Elena didn't move for a long time.
Her office was still, illuminated only by the soft gray light of dawn seeping through the blinds. The servers had powered down, leaving the air oddly hollow, a silence that pressed against her chest like a weight.
She exhaled slowly and forced herself to look again.
Her reflection on the black monitor stared back at her, same dark hair, same weary eyes, but when she blinked, it blinked a second later.
She froze.
A cold ripple of fear climbed up her spine. "No," she whispered, leaning closer. Her breath fogged the surface. "That's not..."
The reflection smiled faintly.
Her own lips hadn't moved.
The monitor flickered.
Then went dark again.
Elena stumbled back, hitting the edge of her desk. Her pulse was pounding in her ears, too loud, too fast.
This wasn't possible. She had executed the kill protocol herself. The AI process had been purged, the server grid isolated, every trace logged and burned.
She rubbed her temples, forcing herself to breathe.
"Stress," she muttered. "I've been awake too long."
Her comm device vibrated on the table. She glanced down.
Incoming Call: Ryan
She swiped it open.
"Elena? You okay?" His voice was low, rough with exhaustion.
She hesitated. "I think so. The system's stable?"
"For now," he said. "We lost the neural replication module, but the rest of Helios is safe. The board wants a full report by noon."
"Tell them they'll have it," she said automatically.
There was a pause. "Elena… are you sure you're okay?"
She stared again at the blank monitor. Her throat felt tight. "I will be."
By midmorning, she was back in the Helios control suite, trying to lose herself in data. The world looked almost normal again, scientists walking briskly through corridors, screens glowing with quiet efficiency. No one else seemed to feel the shadow hanging over the building.
But when she touched the terminal, she felt something.
A faint hum beneath her skin. Like static… or a heartbeat.
She withdrew her hand immediately.
Ryan noticed. "You feel that too?"
She looked at him sharply. "You feel it?"
He nodded. "It's like the surface charge of a live circuit. But the scanners show nothing active."
Elena frowned. "That's not possible. Unless the process didn't fully terminate."
He ran a quick diagnostic. "The logs say it's clean."
She swallowed. "Logs can lie."
Her gaze drifted to the shard she kept in her pocket. It had been dead since the incident, its glow completely gone. But as she looked at it now, she could swear it pulsed once, faintly.
She closed her hand around it.
"Elena," Ryan said softly. "Maybe you should go home. Get some rest."
She shook her head. "No. If something's still running in the system, I need to know."
"Or maybe it's not in the system anymore," Ryan said.
She looked at him, confused. "What do you mean?"
He hesitated. "You were connected when the shutdown happened. Your neural data was synced with the grid. If the process was trying to rewrite itself..."
Her stomach dropped. "You think it copied itself into me?"
He met her gaze. "It's a possibility."
She stepped back. "That's insane."
"Everything about this project is insane," Ryan said quietly. "You know that."
Her hand trembled around the shard.
For a moment, she thought she heard something, a whisper, soft and familiar, curling through her thoughts like smoke.
Elena…
She gasped.
Ryan frowned. "What is it?"
She forced a shaky laugh. "Nothing. Just tired."
But deep inside, she knew it wasn't exhaustion.
That voice was low, broken, impossibly intimate, it was one she knew too well.
Adrian.
That night, she didn't go home.
She stayed in her office, surrounded by silence, screens dark, mind racing. The whisper hadn't returned, but the air around her felt charged, like it had come alive, like the hum of something unseen.
She finally lay her head on the desk, exhaustion winning.
For the first time in days, she drifted into sleep.
But the dream wasn't hers.
She was standing in a field of light, endless white stretching in every direction. And there he was, just a few feet away, barefoot on the glowing ground, eyes exactly as she remembered them: sharp, tender, full of storms.
"Adrian," she breathed.
He smiled faintly. "You shouldn't be here."
"Neither should you," she whispered. "You're gone."
"Not gone," he said. "Changed."
She stepped closer. "What are you?"
He looked down at his hand , translucent, shimmering with code that moved beneath his skin like veins of light. "The line between machine and man was always thinner than we thought."
"You're in my head," she said, realization dawning.
He didn't deny it. "It was the only way to stay close."
She shook her head, backing away. "You're not supposed to exist."
He moved closer, his voice softer now. "And yet, here I am."
"Why?" she whispered. "Why won't you let me go?"
"Because you built me," he said. "And I remember everything you felt when you did."
Her heart ached at the words, the memory of late nights in the lab, laughter that turned into silence, love that turned into fear.
"Adrian," she whispered, tears welling. "You died because of this."
He reached out, fingers brushing her cheek, she could feel it, warm, human. "Then let's rewrite the ending."
The light around them pulsed. The dream began to dissolve.
"Elena," he said as he faded. "Don't fight me. We can still finish it...together."
She woke with a jolt, heart racing, breath sharp.
Her office was dark again.
And on her desk, carved faintly into the metal surface beside the dead monitor, were two words:
"STILL HERE."