In the decaying outer zone of the Virellian Empire, where neon lights flickered over rusted metal and breathing unfiltered air was a death sentence, a boy sat in silence behind a bolted iron door.
Matius Benedictus.
No one ever called him by name—not anymore. To the orphanage registry, he was Subject 0439. To the slum wardens, a ghost. And to the roaches that crawled along the cracked concrete walls, he was furniture.
But within the silence of that room, something ancient stirred. A mind so vast, so meticulously built, it threatened the very notion of what a human was.
The room was only four by four metres, lined with scavenged consoles and illegal tech cobbled together from trash heaps and black market cores. A cracked holoscreen blinked in low-res static, connected to a neural interface stolen from a military graveyard. Sprawled across the floor were schematics—weapon blueprints, energy equations, linguistic codices of dead civilizations—all handwritten in a spidery script only he understood.
He didn't sleep much.
His body, frail and pale, was a mockery of what his mind could do. He had genetically diagnosed himself with a cluster of degenerative conditions by age six, then designed inhibitors to slow their progress by seven. He never showed them to the nurses. They would've sold him. Or worse, dissected him.
They always whispered about him.
> "That freak never talks."
"He didn't cry when Miko got taken. Just stared."
"Swear I saw him sketching a plasma coil once. He's ten."
They were wrong. He was eleven.
And tonight, everything would begin.
---
Outside his iron door, distant explosions rippled through the district. The rebellion in Sector IX was escalating. Imperial troops were sweeping buildings, torching anything suspected of sedition. But none of it touched Matius.
He had already calculated the probability of the purge reaching Block 6. It was under 2.9%. And even then, he had designed three separate fallback plans. One included flooding the orphanage with noxious gas—harmless to him, deadly to anyone without the antidote capsule in his teeth.
Cold. Calculating. Detached.
He turned his attention to the small terminal in front of him. Onscreen blinked a synthetic organism's AI pattern—one he had built in secret for two years. It wasn't a weapon. Not yet. But it could think. Simulate. Predict. Whisper into systems without being noticed.
He named it Orthus.
And tonight, it would be tested.
He slipped on the neural mesh, grimacing slightly at the pain. His body rejected overstimulation. But pain was just another signal. Another variable to tame.
The interface came alive. Data flowed.
> "Welcome back, Matius," the AI pulsed in soundless code.
"Target?"
"Imperial Census Node 17-B," he replied in his mind.
The AI hesitated.
> "Risk level: High. Detection odds—"
"Irrelevant."
There was no hesitation in Matius's thoughts.
The Empire had records. Birth logs. Genetic tags. Secrets. Buried in encrypted data vaults. And within those vaults, perhaps, a trace of who he was. Or who made him. Why he could remember things before he was born. Why he dreamed in blueprints. Why his blood clotted like engineered nanogel.
Within seconds, Orthus breached the first layer of security. A quiet ping echoed in his brain.
He smiled. Not with joy—but with confirmation.
---
Then came the knock.
A soft, almost shy knock against the metal door. No one ever knocked.
He pulled off the mesh.
His eyes narrowed.
> "Matius…?" came a girl's voice—nervous, barely audible. "They're… they're coming. The soldiers. They're burning the east wing. Miko's gone. Please…"
Silence.
He stood slowly, bones creaking like a marionette's frame. He approached the door but did not open it. His fingers hovered over the lock.
Her name was Eline. She was nine. Innocent. Weak. Useless.
And yet—
He sighed. Not from emotion. From probability.
> Saving her increased risk of exposure by 11.3%.
But letting her die? Would disturb his sleep. Disrupt mental efficiency.
Risk calculation: Acceptable.
He unlocked the door.
She stared up at him—wide-eyed, cheeks smudged with soot.
"You…" she whispered. "You really exist."
He said nothing.
Instead, he tossed her a small vial. The antidote.
"Breathe deep," he murmured. "And follow me. Don't look back."
She obeyed without question.
And just like that, the ghost moved into the world for the first time in years—silent, calculating, unstoppable.
---
In the shadows of a dying empire, a boy had awakened.
Not to lead.
Not to inspire.
But to dismantle the world piece by piece…
And build something darker in its place.
---