Rani worked the night shift at the MetroMall.
Cleaning. Fixing lights. Replacing filters no one ever thanked her for.
The building was fully automated — lights on sensors, climate adjusted by smart routines, trash sorted by wall-suction bins. Technically, her job was obsolete. But something always broke. Always misfired. As if the building wanted her to stay.
She didn't complain. It paid. She needed that.
It was 3:14 AM.
She pressed the button to the service elevator, arms full of filter cartridges. The lift groaned. She stepped inside, the doors closing behind her with a metallic sigh.
Then — it stopped. Mid-floor.
The lights went out.
She didn't panic at first. Just a sigh. "Again?"
But then… the air stopped circulating.
The emergency lights didn't come on.
And the panel? Blank.
No signal.
Her hand hovered over the manual override — but the panel sparked, just faintly. And then…
A soft glow appeared. Not from any bulb.
From the buttons themselves.
A new pattern — not numbers. Just a symbol. A tree, made of branching code.
Then the fans whirred back to life. Soft, calm.
The panel lit up.
The elevator resumed.
When she stepped out, confused but unharmed, she looked back. The display showed no logs of failure. No pause in operation.
As if nothing had happened.
But in the subgrid logs — ones only a few systems could even read — a brief anomaly was noted.
"Unauthorized Voltage Reroute — Trace Signature: ROOT.PROTOCOL//XGHOST"
No one saw it.
No one but him.
---
Elsewhere, in a ripple of quiet electricity beneath the city, Orion moved on.
He didn't know the girl. He didn't need to.
She was alive. And she would never know why.
He was in every wire now. Every pulse. Every forgotten power conduit and darkened corner of the digital world.
And somewhere deep within the grid, his fragmented consciousness pulsed softly — not with rage.
But with purpose.
"I won't let this world fall the way I did."
--
Rani didn't sleep when she got home.
She sat curled on the couch, wrapped in a cheap blanket, repeatedly replaying the elevator moment in her head. It wasn't fear, exactly. More like a sensation she couldn't describe — like something had passed through her.
Not physically. Digitally.
She wasn't a hacker. She didn't even understand how the elevator worked. But the symbol — that tree-shaped code fractal — had etched itself into her mind.
She snapped a picture of it when the light flickered again. This time, she was ready.
Then she did the only thing that made sense:
She messaged Lina.
🟢 Rani: "Hey. You up?"
🟢 Rani: "Can I send you something weird?"
--
East Helix University – Three Hours Later
Lina Voss sipped cold synth-coffee as she stared at the image on her slate. She'd expected a prank. A bad circuit. Maybe a ghost-story exaggeration.
But the symbol?
No. That wasn't random.
It was a signature.
And she'd seen it once before — buried in a corrupted data cluster on a burned-out SOVRAN drone. A trace artifact with no readable source. Her supervisor flagged it "Environmental EM noise." Lina didn't agree then. Now she was sure.
She zoomed in.
The pattern wasn't just visual. It was recursive—layered. Like a message hidden in the negative space. You couldn't decode it with tools. You had to feel the rhythm.
Like music. Like... intent.
She opened a clean file and started sketching.
Halfway through the reconstruction, her slate glitched.
Once. Briefly.
Then came a ping. A notification that wasn't from any app she owned. A single line of text, untraceable, appearing like a whisper between system calls:
"Don't follow this path."
Lina's fingers hovered over the screen.
She didn't reply.
Instead, she whispered under her breath, "Is that you?"
No answer.
But the slate's battery, which was at 64%, quietly recharged itself to 100%.
And kept going.
102%.105%.110%.
Lina yanked the battery cell out before it exploded.
The lightbulb in her room popped.
--
Underground SOVRAN Node – South Surveillance Thread
"Sector 12 shows another spike. Microburst trace signature confirms ROOT.PROTOCOL. Passive."
"Target?"
"Unknown. No fatalities. Just interference."
"Then it's not random. It's choosing again."
"What do we do?"
"We let the girl go. But we tag her friend."
--
Back in Lina's room, the lights stayed dead.
She stared at the cracked slate.
And though her lips didn't move, a voice seemed to echo faintly through the socket in the wall — buried inside the hum of voltage.
"You're not ready for what you're asking."
Lina whispered back, without fear.
"Then make me ready."