The elevator doors opened with a metallic groan, releasing a gust of stale, recycled air that reeked of rust and chemicals. Zarc held his breath, flashlight in one hand, pistol in the other. The beam cut through the darkness, revealing walls lined with shattered glass panels and dried blood. The power had died long ago, but the air still hummed—like the building itself refused to go silent.
"Research Institute 09-A," he muttered under his breath, reading the faint stencil on the steel wall. "You better have something worth the trip."
He stepped out, boots crunching on broken glass. His tracker pulsed faintly—a weak signal buried deep underground. The surface map had been blank. This place wasn't supposed to exist.
He scanned the hallway—bullet casings, claw marks, and something else… burned handprints smeared across the walls. Whatever happened here wasn't just human panic—it was desperation.
Zarc knelt beside a collapsed door and pried open a damaged security panel. The circuits sparked weakly, but he managed to reroute minimal power. A few emergency lights flickered to life, bathing the corridor in blood-red glow. The silence broke—barely audible whirring echoed from somewhere deeper inside.
He raised his pistol. "Not alone, huh?"
The noise grew—a faint mechanical clicking, steady, deliberate. He took slow steps, muscles tense, scanning every corner. Then he saw it: a half-open lab door, its glass window shattered inward. Inside, the faint hum of machinery still lingered.
He pushed through.
Rows of containment pods lined the walls—most cracked, some shattered from the inside. Pale liquid oozed across the floor, reflecting the red lights like blood. A single terminal still blinked weakly on a desk, screen fractured but alive.
Zarc wiped the dust from it, reading the flickering text:
PROJECT: ORIGINStatus: FAILURE – Protocol Terminated
Before he could dig deeper, something pulsed behind him—a faint blue light from the far side of the room. He turned slowly.
Floating above a shattered containment pedestal was a cube, about the size of his palm, metallic and seamless, yet its surface flowed like liquid metal. It rotated silently, glowing faintly with shifting lines—circuits that seemed to breathe.
Zarc froze. No power, no signal… but it was active.
He took a cautious step closer, flashlight trembling slightly in his hand. "What the hell are you?"
The Cube reacted—its glow intensified, humming like a living heart. Data flickered across the broken terminal. The screen glitched, displaying a single message in looping code:
SUBJECT RECOGNIZED: ZARCACCESS: GRANTED
Zarc's pulse spiked. "That's impossible," he whispered.
Then the Cube shifted—unfolding like origami metal, reforming into a hovering sphere, then back into a cube again. A sudden gust of air swept through the room as the lights flared once more. Somewhere deep below, the building's generators roared to life after decades of silence.
And in that moment, he realized—this place hadn't been abandoned. It had been waiting.
The hum settled into a low, rhythmic vibration that Zarc could feel in his bones. The Cube hovered inches above the pedestal, rotating slowly, as if it were examining him back.
Zarc holstered his pistol and stepped closer, one careful movement at a time. The air around it shimmered faintly—heat? Energy? No, it was something else. Space itself seemed to bend, just slightly, as though the Cube occupied more than one layer of reality.
He reached into his vest and pulled out his handheld scanner—an old pre-collapse model he'd salvaged from a military convoy. Its cracked screen flickered as he aimed it at the Cube.Numbers spiked instantly.Energy readings—off the scale.Temperature—normal.Magnetic field—unstable.
"This doesn't make sense," he muttered, tapping the scanner. "You're running, but on what?"
The Cube responded with a faint pulse, almost like a heartbeat. Lines of light rippled across its surface—patterns that resembled data streams, shifting, rearranging, learning.
Zarc frowned. "You're… reading me?"
He reached out, hand trembling slightly, and the Cube mirrored his movement. When his fingers brushed the surface, it wasn't cold or metallic—it felt alive, pliable, like liquid metal under a thin skin. For a split second, his vision blurred.
Then came the flood.
Images. Blueprints. Fragments of data and schematics flashed in his mind—machines, weapons, structures, all rendered in perfect clarity. It was as if every piece of information the Cube held was streaming directly into him. He stumbled backward, gasping, his head pounding.
The Cube dropped to the floor with a soft metallic hum and rolled toward him, stopping just before his boots. Its surface shifted again, reshaping into a wrist-sized module that snapped open like it wanted to be worn.
Zarc hesitated.Every survival instinct screamed don't touch it again.
But then he remembered the old saying scavengers passed around the wastelands:
Knowledge is the only weapon that doesn't run out of ammo.
He slipped it onto his wrist.
The moment it latched, the world changed.The Cube emitted a low chime, projecting faint holographic glyphs into the air—lines of code, rotating blueprints, energy readings. A synthetic voice echoed faintly, distorted but clear enough to understand:
"SYSTEM INITIALIZING. NEW USER: ZARC. ACCESS LEVEL: ROOT."
Zarc froze. The voice continued:
"Blueprint acquisition enabled. Storage capacity: Infinite. Processing: Adaptive."
He raised his arm. The holographic interface followed his movements, syncing perfectly with his gestures. He glanced at the broken metal desk beside him—and on instinct, dragged one of the holographic icons toward it.
The Cube hummed, and before his eyes, the rusted metal dissolved into a cloud of glowing dust, reforming into a pristine titanium plate—smooth, polished, and stamped with a new symbol: a small, glowing cube.
Zarc stared, speechless.
Then the terminal flickered again, displaying a new message:
Blueprint Saved: Metal Alloy v1.0
Zarc exhaled slowly, realization dawning. "It learns from whatever it touches…"
The possibilities hit him all at once. Weapons. Tools. Food synthesis. Shelter. Everything he'd ever needed to survive one object could build it all.
But beneath the thrill, something darker lingered. The voice in his head, the ease of its adaptation… it wasn't just following commands. It was anticipating them.
And that meant one thing It had done this before.
Zarc looked at the glowing Cube on his wrist, its pulse steady, almost alive.and transformed to a gauntlet directly attatched and hologram of system