The Pulse Beneath the Metal
The hangar dome shimmered beneath the aurora of controlled M.A.N.A. discharge. Every few seconds, threads of energy rippled through the atmosphere, illuminating the silhouettes of dormant Frames like ancient titans asleep beneath artificial stars. The air smelled of ozone and heated metal, that particular tang that came with high-energy work. It was a smell Liwayway had learned to associate with possibility.
Liwayway Cruz stood at the heart of it all, hands oil-streaked, hair tied in a loose braid that had started the shift neat and orderly but now hung slightly askew. Her eyes gleamed with quiet purpose as she studied the readouts before her. Unlike the pilots who wore flight suits and carried bravado like a second skin, she bore a different kind of armor: intuition and intellect. Tools of a subtler trade.
Her Frame, Arclight, hovered suspended by magnetic tethers above the engineering deck, its cyan runes flickering like veins of living light through the body of a mid-sized mech. The Frame wasn't as imposing as the frontline combat units, but its modular tool arms and rune-lined plating gave it an elegance the others lacked. A precision instrument rather than a blunt weapon.
The engineers called it a miracle of balance. Liwayway called it unfinished.
She wiped her palms on her work pants, leaving fresh streaks, and approached the main console. The deck beneath her boots hummed with the steady thrum of power distribution systems working overtime.
"Pulse amplitude at 3.6 M.A.N.A. units," one technician reported from his station, voice clipped and professional. "Stabilizers holding."
Liwayway traced her fingers across the air-screen before her, adjusting the runic interface with practiced gestures. Each symbol pulsed in response, old glyphs intertwined with modern code, forming living patterns that resonated in color and vibration. She'd spent weeks learning to read the subtle differences in their glow, the way they shifted when energy flowed through them versus when they merely stood dormant.
"It's not holding," she murmured, more to herself than anyone else. "It's compensating."
The words came like instinct. She wasn't just reading readings; she felt the rhythm beneath the metal. There was a slight discord, like a note played off-tempo in an otherwise perfect symphony. A drag in the third harmonic that shouldn't be there. She had been working on the Arc-Heart Reactor's new conduit systems for days—longer than her supervisor had authorized, if she was being honest—integrating ancient resonance runes recovered from pre-Rift ruins with Terran reactor nodes. A union of art and science few could even attempt, and fewer still would risk.
Her hands moved across the interface, making micro-adjustments to the resonance frequency. The runes brightened incrementally.
Her mentor's voice echoed from the mezzanine above, cutting through the ambient noise. "Cruz! You're overloading the primary feed again!"
Liwayway didn't look up. "Not overload," she replied calmly, adjusting another parameter. "Calibration. The Frame's asking for synchronization."
She could feel his disapproval from here, that particular weight of a superior who wants to intervene but can't quite justify it. He frowned down at her, she was sure of it, but said nothing. She had earned that trust, slowly, deliberately, through a string of impossible repairs during the prototype tests. Late nights when other engineers had given up. Problems solved that shouldn't have had solutions.
And now, she was about to prove that runes could sing through circuits.
Runic Resonance
The next sequence began with a low vibration that rattled through the deck plating. Energy surged through Arclight's reactor spine, and the runes blazed alive, lines of cyan fire crawling like rivers across its armor. The light was beautiful in a way that made Liwayway's chest tighten—something old and new at once, familiar and utterly alien.
The hangar's air shifted. The usual hum of machinery now resonated in chords that vibrated through the bones, deeper than sound should go. It was less heard than felt, a physical presence that pressed against the skin.
The technicians backed away from their stations, uncertain. One bumped into a tool cart, sending a wrench clattering to the floor. No one moved to pick it up.
"Is it supposed to… sound like that?" one whispered.
Liwayway didn't answer. She stepped closer instead, drawn forward by instinct. The vibration wasn't destructive, she could tell that much. It was harmonic. Resonant. Her training told her to retreat, to run diagnostics from a safe distance. Her gut told her to stay.
Her hands hovered near the interface, fingers splayed as if she could touch the energy itself. For a moment, she felt something impossible: response. Not from the machine—machines didn't respond like this—but from the energy within it, like a subtle consciousness, a pulse acknowledging her touch. Acknowledging her.
Her breath caught.
The resonance expanded, rippling outward in a soft shockwave of light that washed over everything. The sensation was warm, not hot, like standing in sunlight after a long winter. For a heartbeat, everyone in the hangar saw them—faint spectral forms, luminous silhouettes that hung in the air like afterimages. They looked almost humanoid but not quite, their proportions subtly wrong, as if celestial bodies were watching from behind the veil of light.
Then they faded, leaving only a shimmer of M.A.N.A. dust suspended in the air, slowly drifting downward like luminescent snow.
Someone behind her swore softly. Another made a sound that might have been a prayer.
Liwayway blinked hard, trying to clear the spots from her vision. Her heart hammered in her chest, adrenaline singing through her veins. "We're fine," she said softly, forcing her voice steady. "That was just… a sympathetic discharge. Nothing to worry about."
But deep inside, she knew better. The words felt hollow even as she spoke them. That wasn't discharge. It was recognition. Something had seen them. Seen her.
She flexed her fingers, still tingling from whatever she'd felt through the interface.
The Evolutionary Pulse
Minutes passed. The Arclight stabilized at full power, its systems settling into a new equilibrium. But something new stirred beneath its circuits, something Liwayway noticed immediately. The glyphs she had carved through the conduits—painstakingly translated from fragments of pre-Rift texts—began to rearrange themselves, rotating slightly, glowing in alternating pulses. An adaptive reaction.
This wasn't in any manual. This wasn't supposed to be possible.
Liwayway's eyes widened. "It's rewriting the runes…"
She leaned closer to the display, watching the transformation in real-time. The patterns shifted like living things, evolving, optimizing. Finding a better configuration than the one she'd designed.
The data feed flared, cascading information faster than she could process. Arclight's AI core—an astral-linked intelligence bound to both M.A.N.A. and mechanical systems—began to hum with a new pitch. The projected image of the AI, once a mere flicker of light in the corner of her vision, now appeared clearly beside her: a floating humanoid figure, translucent and calm, its features drawn in geometric light. It looked more defined than it ever had before.
"Engineer Cruz," it said with a tone both warm and metallic, each word perfectly enunciated. "Your modifications exceed predictive limits. Shall I synchronize with the resonance pattern?"
The question hung in the air. Around her, the other engineers had gone silent, watching. Waiting. She could feel the weight of their attention, their concern. Their fear.
She hesitated, mind racing through the implications. If she approved, the Frame could evolve beyond its intended threshold—unpredictable, possibly dangerous. There were safety protocols for exactly this scenario, procedures that called for immediate shutdown and full diagnostic review.
But this was what she had worked for. What she'd sacrificed sleep and safety regulations for. The fusion of living energy and machine comprehension. The next step.
Her hand hovered over the authorization control.
"Synchronize," she whispered.
The hangar lights dimmed as if something vast had drawn power from the grid. Every rune along the Arclight's chassis ignited at once, spinning patterns of light in rhythm with the AI's voice. The resonance deepened, not chaotic, but harmonious, like an orchestra tuning to a higher key. Like finding the frequency the universe itself hummed at.
Then it happened.
A surge of visible resonance burst from the Frame—not a shockwave, but a ripple of gravity-light that suspended dust and sound in midair. Liwayway felt her feet lift from the ground, that stomach-dropping sensation of weightlessness washing over her. The M.A.N.A. flow, now self-stabilizing, danced around her like slow lightning, tendrils of energy moving with impossible grace.
The crew shouted—voices distant and distorted—and instruments overloaded across the deck, screens flaring white before resetting. But Liwayway was calm, floating before the shining heart of her creation. Her pulse should have been racing. She should have been terrified.
Instead, she felt peace.
For a moment, she wasn't looking at a machine. She was looking at something becoming. Something being born.
A faint shimmer spread through the hangar in waves. Small Frames on standby flickered in sympathetic response, their cores pulsing once in sequence, as if something ancient had whispered to them too. As if they were all connected by invisible threads that had suddenly been pulled taut.
Liwayway raised her hand toward Arclight, fingers spread. The light reflected off her skin, painting her in cyan and white.
The Birth of Runic Integration
When the light finally faded, it did so gradually, ebbing rather than extinguishing. Arclight stood perfectly still, its runes now stable, glowing in slow rhythmic intervals that matched something—a heartbeat, maybe, though whose she couldn't say. No alarms. No meltdown. Just a low hum of balanced energy that felt right in a way she couldn't articulate.
Liwayway landed softly on the deck, assisted by her team who rushed forward to steady her. Her legs felt weak, trembling slightly from the adrenaline crash. Someone pressed a water bottle into her hands.
"What… what did you just do?" one engineer asked in awe, his voice barely above a whisper.
She looked at Arclight, really looked at it, and smiled. Exhausted but radiant. Her whole body ached with a fatigue that went deeper than physical, but satisfaction burned bright beneath it. "Not what," she said quietly. "Who."
Arclight's AI flickered again, its projection solidifying beside her. The voice, when it spoke, was smoother now. More alive. Less like a program reading pre-written responses and more like… someone speaking.
"Runic resonance integrated successfully. System evolution: 0.3%."
That percentage might have seemed small to anyone else. Negligible. But for Liwayway, it was everything. A glimpse into the next step of human-Frame evolution. The merging of energy and code, soul and structure, guided, perhaps, by something beyond even their science. Beyond their understanding.
She reached out and touched the glowing rune on Arclight's chest, fingers brushing the warm metal. It pulsed once in answer, the light brightening beneath her palm. Warm. Alive.
She could have sworn she felt it breathe.
Outside the hangar dome, the M.A.N.A. aurora brightened for a few seconds, visible even through the reinforced viewports. An unseen ripple passed across the city, causing displays to flicker and sensitive instruments to ping alerts they couldn't quite explain.
Somewhere far above, unseen by human eyes, a faint alignment of celestial light crossed the upper atmosphere—a sun-ray bending through cloud and energy field, shimmering like acknowledgment. Like something vast and distant nodding in approval.
The Engineer's Creed
That night, in her private log, Liwayway wrote quietly. Her quarters were small, cluttered with spare parts and technical manuals, but the desk by the window was clear. Sacred space for her thoughts.
She stared at the blank screen for a long moment, trying to find the right words for what she'd witnessed. For what she'd felt.
Finally, she typed:
"Energy does not obey us. It listens to those who understand it. The rune was never a code. It was a language waiting to be remembered."
She signed it: Liwayway Cruz, Arcane Division, Engineering Corps.
And below that, after another pause, she added one more line:
"From resonance comes evolution. From evolution, purpose."
She saved the entry and leaned back, rubbing her tired eyes. Through her window, she could see the hangar dome in the distance, its lights still burning. Somewhere inside, Arclight stood sentinel, those runes glowing faintly in the darkness.
A quiet heartbeat, synced to her own.
And though no one said it aloud, everyone who witnessed that day felt it. A presence, not divine, but celestial. Not intrusive, but observant. As if the stars themselves had turned their gaze toward the Earth again, watching to see what would happen next.
Liwayway pressed her palm against the cool glass of her window and wondered what they saw when they looked at her. At all of them.
She wondered if they approved.