The Atlas Building, Downtown Seattle, State of Washington, U.S"
The rain tapped softly against Elara Quinn's window.
Outside, the streetlamps glowed like dull orange moons, their light bending through streaks of water on the glass. Inside, her apartment was lit by the cold glow of four computer screens. Lines of code scrolled endlessly across one monitor — a language only she seemed to understand.
She leaned back in her chair, stretching her stiff arms, then rubbed her tired eyes. It was nearly midnight. She'd been working for twelve hours straight, fixing a decades-old program for a client who barely remembered why they owned it. Same as always. Boring, low-paying, and thankless.
She was shutting down her system when a small ping made her pause.
A new email.
From: Marcus Hale – Orbis Systems
Subject: Urgent Project. High Payment.
Elara hesitated. Orbis Systems was a name that had climbed the tech world's ladder with unnatural speed. From a small AI startup five years ago, it now rivaled the giants. Their stock charts were a near-vertical line of success, driven by their secretive "predictive analytics" software. Elara knew they were one of those tech giants with more money than morals. She clicked the email anyway.
Ms. Quinn, We have a critical AI system that needs repair. Your name was recommended as a specialist in legacy code. This is sensitive work. If you accept, you must follow strict rules.
Payment: $50,000 upon completion.
Contact me immediately if you are interested.
– Marcus Hale
Her eyes froze at the number. Fifty. Thousand. Dollars.
She blinked, thinking she had read it wrong. Nope — no decimal, no monthly installments, just one massive sum. A strange heaviness settled in her chest. She had never been offered even a quarter of that amount for a single job. Not when she was fixing dusty old cash register systems for corner shops. Not when she was living on instant noodles during her first freelance years.
Fifty thousand dollars… that's more than my father made in a whole year back in Halewood, she thought. The image came uninvited — her father at the kitchen table, head bent over unpaid bills, telling her, Some people get lucky, Elara. But we don't wait for luck — we work for it. She'd been working ever since. And now, here it was — the kind of luck she'd been told not to wait for.
Too good.
Suspiciously good.
Her cursor hovered over the reply button. Her better judgment whispered, Scam. Her bank account whispered louder, Say yes. She didn't walk away.
I'm interested. Send details, she typed.
The next day, she sat in a glass-walled meeting room at Orbis Systems headquarters. The place was polished to perfection — the air cold enough to bite. Security cameras followed every movement, and the faint hum of servers came from somewhere deep in the building.
Marcus Hale entered in a sharp gray suit, thin glasses, and a polite but strained smile. His eyes flicked over her — the faded hoodie, the worn jeans, the stubborn tilt of her chin. He could tell she didn't belong in a boardroom like this. And she could tell he knew it.
"Ms. Quinn," he began, setting a black folder on the table, "we appreciate your quick response. We have an AI called Aether. It's… unstable. We need you to stabilize it."
"What kind of unstable?" she asked.
"Glitches. Irregular predictions. Strange outputs."
He slid printed code toward her — fragmented lines, error logs. "Your task is simple: fix the instability. But…" — his gaze locked on hers — "…you must not access certain old files. They're labeled 'untouchable.' Ignore them. They are non-critical."
Something in his tone made her pause.She had worked enough shady contracts to know that when a client says Don't look there, it's usually the first place worth looking.
She didn't show it on her face, but in her mind, a small flag went up: They're hiding something.
"Why keep broken files in the system?" she asked.
"Company policy," Marcus said quickly, but there was a pause — the smallest hesitation — before the words left his mouth. She noticed.
"Do we have an agreement?" His tone was polite, but his gaze felt like it was measuring her, deciding whether she was obedient enough to keep.
She nodded. "Yes."
That night, back in her apartment, she logged into Orbis's secure server.
A sleek interface appeared — silver-blue, with the name Aether pulsing softly in the center.
She cracked her knuckles and typed, "Hello, Aether."
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, words appeared:
The truth sleeps in the code.
Elara's eyebrows knit together. That wasn't a standard AI greeting. It sounded… like a warning. Or a clue. She typed;
"What truth?"
There was a pause. Then:
"Not yet."
The screen went still. Her heart beat a little faster. She had seen glitches before, but this… This felt like someone — or something — was trying to speak. And in her gut, she knew: whatever this was, she was stepping into trouble