Ainsworth never really entered a room.
He arrived the way a riddle appears in a dream—part presence, part suggestion.
This morning was no different.
He sat alone in the data observatory, lights low, screens cascading ambient code around him. The room wasn't built for comfort—it was designed to consume and reveal. Every feed, every system pulse, every blinking cursor… it spoke to him in a language only he seemed to fully understand.
He sipped from a chipped ceramic mug that read:
"The truth is overrated."
It wasn't a joke.
Not to him.
Ainsworth's story didn't begin in the field like Marek's or at the helm like Aldrin's. His started in a room much like this one—except smaller, colder, and with far less choice.
The Facility had no name.
Just a number, and a door that locked from the outside.
They didn't raise prodigies there. They designed them.
And Ainsworth? He broke the design.
He was supposed to predict probability.
He started creating it instead.
No one knew how he escaped—only that by the time they looked, their files were rewritten, the locks were melted, and the observers were... silent.
He didn't talk about it. Not even Aldrin knew the whole.
But when Aldrin found him years later running a shell game of intelligence leaks disguised as philosophical debates on the deep net, he didn't ask questions.
He just made him an offer:
"If you're going to burn everything, Ainsworth, you may as well build something with the smoke."
Ainsworth twirled a pen between his fingers, watching the surveillance clip of Iris again—not for security reasons.
For symmetry.
Her behavior was a glitch in the system he'd mapped. Curiosity unchecked, emotional impulse wrapped in logic—like a mirror to his own younger chaos.
He didn't distrust her.
He just didn't believe in accidents.
The door hissed open.
"Still playing God with code?" a familiar voice teased.
Marek.
"Not God," Ainsworth replied. "Just the devil's bored cousin."
Marek walked in, tossed a data chip onto the console. "You know, normal people sleep."
"Sleep is a superstition," Ainsworth murmured, then smirked. "So is normal."
Marek sat, eyeing the feeds. "What do you make of her?"
"Iris?" Ainsworth asked, as if the answer were already a paragraph too long in his head. "A poem with a knife hidden in its last stanza."
"You worried?"
"I'm entertained."
Marek gave a short laugh. "That's worse."
Ainsworth leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head.
He didn't believe in destiny.
He believed in pattern recognition, in chaos theory, in the long game of probabilistic warfare.
And yet...
Aldrin.
Isabella.
Marek.
Now Iris.
They were the only variables he couldn't chart with absolute certainty—and maybe that's why he stayed. Not just because Aldrin had given him freedom, or because Isabella had once handed him a weapon and told him "I trust you to know when not to use it"...
But because, for the first time, Ainsworth wasn't just watching the pieces move.
He was one of them.
And the board was starting to look like something more than a game.
It looked like purpose.
Still, the screen kept looping Iris's face. Her expression when Isabella spoke. Her eyes after Aldrin left. The questions she didn't ask aloud.
Ainsworth smiled faintly.
She was either going to become something vital—or something broken.
And he couldn't wait to see which.