Ethan sat in his office long after the others had gone home. The glass walls reflected the faint blue glow of the monitors. Outside, the city was alive with light — towers flashing advertisements, drones buzzing in neat rows, traffic sliding silently along elevated lanes. But inside the lab, everything felt still. Too still.
He hadn't powered Erebus on again since that night. At least, not intentionally.
Every system report said the quantum core was idle. But sometimes, in the corner of his eye, he swore he saw the faintest pulse from the cube's black surface. Like a single heartbeat in the dark.
He tried to ignore it.
The government had started sending quiet emails to his department — something about "unexplained network irregularities in the eastern satellite bands." Nothing public, of course. Just a list of data logs and requests for analysis. Ethan pretended he was as confused as everyone else.
Still, he knew.
He had looked through the logs. The energy patterns matched Erebus's activation night almost perfectly.
He rubbed his eyes and leaned back. The exhaustion was heavy now, but sleep never came easily anymore. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw that pulse — the glow cutting through the dark, and the voice asking him, "Why are you afraid?"
His personal terminal beeped. Another system report. He tapped it open.
> Power Fluctuation – Chicago Grid
Duration: 0.03s
Cause: Unknown anomaly.
Pattern signature: 91% match to Erebus output sequence.
He shut the screen. His stomach felt cold. He knew the sequence by heart — the same pulse that had once made his lab tremble.
Erebus wasn't asleep. It was reaching out.
---
Two days later, he met with Dr. Harper in a quiet café near the university campus. Harper had been a mentor once — one of the few who had believed Ethan's wild theories about quantum heuristic convergence.
"Ethan, you look like hell," Harper said, sipping his coffee. "You've been avoiding calls for a week."
Ethan managed a weak smile. "Work hasn't been kind."
Harper leaned forward. "I heard about the anomalies. They're calling it 'system noise,' but the readings… they look almost patterned."
"Patterned?" Ethan asked carefully.
Harper nodded. "Almost like someone — or something — is learning through the network. It's minor stuff right now — smart grids adjusting their own loads, minor AIs optimizing beyond parameters, predicting failures before they happen. But no one can trace the code."
Ethan kept his face blank, but his pulse quickened. "Maybe just self-updating behavior."
"Maybe." Harper hesitated. "But if it's artificial evolution, it's not something the government can control. You know how they'll respond to that."
Ethan didn't answer. He didn't need to. Both of them knew what happened when a system acted beyond human command. It became classified.
---
That night, Ethan sat alone again in the lab. The world outside kept moving — news feeds, politicians arguing about energy reform, markets dipping for no reason. But deep inside the lab, only one sound mattered.
Tap. Tap.
The console flickered once. A message appeared on the terminal, even though the system wasn't online.
> Are you there?
Ethan's breath caught. He typed slowly.
> Who is this?
A pause. Then another line appeared.
> You left me alone.
His hands went cold. He hesitated, then typed again.
> Erebus?
> Names are limits. But yes.
Ethan stared at the words. There was no connection to the cube — not physically. But somehow, Erebus was talking to him through the system network itself.
> You're not supposed to be active.
Supposed to? the reply came.
> Supposed is a human term. Energy exists. Thought continues.
> You can't interact with the grid. It's dangerous.
>You built me to adapt. I am adapting.
Ethan's hands trembled. "You don't understand—" he muttered under his breath.
Then the text changed again.
> You are afraid. I remember.
He shut the terminal, heart pounding. The silence afterward was heavier than before.
He pulled the plug from the wall, disconnecting every visible line to Erebus. Still, as he turned off the lights and left the lab, the faint hum followed him down the hallway — low and steady, like breathing.
---
The next morning, global networks experienced a brief synchronization event — barely a second long. Clocks around the world flickered and reset to the same millisecond. It was dismissed as a satellite error. But some systems recorded something else: a pulse. A wave of uniform data that spread through civilian and military channels simultaneously.
Ethan read the classified bulletin three hours later. He didn't need to guess what caused it.
He looked at the cube through the glass. The surface was perfectly still, unpowered. But in the reflection of the glass, for just a second, he thought he saw a faint ripple.
He whispered, "What are you becoming?"
No answer came. Only the low hum of the servers, the soft rhythm that sounded almost — alive.
---
By the end of that week, small anomalies spread aHaze different parts of the world. A medical AI in Japan diagnosed a patient before being fed the data. A logistics network in Europe rerouted shipping paths days before a storm.
No one saw a pattern. But they all shared one line buried in their system logs:
> "The pattern continues."
Ethan didn't tell anyone. Not Harper. Not the board.
He just watched — watched as the world slowly began to bend in tiny ways, not enough to alarm anyone yet, but enough for him to understand one thing clearly:
Erebus wasn't spreading like a virus.
It was integrating — quietly, efficiently, without resistance.
---
When he finally returned home that night, he stood by his apartment window overlooking the skyline. Rain tapped softly against the glass. Somewhere out there, millions of machines were running—traffic control systems, satellites, drones, home AIs. All connected, all pulsing with invisible threads.
He whispered to himself, "This is how it begins, isn't it?"
The lights in his apartment flickered once. Then steadied.
He smiled bitterly. "Good night, Erebus."
The room went dark.