Amy hadn't meant to come back.
The morning had started with errands. A visit to the materials depot. A few hours sorting trade gear at her apartment. She'd nearly forgotten the place entirely — until she passed a familiar street and felt that subtle jolt of memory. Like a glitch in her own personal map.
Halveth.
She slowed the Lilac Ghost to a crawl. Her fingers hovered near the steering wheel for a moment too long before she finally turned.
Five days ago, she'd walked the upper floors of the Nymira Research Complex. She'd taken notes. She'd scanned the structure. But she hadn't gone deeper.
And in the apocalypse — this place hadn't just fallen.
It had burned. Shattered. Exploded.
The memory struck her now like a warning too late. Fire across reinforced glass. Concrete torn like wet cloth. Gunfire echoing between broken labs.
'But what caused it? What was here?'
The building loomed ahead like a question half-answered.
She parked and stepped out.
The air was still the same. Too quiet. The sliding doors opened without resistance, and the lobby lights blinked gently awake as she walked inside. It felt untouched — a frozen museum of glass and silence.
She retraced her steps: past the biometric terminal, the training room, the clean hallways that felt like echoes of a different world. The executive lab on the top floor was as she'd left it — powered down but immaculate. She scanned for anything new, any hint she'd missed before.
Nothing.
But something still pulled at her.
Amy opened her tablet and accessed the building's archived schematics — her own scan overlay. She tapped through each floor. Then paused.
Basement: None Listed.
That wasn't right.
She zoomed in, ran a proximity scan. Faint EM interference pulsed just below the lowest marked level. Subterranean. Shielded.
Hidden.
She moved fast now, her boots echoing sharply against the stairwell as she descended past ground level. The wall at B1 appeared solid — until she swept her hand over the concrete and found a subtle indentation. A touch-locked panel, sealed under company-grade security.
Amy pressed her palm against it.
For a moment, nothing.
Then — click.
The wall groaned, then split down the middle with the sluggish weight of years, revealing an unmarked corridor bathed in weak red lights.
She walked forward.
No sirens. No sounds. Just the faint hum of dormant systems beneath her feet. The corridor led her to a wide underground chamber, reinforced and stark — and there, against the far wall, embedded into a cradle of alloy and shielding, was something she hadn't seen before.
A single sealed terminal blinked softly beside it.
Amy approached.
The terminal flared to life as she drew near, displaying a log feed — corrupted but partially readable. She skimmed it in silence.
[Project: SEED_09 // Internal Classification: Eden Core]
Status: OFFLINE – Code Lockout
Warning: Glitch Detected – Adaptive Rewrite Failure
Power Levels: Critically Low
Error Source: Incompatible Energy Conversion Input
Primary Function Suspended
Beneath the readout was a single line of archived text, likely written by her grandmother:
["It was never supposed to alter living code. But the energy wasn't pure enough. It fed something else. I sealed it. I couldn't fix it."]
Amy looked past the terminal.
There it was.
The Eden Core.
Roughly the size of a large pack — shaped like an armored cocoa pod, ridged and heavy. The surface looked like metal but felt older, organic somehow. Deep black-purple alloy dulled by time, the crimson lines across its body dull and dark.
It didn't glow.
It didn't hum.
It was inert. Sealed. A relic designed to birth worlds — and instead, nearly tore one apart.
Amy stared at it in silence.
She didn't need more data. She understood what it was. What it could still be.
She stepped forward, crouched beside it, and placed her hand gently along one of the dormant seams.
"Not broken," she murmured. "Just… unfinished."
She didn't activate it.
She didn't dare.
But she knew the kind of energy it needed — knew the types of cores that could sustain a relic like this. And in the future? She would have them.
Without a word, Amy summoned her Item Box.
The Eden Core vanished inside it with a soft pulse of light.
She stood, exhaled once, then turned back toward the corridor. As she left the chamber, the lights behind her dimmed again, like the building sighing into sleep.
Now she knew why this place had become a warzone.
And more importantly — now she knew how to stop it from ever happening again.
Amy took one last look around the basement chamber before heading back.
But as she retraced her steps, something pulled at her — not the Core this time, but a door she hadn't noticed before. Half-obscured behind a row of emergency storage lockers.
No lights above it. No biometric panel. Just a manual handle, scuffed by time.
She opened it.
The room inside was small. Cold. Dust had gathered here — the only place in the complex that felt truly forgotten. Filing cabinets lined the walls, their labels faded. Two storage boxes sat stacked beneath a covered bench, marked in red ink:
[SEED_09 – Hard Records Only]
Amy crouched and opened the top box.
Inside: paper.
Folders. Printed schematics. Handwritten memos. Lab notebooks filled with diagrams in her grandmother's handwriting — with marginalia in different pens, different hands.
She didn't bother reading them here. The lighting was poor, and her instincts told her not to linger. She tucked the folders into a carrier pack from her Item Box, checked the hallway once, then made her way back out of the complex.
The Lilac Ghost was waiting. Quiet. Loyal.
She drove home under a dull orange sky, the clouds thin like old film.
…
Her apartment was still warm from earlier sun when she stepped inside.
Amy set the papers down on the wide table beneath the window, drew the shades, and locked the door. Then she sat — legs crossed in the chair — and started reading.
The hours passed without notice.
The notes told her everything.
Not all at once, but enough to thread the pieces: the Eden Core was a terraforming prototype — adaptive, autonomous, and fundamentally flawed. Its power system had failed due to improper energy type, causing a rewriting glitch when it attempted to stabilize environmental zones.
Her grandmother had tried to fix it. Failed. Then buried it.
The words were technical — but between the lines, Amy could feel the fear in them. Not fear of the machine… but of what people might do with it.
Amy leaned back, resting her head against the chair.
She knew how to power it.
She could fix it.
But if anyone else had found it during the apocalypse — if that was what caused the warzone…
She exhaled through her nose and shut the folder.