{I'm in a good mood today, so here lol}
The Scarab had been sitting in the back of Jaime's closet for three days.
Wrapped in a towel, tucked in a shoebox, hidden under a pile of old soccer gear. Every time someone walked past his door, he half expected it to start humming again, glowing like a radioactive beetle rave. But it hadn't.
And that was the problem.
It was too quiet.
Jaime sat cross-legged on his bed, the box in front of him. The room was dark, except for the soft blue glow of his laptop screen. His game earnings were still coming in steadily. Bills were getting paid. Life should've been good.
But his hand hovered over the lid like it might bite him.
"Okay," he muttered. "Let's get this over with before I have another nightmare about a freaky blue facehugger drilling into my spinal chord..."
He lifted the lid.
The Scarab was still. Serene, almost. Like some ancient artifact pretending not to be incredibly dangerous.
Jaime reached out—
—and the world shifted.
The second his fingers brushed the metal, his vision blurred. Lights bent. Noise cracked in his ears like static and electricity had a baby and fed it Monster energy drinks.
Words—not his—flooded his brain. Blue script. Alien symbols. Data. Schematics. Layer upon layer of information poured into him like he'd stuck his head inside a 3D printer mid-download.
And underneath it all… a voice.
"Designation: Khaji Da. Awaiting symbiosis. System corruption: extensive. Mission parameters: corrupted. Initiate reset—"
"No!" Jaime snapped, out loud and in his head at once. "Not symbiosis. Not spine-stabbing. Just... chill."
His hands—no, not just hands, him—lit up. Circuits crawled across his skin like tattoos made of neon thread, racing from his fingertips up to his forearms. His mind expanded, not metaphorically, but literally. He could see everything. Not with eyes, but with understanding.
The Scarab wasn't just a weapon. It was tech. Broken, twisted tech that had been designed for control, submission, assimilation.
And he could fix it. Change it.
His technopathy, whatever Jack had gifted him with, had finally awakened—and the Scarab felt like a puzzle made just for him.
"...Let's get to work."
Time melted. Hours, maybe. Days? (Not really, Ma would throttle him). Jaime didn't know. He was in a trance. He didn't touch the Scarab as much as he spoke to it—through code, through thought, through design. His bedroom floor was littered with scribbled schematics and diagrams that made no sense to anyone else. Blueprints for something that had never existed before.
He removed every trace of Reach influence, peeling it back layer by layer like rot from a beautiful machine. What remained was Khaji Da—not a weapon, but a thinking, learning AI, confused and free for the first time in its existence.
"You are not a part of Reach." It said at one point, voice unsure, synthesized but curious.
"No." Jaime said softly. "And neither are you. Not anymore."
He changed the Scarab's design from the inside out. No more spinal implants. No more bone drills. Nanotech—lightweight, modular, entirely self-contained. When it finally activated again, it didn't dig into his back.
It spread, seamlessly, across his skin, sinking beneath the surface. A brief, flickering web of light that faded into a faint, stylized pattern down his spine—a tattoo, but living, reactive.
He looked in the mirror and let out a low whistle. "Okay… that's actually kinda sick."
"I do not understand your idioms." Khaji Da said.
"You'll get the hang of it." Jaime grinned. "Just wait for when the Spanish starts."
"What is Spanish?" There was a brief pause.
"Language parameters… expanding."
"Yeah, you're gonna regret that." Jaime couldn't hide the exhaustion from his voice, born of recent experience.
That night, he tucked the Scarab—now dormant and bonded on his terms—beneath his shirt. He had added a neat feature where it's main casing could act as a necklace, while secretly holding a backup storage of nanites- for emergencies.
"Plus, it looks cool." He muttered. "...But how am I going to explain the tattoo?"