Donagan closed the lab doors, drew a deep breath, and initiated the decontamination process for entering the mainframe room. With a heavy heart, he stubbed out his pipe, bracing himself for the long hours it would likely take to decipher this cryptic data. As the decontamination cycle finished, he turned to Darius and handed him a key.
“Here’s the spare. Ye’ll need it tae unlock the console an’ the side door. If the mainframe asks fer a security pass or somethin’, just slide the key into the lock near the computer.”
Suddenly, the door to the mainframe slid open, unleashing a cacophony of sound that bordered on deafening.
“Right, head tae the core, dump all the data ye need there, an’ meet me in the control room!”
Donagan left Darius to handle the central chamber while he made straight for the room on the left. Once inside, he wasted no time firing up the console, waiting for the data to upload. His fingertips drummed impatiently on the table as he watched each block go live.
Derius moved with quiet precision, his boots echoing softly against the polished steel floor as he stepped toward the console assigned to him. The terminal flickered to life as he approached, a familiar prompt glowing dimly on the interface. He wasted no time—Donagan’s instructions had been clear, and Derius had no intention of fumbling through needless protocol.
Fingers danced across the interface as he logged in, his cybernetic eye flickering subtly as it synchronized with the display. His internal augmentations filtered and categorized data in real time, allowing him to scan through massive datasets in seconds. His brow furrowed as lines of text and visual feeds scrolled across the screen.
"Hmm… Apahanta... Seth Wither... EVE... Finn McCool...” he murmured to himself, each name like a ghost from the past echoing in his mind. “Ingenuus Cell?” He arched an eyebrow. “Looks like there’s some data on that too. Worth a look…”
Derius opened the corresponding files, watching as folders began unfolding in front of him like a cascade of dominoes—intel logs, experimental records, archived comms, operational documents. There was more than he expected—far more.
With a few deft gestures, he initiated a deep search on the keywords, routing them through a local buffer to avoid triggering any embedded failsafes or retroactive data wipes. The encryption surrounding some of the files was archaic, but sophisticated—a clear sign of Ingenuus protocol. It wasn’t just about breaking through anymore; it was about understanding what he was looking at. Every scrap of metadata could be another piece of the puzzle.
"This will take a while..." he muttered, transferring the flagged data into a temporary cache zone. Packet by packet, the information began to download—painfully slow by his standards, but safely insulated from data loss or detection.
He leaned back slightly, stretching out his right shoulder where the synthetic nerves still occasionally tingled from older injuries. Glancing across the room, he raised his voice slightly over the ambient hum of servers.
“Hey, Donagan,” he called out, watching the tech on the far end of the chamber monitor his own set of processes. “Do I need to be here while the transfer’s going on, or can I let this thing grind it out on its own?”
He motioned toward the active terminal. Lights blinked across the monitor—transfer at 12% and climbing—but the real weight lay in what he was beginning to piece together. These names, these files—they weren’t just old entries. They were fragments of a much bigger picture. And Derius wasn’t sure whether he was ready to see the whole thing just yet.
Donagan had just finished configuring the final mainframe block to process the incoming data when he noticed Derius’s request.
“Och, certainly ye can, unless ye happen tae relish deafenin’ racket an’ freezin’ temperatures.”
He observed the data upload as the computer performed a preliminary scan on each incoming packet. Though the pre-scan slowed the overall upload, it would prove beneficial in the long haul. The system duplicated each data set and routed it to various databases based on those preliminary results, where comparisons and tests would be run.
“An’ while ye’re at it, flip open Valve Five, will ye? Should be on yer way out o’ the mainframe. We may need it later.”
If necessary, the room could be chilled to subzero—well below standard freezing—to accommodate the super-calculator’s extreme cooling requirements. As long as they stayed above -40°C, the mainframe was designed to continue running without issue.
Derius frowned as a creeping chill slid across the floor beneath him, the ambient hum of the mainframe shifting pitch ever so slightly as subroutines surged through coolant veins overhead. He cast a glance toward the corner of the room, where Donagan’s silhouette moved beneath the icy-blue glow of status lights.
"Yeah, I’m not exactly impervious to cold," he muttered, rubbing his hands together. The synthetic tissue on his fingers flexed like real skin, but lacked the warmth. "I think I’ll move over there before I freeze solid."
With a small grunt, he stepped away from the terminal, the interface continuing its automated data buffering and transfer routine. He let the system handle its job, trusting it not to fry anything important. Yet.
Derius wandered forward, slow and purposeful, eyes scanning the stark industrial structure of the place. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t graceful. It was a bare-bones, bones-and-metal sort of place that stank of function over form. And he liked it. Every weld, every pipe, every support beam told a story of hands-on engineering—a forgotten era of work before synthetic AI built clean rooms in their sleep.
As his boots echoed along the grating, he heard Donagan’s voice crackle through the comms.
"Valve Five, right..." Derius murmured, brow arching. He glanced at the long row of industrial bulkheads, counting as he went. "One, two... that one’s broken... three, four..." And there it was—number five, barely visible beneath a flaking rust stripe and a corroded marking that had once been white. "Figures."
He crouched, gripping the wheel with both hands—his black, metallic palms locking tight around the frostbitten iron. "Lefty loosey..." he grunted, forcing it counter-clockwise. The wheel shrieked under the pressure, but slowly yielded, letting a cascade of thermal pressure hiss outward through a nearby exhaust.
Not wasting time, Derius rose and turned on his heel, the hiss of compressed cold chasing at his boots. "Note to self—don’t stick around after the valves open," he muttered, ducking through a pressure hatch just before the room behind him began to fog.
Crossing into the warmer control annex where Donagan waited, he exhaled sharply, brushing a thin layer of frost from his shoulder plating. He looked around once again—more intently this time—taking in the loose cabling, the older conduits, and the exposed fuse columns.
"The system feels outdated," he said flatly. "Too many open cycle ports, redundant logic gates... When was the last update? Or are we talking a ‘don’t fix what works’ kind of setup here?"
He stepped forward toward Donagan’s station, hands folding behind his back, more curious now than concerned. He could work with this—so long as the hardware didn’t decide to die in the middle of a critical decrypt.
"Don’t get me wrong," he added, eyes flicking toward the ceiling-mounted server array, "I like analog workspaces. But it’s like stepping into the past... fitting, I guess."
As Donagan heard Derius’s remark, he abruptly stopped tapping his finger and slowly turned his head toward him.
“Outdated?! OUTDATED?! Aye, the coolin’ system’s seen better days, but dinnae judge the machine by its cover!”
He rose to his feet, jabbing a finger toward the mainframe.
“Each layer o’ this setup uses a different bit o’ tech tae boost our chances. Some o’ it may look outdated, but when ye’re tryin’ tae match somethin’ concocted nearly a decade ago, ye’ve got tae use a wee bit o’ the same technology.”
He paused, adjusting his glasses while collecting his thoughts.
“The second layer’s an Ingenuus calculator we salvaged, an’ that may be outdated—aye—but we still need it.”
Sitting back down, Donagan keyed in a series of commands, grumbling under his breath:
“Ye’ve no idea how hard it is tae haul this sort o’ gear out here in the Omicrons. May not be as shiny as the Ageira labs, Mr. Fancy-Pants, but it’s no’ far behind.”
"Ageira can kiss my ass," Derius muttered, his tone carrying that familiar edge of irritated sarcasm as he paced slowly around the edge of the console. "They haven’t done anything truly innovative since the trade lanes went up. Everything after that? Slapped together patents and politics."
He flicked a small metal stylus between the fingers of his right augmented hand, the smooth click of metal on metal adding rhythm to his frustration. His left hand, entirely synthetic and glowing faintly at the seams, traced across a touchscreen as he reviewed the progress of the decryption sequence. The data streams pulsed in familiar patterns of green and blue—but his eyes were trained for the anomalies. The inconsistencies. The places where the Ingenuus encryption faltered, even slightly.
He was just about to launch into another rant—probably something about corporate monopolies and how Sirius would’ve been better off if people focused more on survival than profit—when a subtle, electronic ding chimed from the mainframe console. His head turned immediately, brows raised. Then came the second chime—this time from his personal datapad. The sync was confirmed.
"Looks like a part of the transfer is complete," he said, his voice now steadier, more focused. He stepped toward the main console and tapped through the notifications. "Ten percent. Not bad at all. We might not be here for too long after all."
He leaned against the edge of a reinforced terminal, eyes scanning the data headers now unlocked. Most of it was background metadata—environmental logs, timestamp anomalies, nested encryption shells—but… one entry caught his eye.
“Encrypted Archive: Seth Wither – Revision A.”
He froze for a breath, then reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a thin metal card—an old physical access key, barely used anymore, except for specific backdoor operations he preferred not to run openly. He slid it into the auxiliary port, eyes narrowing.
"Just ten percent in and we're already pulling ghosts out of the machine..." he murmured.
Derius glanced briefly toward the next terminal, where Donagan had moved to continue monitoring. "Let me know if anything spikes. We’ve just brushed the surface—there’s a lot of old skeletons buried in here."
Then he turned back to the console and kept working, his fingers dancing across the screen, unlocking piece by piece of the long-forgotten past.
Donagan hadn’t even noticed the file Derius had unlocked; Seth Wither meant next to nothing to him. However, as data poured through the system, he spotted a recurring pattern that looked strangely familiar while various algorithms parsed the ciphered information. Rummaging through his Engineer’s Suit, he unearthed a small datapad after a bit of pocket-scuffling. A brief search of its files—and multiple security checks—yielded a graph titled: Power core energy level under intense stress. Ship class: Leviathan.
“Seems there’s a mighty big skeleton lurking in the closet here. If I’m right, this data should never have left the Zoner databanks…” he muttered, clearly annoyed.
He knew McCool’s obsession with the Leviathan, so it hardly surprised him to find these details popping up. Donagan had always suspected there was a link between those Ingenuus power cells and the Leviathan.
“This might be worth a try; the data’s well-known by now.”
He uploaded the graph, instructing one instance of the calculator to extrapolate what it could about the original graph and its presumed ciphered twin. Turning his attention back to Derius, he continued:
“If it’s what I reckon, we willnae have the whole key to their cipher just yet, but it’ll give us clues about how they’ve scrambled the data. I’ll keep runnin’ more extrapolations on yer file as it uploads.”
Derius couldn’t help the sideways glance. His curiosity—razor-sharp and years in the making—got the better of him as he leaned just slightly, peering toward Donagan’s terminal.
“Found something interesting?” he asked, half-distracted. The question came with a neutral tone, but his gaze didn’t linger long—his attention snapped back to his own console as another sharp ding echoed through the room.
He blinked.
Then again, eyes narrowing this time.
“This… this is not supposed to be here.”
His voice dropped lower, more to himself than to anyone else. His mechanical fingers hovered over the console, trembling for a brief second—an almost imperceptible twitch of tension.
“This was top secret. I locked this away after Liberty. After Fairbanks. After...” he stopped.
There it was, glowing in soft blue on the screen. Simple, unassuming, and yet catastrophic in its implication:
FILE: PROJECT: E.V.E.
Derius inhaled sharply, as if trying to slow the acceleration of thoughts that now raced behind his cybernetic eyes. He leaned forward, arms resting heavily over the console, his body language sinking from composed technician to weary soldier in an instant.
“Well, fuck you, McCool…” he exhaled bitterly, the name falling from his lips like venom. “No wonder the Core found me. No wonder they came so fast. This… this is what tipped them off. Not the cell. Not the arm. Not even the bold move against the Order in Delta or the setup. This.”
He didn’t look away from the screen. For a moment, it felt like everything in the room slowed around him. A faint hum of systems. The occasional blip of code scroll. But all of that faded beneath the storm that now cracked in his head.
Finally, he turned his head toward Donagan, eyes serious—worse, desperate in a way he rarely allowed himself to show.
“Can you erase this file from the Zoner database?” His tone was still level, but the gravity behind it was unmistakable. “Permanently. Not shelved, not archived, not ‘secured under lock and key.’ Gone.”
He stood straight now, eyes locked with Donagan’s.
“That project was personal. A secret buried so deep I nearly forgot it myself. If this leaks… if anyone else finds out what EVE really was...” he paused, exhaling a long breath, “It won’t just be me they’ll come for.”
His hands clenched at his sides, his voice lowering into a whisper.
“Please, Donagan. Nuke it. I can’t let that ghost walk again.”
He turned back to the screen one more time, staring at the cold, glowing letters.
And all the while, a thought echoed in his mind.
