading anomaly while she continued to evaluate what she was seeing.

"Someone is treating the galaxy's signal pathways like terrain. Not something to disrupt, but something to move through. This pattern isn't improvisation—it's familiarity. Whoever this is…" She paused, not for effect but for accuracy. "…they navigate the networks like they built the map. Or like they wrote the rules everyone else is trying to use."

Only then did she turn fully toward him, lowering the Patternwell lenses just enough for her brown eyes to meet his without obstruction. It grounded the moment, sharpened it.

"If you want my full assessment?" There was no hesitation when she continued. "I see intent. Clear, deliberate intent. Whoever this is, they're not improvising. They're pacing themselves. Testing boundaries. Marking territory in a language most analysts wouldn't even know how to read."

She stepped closer—not into his space, but beside his shoulder, close enough that they both shared the looming projection of the anomaly. "Pull the raw time-stream logs. I want packet delay signatures, interval drift, and every microsecond where timing shifts without a trace. Someone this precise always leaves fingerprints in the timestamps, not the content."

Then she lifted the lenses again, letting them rest lightly at the bridge of her nose, the dim glow of the projection catching the faint curve of her jaw as she looked at him with a steadiness that didn't waver. "And Black…" Her voice dropped—not soft, not stern, but absolute. "Stop holding back the restricted layers." Not a reprimand. Not suspicion. A statement of fact delivered by someone who could already see the edges of what he had omitted. "You didn't bring me into the heart of Apex to feed me filtered data. You said you wanted my eyes. So give them what they're meant to see."

She returned her attention to the anomaly, her posture grounded, her mind already moving ahead into the unknown spaces the upper-level logs hadn't revealed. "Show me the part the board isn't allowed to look at."

Not a command. Not a test. A beginning—shaped by precision, sharpened by purpose, and threaded with the same quiet, electric awareness that had sparked when his fingertips brushed hers.

Mr Black

 

[Mr Black]

Her fingertip touch on his natural hand, sent a current across the cybernetic side of him that had nothing to do with wiring. Black didn't show sentiment often, his family's past made that tighter than he liked, but something in the way she articulated, to dismantle the noise and speak only in precision.

Ana's words, her mind, leadership, the way she stood at the heart of it, and her pinpoint focus drew an honest reaction. A smile, the rare and real kind, subtle and echelon-sharp, marked the corner of his mouth "Careful," his voice low enough only she could catch it. "At this rate, I might start enjoying this."

He straightened and nodded toward the technicians. "Alright, you heard her."

All that was said. The room reacted like he'd barked critical orders. People darted across stations, systems hummed to life, HRDs realigned like moving parts. He didn't shout; her request was weight enough, his acknowledgement of it only gave it momentum.

"Pull the raw time-stream logs," he added, voice calmly conversational. The staff moved faster. Then her next request: Stop holding back the restricted layers. He pointed at himself with a single raised brow edging over the glasses, who me, an expression a blend of amusement and reluctant admiration. Like she'd seen a secret he didn't know she could.

"That's me," a light admission. "That part you're asking for? The stuff the board locks in our vault and labels with a seventeen-digit security lockout."

Pausing.

He leaned closer, not invading her space but aligning with her mind, like they were looking at the same horizon about to dawn.

"But since you're here, what the hell." He snapped his cybernetic fingers giving another precise, electrical crack. "Full uncensored feeds, drop our eyes-only protocols." Safeties off. The techs hesitated, only for a fraction, Black stared at them over the rim of his glasses till it broke their pause.

Lights dimmed further; the projection deepened at her wish. Apex-Tier filters dropped away like layers of an onion, revealing the truth beneath the investigation. He stepped beside her again, voice softened, not in caution but in focus.

"You want specific fingerprints in these timestamps?" He angled their screen toward her. "Then let's give you every millisecond we tried to erase."

The room changed, the Dataway responded. Their anomaly, no longer guarded or sanitised from prying eyes, its undercurrent exposed, and the reason he'd needed to be here personally.

She asked for the part that the board wasn't allowed to see. He was giving her the part no one had ever seen. "Show her the… root volatility," he told the nearest tech without looking away from the display. A new cluster of patterns came into being, recursive in nature and too intentional to be accidental.

Black's expression sharpened in focus, the glasses hid his personal interest poorly

"There," he said, tapping a line, a vector that echoed like a songbird behind static. "That's the thing I didn't say earlier." His tone quieter, steadier, and more dangerous.

"You're not just looking at navigation. Whoever's or whatever's doing this… they're threading themselves through the system like a second spine. Shadowing the Dataway's bandwidth, riding along it learning.... pointing it to and from a dead zone." A structure?

He turned his head toward her, glancing to see the reflections of the anomaly dancing on her lenses.

"So here's my question." He gave a slow inhale, a grin carrying the thrill of an engineer's first discovery. If they're mapping the networks and data like terrain…" He turned his eyes back to the projection. "…what are they mapping toward? And why?"

And then, in that opening she'd created by being bold, he handed it back to her with intention.

"This is your arena now," he said. "The keys to the dataway are in your palm, you know the threat it faces. Without fresh, reliable data Echelon dies." Eyes aligned with hers, "Pick a thread, any of them, and I'll pull it with you." No test or command, just a partnership beside her, exactly like she'd asked for.

Ana Rix

 

[Ana Rix]

Her fingertips slowed their movement across the interface only when she felt the shift in him—a subtle change in tone, the quiet thread of humor he rarely let slip.

When he murmured, "Careful. At this rate, I might start enjoying this,"
Ana didn't look at him immediately.

Instead, she finished calibrating the orientation of the data stream array, the cascading bands of signal-light rippling under her hand. Only then did she turn her head a fraction, just enough for the pale glow of the feed to catch along her cheekbone.

A brief, composed ghost of a smile appeared—not warm, not coy, but aware, gone as quickly as it formed.

"Good." Her tone was quiet, smooth, controlled. "I prefer partners who stay engaged."

No indulgence. No retreat. Just a pointed acknowledgment—answering him without stepping outside her center of gravity.

And then she moved forward again, into the wash of the projection, letting the moment fold itself neatly back into the work.

The chamber shifted behind her as Black dropped the safeties and ordered full uncensored access. The entire infrastructure of the room responded — technicians accelerating to near-sprint, HRDs realigning in perfect mechanical unity, layers of filtration peeling away from the Dataway like armor plates surrendering their secrets. What emerged beneath was not mere complexity but raw, unmediated architecture: recursive anomalies, temporal fractures, and signal constructs that had no business surviving in a living network.

Ana stepped deeper into the projection glow.

The Patternwell lenses parsed every unfiltered channel, revealing the second-spine structure pulsing beneath the Dataway. It was subtle—almost elegant—woven with the precision of someone who understood not just how the system worked, but where it was weakest…and how to hide inside those weaknesses without being chased.

Her expression remained steady, but the focus in her gaze sharpened, clean as a blade being honed. "Look at the recursion cycle." She lifted her hand toward a cluster of pulses, letting the holographic signals shimmer around her fingertips. "This shouldn't be stable. Drift evolves chaotically—but this pattern preserves itself between collapses."

She traced a line between three seemingly unrelated nodes. Each pulsed with a fractional delay: too slight to register to anyone not looking for it, yet unmistakably intentional. "These aren't remnants. They're anchors."

She lowered her hand, stepping back half a pace to take in the whole constellation now exposed.

"Whoever did this is building a structure inside the silence. Temporary scaffolding to move through the Dataway without disturbing its surface metrics."

A breath—slow, unhurried, entirely in control. "They're not lost in the network, Black. They're navigating it. The way someone walks through a crowd without touching anyone—but still chooses every step."

She lifted one thread—thin, flickering, deceptively harmless—and let the system magnify it. A microsecond of drift misaligned with all the others. "This is the newest construction point." The projection deepened, revealing an interpolated sequence of timing markers and compression stresses that didn't belong. "It's weak because it hasn't finished learning the system yet. If we pull this one…"

She turned fully toward him now, the reflected anomaly painting fractured light across her lenses. "…everything they've built will reorient to compensate. And that reaction will show us what they're protecting."

Her posture straightened, calm but decisive, the way a mind steps into a problem it was built to solve. "You wanted my eyes on this."

Her hand hovered over the trembling thread, a controlled stillness radiating through her frame. "Then follow my lead." A final beat—quiet, sure. "Pull this thread with me…and let's see who's arrogant enough to write a second Dataway under yours."

The work was hers now. The arena was hers now. And she met his earlier invitation with one of her own—steady, surgical, and unmistakably charged beneath the surface.

Mr Black

 

[Mr Black]

"Good." Her tone was quiet, smooth, and controlled. "I prefer partners who stay engaged."

For a moment, Black didn't speak. Not because he was startled; he rarely was. For some reason, he didn't jump at sudden shifts either unless some accountant put real effort into spooking him. He stopped because there was something profoundly gratifying in watching her work. The way Ana stepped into the center of the projection and spoke a truth only she could see. She transformed raw chaos into architecture for thought.

That ghost-smile of hers? He felt it like a shift in tone. A slow exhale left him, amused, appreciative, and unmistakably hooked.

"You know," he spoke, enough dryness in his voice to clean-cut through, "most people I work with get lost inside the first graph. You walk in, and suddenly the Dataway behaves like it's trying to impress you." Not flattery, observation causing a raise of his head. "Should I be jealous, or is that just professional favoritism kicking in early?"

Stepping back up beside her, glasses reflecting the patterns she'd isolated, the anchor-points that spoke signals, quietly masked and deliberate in intent. Whoever was inside this network wasn't hiding; they were dancing their way through it. Black's attention snapped to the line she highlighted, the newest construction point radiating the anxiety of fresh code not yet sure of itself.

"Oh, that's pretty," he said under his breath. "Sloppy, but pretty."

He lifted his glasses to let his ocular mods record a clear snapshot for later. He tilted his head, studying the misaligned nanosecond she'd extracted. Patternwell gleamed across his lenses, alive, breathing, waiting to reveal itself.

"You're right," he said quietly, decisive. "This isn't survival, there's a strategy."

He approached the projection, closer this time, enough that the hologram traced faint light across the edge of his jaw. "They're not just navigating the Dataway… they are using it. Using silence as a framework and their signal drift as camouflage. Building a private datalane under my…Echelon's… signal structure."

A soft, disbelieving laugh brought him into sync with her. "Do you have any idea how bold that is? I almost want to shake their hand." He narrowed his eyes. "Almost." But then he straightened, the warmth slipping into something sharper, corporate, and decisive.

"But they made a mistake," he said, nodding toward the thread she'd chosen. "This anchor? They built it before they understood our redundancies. Before they realized what makes this place what it is, not the legacy systems, but the future we're shaping into existence, data breeding more data." Forward thinkers vs those who clung to the past, or corpos vs streetrunners. Besides, the amount of signal arbitration going on now in Echelon to keep their data-currency from being inflated with false signals made his head spin.

His hand lifted, cybernetic fingers hovering just above the fragile thread she'd indicated, but not touching it yet. He looked at her, aligning his eyes with Ana. "You want to pull it?" His voice shifted gears to something like inspiration. "Then we do it your way and we pull it together." Glasses down fully.

He extended his cybernetic hand, not to take hers or for theatrics, but to mirror her exact angle over the projection, syncing posture to posture, his intention to her intention.

And if she pulled…
…the Dataway didn't unravel.
It pulled back.

The thread snapped free with a shiver along the terminals screens, and every projection in the room stuttered out just once, like a signal thrown off frequency.

Then a network opened.

Not violently or chaotically, a pupil dilating to focus. Layer after layer of masked traffic stripped back, revealing a structure that shouldn't have existed: back-channels pushed through abandoned hyperlane telemetry, spliced signals in old civilian code, ghost-signatures belonging to slicers, signal jackers, and networks that no longer officially 'existed;, recursive tunnels, handmade, improvised, or deliberate, like someone carving hallways in hyperspace.

But beneath all the human fingerprints, the synthetic edits, the rogue slicer architecture… something else… Didn't seem like an AI, or a program. The pattern didn't behave like preprogrammed code or a living being. It behaved like…. he didn't know. Quiet, guided. Black recalibrated his glasses twice before stabilizing them.

"Well," he said under his breath, not shocked, intrigued. "That… isn't in any manual I've read."

But then the dataway wasn't like anything else in the galaxy either.
Ana Rix

 

[Ana Rix]

Ana didn't look away from the projection when he spoke, but the shift in her posture was unmistakable—subtle, deliberate, and not the kind of response she gave to noise. His words reached her, and she let them.

The smallest curve touched her mouth again, more present this time, a hint of warmth threading through her control.

"If the Dataway is trying to impress me," she murmured, "I assume it learned that from its architect."

Not deflection. Not flattery. A measured acknowledgment—and an answer to the question he wasn't quite asking.

Only then did she turn slightly toward him, enough that the reflected data-stream light brushed across her lower lashes. Her eyes held his for a beat, steady and unguarded in a way few people ever saw.

"And no," she added, voice soft but sure, "you don't have to be jealous. I engage with what meets me at my level."

A quiet implication: He already was.

She shifted closer to the highlighted thread, the proximity between them intentional rather than incidental. As he studied the unstable code, she leaned in just enough that their shoulders nearly aligned over the same point of focus.

The anxiety of the fresh anchor-pattern flickered across her lenses, and her expression sharpened with recognition.

"'Sloppy but pretty' is generous," she said, a soft exhale betraying the faintest amusement. "But it's learning." Her fingers hovered a breath above the line he tapped, reading not just its structure but its intent. "Whoever built this didn't expect resistance this early. That mistake won't happen twice."

When he angled his cybernetic hand to mirror hers, syncing posture to posture, Ana didn't hesitate. She matched the alignment with precision, but also with an ease that hadn't been present earlier—a wordless acceptance of the partnership he'd offered.

She glanced at him once more before they pulled the thread. "Together, then." A quiet agreement. A deliberate one.

And when the Dataway opened like an eye widening into focus, revealing the impossible labyrinth beneath, she didn't step back. She leaned forward, drawn in by the architecture of something that wasn't human, wasn't machine, wasn't known.

Her voice dropped into something low, analytical, and distinctly alive. "Interesting." A beat. "Let's see how deep this goes."

Mr Black