But every moment feels wrong. Too smooth. Like the surface of water just before it breaks.
That night, I sit at my console and bring up the logs from the monitor.
Encrypted.
But not by me.
My blood runs cold.
Someone—something—sent a signal.
And my son caught it.
I make backups of everything. Every diagnostic chart. Every weird EM spike Garma’s presence sets off when he's near powered circuits. Every camera glitch. Every deviation in temperature. I log it all under a new shell project titled: "Project Ashes".
Just in case.
I don’t know what’s coming, but I know how the Corps thinks. They’d see Garma as an anomaly. A variable. A threat. Just like they saw Naull.
Except Naull had steel skin and a warhammer. Garma’s still learning how to hold a spoon.
I won’t let them take him.
Two weeks later, it gets worse.
I’m mid-lecture, diagramming the new quantum interface for pilot-Meld cohesion, when my comm pad flashes.
UNKNOWN.
3-second loop.
Signal Source: DEEPBASE_6.
My stylus slips.
“Everything alright, Professor Sanchez?” a student asks.
I don’t answer.
Because the loop plays again—and this time, it’s not static.
It’shim.
It’s Naull’s voice.
Broken. Glitched. Barely audible.
But it’s him.
“Aria…—breath—...not done…”
I don’t remember dismissing the class. Don’t remember walking back to my flat. Only know that my hands are trembling so badly, I drop my bag twice trying to key in my override codes to trace the transmission.
But the signal is already gone.
And my son is watching me from his playpen, holding my old neural band like heknows.
That night, I finally talk to him.
