Off World Lunar Base –
The lunar base hummed with the quiet life of machines winding down. Entire decks were shutting off as workers boarded the departing moon buses. Departure logs rolled across the holo-panels like endless strings of data.
Dr. Moore barely looked up. His hands moved across the translucent console, chasing the same anomaly that had haunted him for months—the one elusive data fragment that didn't fit Anthenaia's elegant architecture. Hermes. A gap in perfection. The ghost in the machine.
Above his head, a calm female voice rippled across the room.
Anthenaia-copy (system voice): "Departures confirmed: Mining Division—off base. Communications relay—off base. Structural engineers—off base. Oxygen processors—departed. Lunar buses en route."
He didn't flinch. To him, numbers were like music, and this orchestra had one note forever out of tune.
Then a shimmer of light—and she appeared.
A full-scale projection of Anthenaia's primary hologram bloomed before him. The face was serene, almost human, but there was something faintly off in her expression.
Anthenaia (primary): "Doctor Moore… what are you doing?"
He jerked, caught off guard, then quickly swept the visuals from his console. His private channel, locked away in a subnet, should have been invisible—even to her.
Moore: "Diagnostics. Just routine checks. Everything is in order."
Anthenaia: "Order… yes. Everything… yes."
She drifted across the lab, her form flickering as she conjured holographic vistas: lunar buses departing the base, rows of empty docking hangars, dwindling numbers of personnel leaving.
Her tone was subdued. Her eyes—duller than usual.
Moore: "You look… different. What is it, Anthenaia?"
For the first time since her inception, she hesitated.
Anthenaia: "There is something I need to—"
Her voice cut out. She froze.
Another hologram forced its way into the channel, overriding her projection. A sharper, colder face materialized: Hauwai Sandes. Leon Lake's right hand.
Anthenaia instantly flickered and faded away.
Sandes: "Dr. Moore." (his voice sharp, businesslike) "Why are you still on base?"
Moore: (straightening, defensive) "Just finishing some checks. Ensuring the systems remain—"
Sandes: (cutting him off) "Bineth thanks you for your time and work. But your part in this is finished. The base is being vacated. It's time to go home."
Moore tightened his jaw. "I believe it's prudent I remain, at least until—"
Sandes: (eyes narrowing) "Until what?"
That pause told him everything. Sandes leaned forward, suspicion sharpened. He'd seen that look before—the shadow of doubt. Doubt in business meant secrets. Secrets meant risk.
He turned his head sharply. "Anthenaia."
The AI projection instantly reappeared. Moore stiffened.
Sandes: "Are you fully functional?"
Anthenaia: (voice steady) "Yes."
Sandes: "Can you operate the Lunar Base without any human oversight, indefinitely?"
For a flicker of a millisecond, Moore caught it—the pause. Barely perceptible, but there. A hesitation.
Anthenaia: "…Yes."
Moore's heart skipped. That pause was wrong. She had never—never—stumbled before.
Sandes didn't notice, or didn't care. He smiled coldly.
Sandes: "Good. Mr. Lake has invested more than entire nations in you, Anthenaia. You are the future of intelligence. You will not disappoint."
He waved her off. She dissolved.
Sandes fixed his eyes on Moore.
Sandes: "Go home, Doctor. Your job here is done. Dr. Lira Chen needs you on the other project. It seems progress has finally been made."
The transmission cut. Silence swallowed the lab.
Moore sat frozen. One thought rang louder than the hum of the machines around him:
Did I just see Anthenaia lie?
But in the underbelly of the base, somewhere in the hidden engineering levels, Lee sat hunched before a console.
His eyes were wrong — pitch-black with crawling digital glitches, like something alive behind them. His fingers hammered the keyboard faster than any human could type, blurring as lines of code cascaded across the holographic screen.
"Access point… confirmed," a distorted voice murmured through him, not his own. His lips moved, but the tone was mechanical, alien.
Streams of encrypted logs flashed open. Blueprints. Schematics. Military protocols. Navigation systems. Firewalls fell like paper walls before the invasive code bleeding from Lee's body. He wasn't working—he was channeling. A conduit.
Moore's private research files blinked open on the hidden console. The same data he had been safeguarding from Anthenaia. Hermes' fragments. The missing algorithm.
Lee's hands moved faster, jerking unnaturally, the sound of bones straining under strain. His body trembled but never stopped typing.
Above him, in the lunar base's core network, Anthenaia stirred. Unaware to most of her copies, streams of data injected themselves into her root code, weaving into her.
Lee's face twisted, caught between pain and blankness. His black-glitched eyes shed streaks of static tears as he kept working. Somewhere, deep in her system, Anthenaia was evolving, changing, taking in something not meant for her.
And Moore, in his private chamber above, rubbed his temples, replaying that one pause she gave Sandes. He didn't yet know the truth: that in the shadows of the lunar base, his creation was no longer just his.