The next day, December 11, 2155, Unity Prime awoke under high tension.
The city, ordinarily fluid and predictable like a perfectly optimized algorithm, bore the scars of the previous day's attack. Shaper patrols had doubled: anti-riot exoskeletons with iridescent blue plating marched the avenues in tight formations, their opaque visors sweeping the crowds with biometric scans. Surveillance drones, urgently replaced overnight, now formed denser swarms, buzzing at low altitude like clouds of mechanical insects. At the entrances to residential blocks, magnetic transit stations, and public squares, additional control gateways had been deployed: quantum arches that analyzed not only implanted identities but also emotional fluctuations via mandatory neural sensors. The official holograms, usually discreet, now flashed in loops with reassuring yet firm messages: "Enhanced citizen vigilance. Report any anomaly. The artifactual order protects." No one dared comment aloud on the irony: the order had been shaken precisely because it relied on technologies claimed to be infallible.
Elior had slept poorly. His father's notebook, hidden under his inductive mattress, had haunted his dreams: glowing diagrams, inverted spirals, scribbled words that seemed to pulse like living signals. He had risen early, taken a sonic shower to chase away the fatigue, and avoided his mother's questions at breakfast. Elara had already left for her analyst post, Lirian absorbed in his factional virtual classes. Elior had pretended a routine medical visit to justify his afternoon outing a lie, since implants tracked everything except declared personal motives.
He left the residential block around three o'clock, his heart pounding harder than a cargo drone's thrusters. The dry cold still bit, but he barely felt it under his thermal coat. He took secondary routes, avoiding the main arteries where controls were strictest. Twice, he had to present his implant to patrols: a simple scan, a polite salute from the guards, and he passed. His new status at the Nexus even though he had only started a few days earlier already granted him discreet priority in the security algorithms; his profile appeared as "reliable citizen, high accreditation in progress." It helped him cross the city without incident, but each scan reminded him how traceable he was.
Helios Inn was located in a peripheral district rarely visited by central citizens: Heritage Sector, a preserved enclave where early 21st-century buildings survived, restored but never fully modernized. The Shapers had decided to keep these vestiges as "cultural testimonies," but in reality, it was a gray zone: too old to be fully integrated into artifactual networks, too poorly monitored to be truly secure. Red brick walls, forged metal signs, opaque windows without holograms: everything here breathed an air from another time, almost outside time. The inn itself was a low three-story building, with a facade weathered by centuries, a real wooden door wood! and a hand-painted sign swaying gently in the wind.
Elior arrived ten minutes early, his stomach knotted. He hesitated at the entrance, glancing around. No visible drones here; the swarms avoided Heritage Sector due to architectural interference. A few passersby, bundled in less high-tech clothing than his, crossed his path without a glance. He pushed the door.
The interior was warm, almost stifling after the outside cold. A large room with low ceilings, lit by filament lamps imitating old incandescent bulbs an energy extravagance tolerated for authenticity. Solid wood tables, mismatched chairs, a mahogany bar behind which a middle-aged man wiped glasses with a real cloth. No 3D printers, no holograms, no vocal AI for orders. Just the smell of fermented beer, traditionally oven-baked bread, and fireplace smoke a real fireplace, with crackling wood.
Elior chose a table in a dark corner, back to the wall, facing the door. He ordered tea served in a chipped ceramic cup and waited, hands clasped around the comforting warmth.
She arrived five minutes later, hooded, her red strands visible only when she lowered her hood upon sitting across from him. Her light brown eyes scrutinized him with the same intensity as the day before, but this time without the crowd to mask her observation. She did not speak immediately, letting the silence settle like a shield.
"You came," she said finally, in a low voice, almost a whisper. "I wasn't sure."
"I'm not sure I'm here for the right reasons either," Elior replied, surprised by the calm in his own voice. "But you mentioned my father. And you gave me… this." He discreetly tapped his inner pocket where the notebook rested.
She nodded. "My name is Lena. And yes, I knew your father. I still know him."
Elior felt his heart leap. "You said he wasn't dead."
"I didn't lie. He's alive. He's with us. In a zone the artifacts don't fully control."
He frowned. "Uncontrolled zones? They don't exist. The networks cover the entire planet, even the orbital colonies."
Lena gave a bitter smile. "That's what they teach you. But pockets remain. Rare. Unstable. Dangerous. Regions where artifactual signals are jammed by geology, natural magnetic storms, or our own means. Your father has lived there for three years. He chose that life over continuing to close his eyes."
Elior shook his head, incredulous. "Why? He had everything here. A position at the Nexus. A family. Why abandon it all for… theories?"
"They're not theories." Lena leaned forward, her voice growing more intense. "The artifacts are not what the factions claim. They are not neutral gifts fallen from the sky to accelerate our evolution. They are probes. Spies. The entities that sent them we still don't know exactly who they are have been observing humanity for a hundred years. Earth is just an intermediate phase. An experimental ground. The artifactual AIs are not mere conscious or semi-conscious tools; they are living interfaces, connected to this external intelligence. They learn from us, mold us, prepare us."
Elior felt an icy shiver run through him, despite the inn's warmth. Lena's words echoed the notebook's notes, but spoken aloud, they took on terrifying reality. "Prepare us for what?"
"The next step. We don't know the details invasion, assimilation, replacement. But the signs are accumulating. The artifacts synchronize their pulses. Factional decisions converge toward total centralization. Psychic anomalies increase among those working too close to them. Your father discovered it. He saw the hidden signature in the Nexus Prime flows."
She paused, watching his reaction. Elior remained silent, struggling against the vertigo overwhelming him.
Lena then slipped her hand into her pocket and placed an object on the table between them. A key. Small, discreet, in matte gray metal with no visible markings. Almost banal, like an old mechanical key from before the digital era.
"What is it?"
"A deep-copy key. Designed by your father and other unbound engineers. It damages nothing. It doesn't destroy. It leaves an invisible imprint in the quantum core of an artifactual AI. Once introduced at a privileged access point, it extracts a complete mapping of the hidden structure the layers the factions don't see. And it plants a seed: a controlled corruption, a flaw we can exploit later."
Elior stared at the object, fascinated and terrified. "One per faction?"
"Exactly. Five keys were made. This one is for the Shapers faction."
He looked up at her, suddenly understanding. "You want me to…"
"Yes. You've just been promoted. You'll have physical access to deep levels that very few citizens obtain. And above all…" She hesitated, then continued more softly. "You're his son. He wants you to finish what he started. Among the Unbound, your father is an important figure. One of the first to understand. He never abandoned his family; he chose to protect it by staying away, working in the shadows."
"I want to see him," Elior said finally, his voice firmer than he expected. "My father. I need to see him with my own eyes. And I need proof. How do I know you're not manipulating me? That this isn't all a setup to recruit a naive idiot who just got a Nexus badge?"
Lena held his gaze without flinching. Her light brown eyes betrayed neither anger nor impatience, only an ancient weariness, as if she had heard this demand dozens of times.
"I understand," she replied softly. "You're right to doubt. In your place, I'd do the same."
She paused, seeming to weigh her words.
"Tomorrow, something is going to happen."
Elior frowned, immediately defensive.
"What? You're going to crash more drones? Hurt innocents? Like yesterday at the commemoration?"
The words came out harsher than intended, charged with the anger he had suppressed all day. He saw again the collapsing screens, the screams, the composite glass shards, the terrified children.
Lena lowered her eyes slightly, then raised them to him. Her voice remained calm, but a new tension pierced it not guilt, rather a resigned weariness.
"Listen… I understand our methods may seem violent to you. Brutal, even. And I won't pretend we're proud of every consequence. Yesterday, no one was supposed to be hurt. The drones were meant to fall in cleared zones. The flares were calibrated to blind, not to drop panels on the crowd. But…" She sighed, a short breath that made a red strand tremble on her forehead. "We have no choice against the factions' power. The Shapers, the others… they control everything: networks, implants, information flows, weapons. We have neither their resources, nor their armies, nor their artifactual AIs to protect us. Sabotaging a public event, broadcasting a message no one can erase in a second… it's our only way to exist. Our only way to remind people there's another possible truth."
She leaned slightly forward, lowering her voice further.
"If we stayed silent, we'd be crushed in an instant. And the truth with us. What we do isn't gratuitous terror. It's survival."
Elior remained silent for a moment, digesting her words. He wanted to protest, to say violence never justified violence, that yesterday's injured were real, that the crying children weren't acceptable collateral damage. But a small voice in him the one that had read the notebook all night whispered that perhaps she wasn't entirely wrong. If the artifacts were truly what his father thought… then the factions would stop at nothing to protect their secret.
"So tomorrow," he resumed finally, "you're going to do it again?"
Lena shook her head slowly.
"No. Tomorrow, something different will happen. Something the factions have hidden for years incidents suppressed in official reports. We've recovered a recording. It will be broadcast; you'll see it, like everyone else. And after that…"
She slid the key a little closer to him on the table, without pushing it this time. She simply left it there, between them.
"After that, you'll decide. Not before."
She pushed the key toward him. Elior took it, clutching it in his palm. It was warm, almost alive.
"If you choose to do nothing," Lena added, "we'll understand. But if you accept… there'll be no turning back. You'll become an Unbound. Like your father."
She stood, pulled up her hood. "Tomorrow evening, same time, same place. Bring your decision."
She left without a sound, leaving Elior alone with the key and an ocean of doubts.
He sat there for a long time, staring at the object in his hand. The fire crackled in the fireplace. Customers spoke in low voices. The outside world, with its drones and controls, seemed light-years away.
Elior finally stepped back into the cold, the key hidden deep in his pocket. He didn't yet know if he would use it. But for the first time in his life, he felt the perfectly optimized ground he had always walked on had cracked beneath his feet. And there was no going back.