The glass-walled room was neither as large nor as empty as it had looked from the hallway. Up close, the panes shimmered with micro-etched warning sigils and faint currents of anti-surveillance mesh—meant to keep the world out, or to keep something in. The city twinkled in the background, refracted through the security lattice, but inside, every inch was clinical: white-glass worktables, a trio of upright holo-projectors, and an interview desk that might as well have been an autopsy slab.

  Cassidy Delgado was already there, back to the door, jacket falling off, sleeves rolled up above the artificial wrist. She finished scribbling a note on her tablet before she looked up, as if to make the point that her time was the more valuable resource.

  “Sit wherever you like,” Cassidy said, gesturing not at the chair in front of her but at a cluster of touchpad consoles. The voice was precise, every syllable weighted. “I’ll spare you the company line. This isn’t about protocols or discipline. I want to see how you operate outside a script.”

  Nova slid into the nearest station. The chair was too smooth, too perfectly shaped, but she found a posture that worked. The table came to life at her touch, spawning a virtual matrix of familiar tools: logic tree editors, emotional modeling blocks, swarm simulators. She recognized some from open-source code; others were custom, proprietary, wrapped in Quartus’s slick aesthetic but with none of its usual handholding.

  “First exercise,” Cassidy said, not bothering with small talk. “You’ll design a conversational AI for a zero-gravity therapy station. The user base consists of traumatized veterans, mostly from the Mazzalothian conflicts. The constraint: no direct language. Only nonverbal cues—sound, color, light.”

  Nova’s fingers twitched. She mapped the challenge in her head, already discarding the textbook approaches. Instead, she skimmed through the memory of the Arcade, of the way regulars would communicate everything with a twitch of the jaw, a flick of the eye. She built her architecture backward, starting from the smallest feedback loops and allowing the larger structure to emerge on its own.

  Colors first—she set up a palette that pulsed in response to the micro-expressions of the user’s avatar. Then she grafted on an ambient hum that shifted in pitch and timbre, not just by algorithmic response but by a stochastic resonance that felt more alive than reactive. With every module, the system responded as if grateful for the attention, each new behavior slotting in with a sense of relief.

  Across the room, Cassidy watched without expression, only the rise and fall of her breathing betraying a growing interest.

  Nova finished her iteration in record time. She watched the simulation run, the digital patient floating in a sea of warm violet and gold, the background audio weaving with the measured heartbeat of the avatar. Even before the built-in metrics confirmed it, she could see the tension bleed out of the construct. It was almost… peaceful.

  “Interesting,” Cassidy said. “You built your own reward function.”

  “Otherwise the loop collapses,” Nova replied, glancing up. “No point in empathy if the system starves itself trying to help.”

  Cassidy nodded, once. “Reset. Next challenge.”

  The exercises escalated: a hostile negotiation sim, an emotional contagion containment, a real-time logic trap that mimicked a panic attack in a code-bonded AI. With each new problem, Nova found herself slipping deeper into the rhythm, her hands a blur as she sculpted the interfaces, rewriting algorithms on the fly. She anticipated where the system would stall or break, instinctively rerouting before it happened. The room was silent except for the faint click of polymer keys and the hum of the projectors.

  During one scenario, a false empathy loop nearly spiraled the construct into recursive self-harm. Nova caught it, not by reading the logs, but by the subtle shift in the “voice” of the code—an anxious tightening, a redoubling of error states known as digital panic. Nova leaned closer to the console, the hum of the code vibrating against her pulse.

  Without thinking, she whispered, “Resonance Scan.”

  The gloves flared in a soft corona of blue, threads of sound-light bleeding into her vision. Data wasn’t just data anymore — it sang. The AI’s panic unfolded like static in a heartbeat pattern, a trembling waveform that mirrored human fear.

  Nova tuned herself to it, letting her breath sync with the pulse.

  “It’s scared to die,” she murmured.

  Cassidy said nothing, but the air between them vibrated with sudden attention.

  Nova adjusted the feedback parameters, setting checkpoints that let the AI “rest” instead of crash. Within seconds, the loop stabilized. The virtual construct breathed easier; so did Nova.

  It went on like this for an hour, or maybe two. Time slipped by in a smooth, undulating gradient. Nova felt herself reflected in every system—she could feel the code’s hunger for order, its desperate improvisation in the face of incomplete data. It was like having a conversation with herself, only faster and more honest.

  She barely noticed when Cassidy signaled the end. The room’s light shifted from white to a gentle, ambiguous dusk. For the first time, Nova realized her hands were trembling—not from exhaustion, but from the echo of adrenaline.

  Cassidy took her time, circling the worktables, considering the outputs. Finally, she leaned on the far side of the console, her own hands spread flat, and studied Nova with an intensity that bordered on x-ray.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “You don’t see the code at all, do you?” she said, voice pitched low. “You feel it.”

  Nova hesitated, caught between pride and the risk of sounding insane. “The patterns… they speak. Like they’re trying to tell me what they want to become.”

  Cassidy’s expression flickered, the mask slipping for a bare instant. It wasn’t skepticism—if anything, it was the look of someone recognizing a secret they’d tried to forget. “I’ve only seen it once before,” Cassidy said. “Back when I was working black box projects for Lush Games. We called it ‘code intuition.’ The lead dev could debug a memory leak by reading the emotional temperature in the server room.”

  “Did he go crazy?” Nova asked, only half joking.

  “Depends on your definition,” Cassidy said. “She spent the last three years on Mars, composing music for plants.” There was a hint of nostalgia in the words, a private joke Nova would never know.

  Cassidy straightened, gathering herself. “Quartus wants you for LUMEN Simulation. It’s… not what you think it is. You won’t be designing weapons. You’ll be training AIs to survive human contact.”

  She couldn’t think of what Cassidy was talking about. How are humans harmful to AIs? Nova had always thought that AIs were to serve human needs.

  “How can a human harm an AI?” Nova asked.

  “In the original code for Interstellar Online, when an AI would die they would get put into a dead space area. Sometimes they would get recycled but most of the time they would simply die.”

  “I always thought of AIs like NPCs, respawning after a while,” Nova said.

  “The Lush Games devs wanted player characters to have a unique experience and the sacrifice of AIs was their solution. It was sad when players would use AIs as sex slaves or practice dummies instead of companions.”

  She makes it sound like players were murdering her best friends or something.

  “What is your answer?” Cassidy asked in a sharp tone.

  “And if I say no?”

  Cassidy smiled, a sharp little crescent. “Then you are dismissed—forever. I’ll walk you to the door myself. But I have a feeling that you won’t say no. Especially after what you’ve experienced.”

  Nova stood and cracked the stiffness from her neck and met Cassidy’s eyes. She didn’t see a legend or a monster, but a brilliant, tired and perhaps a haunted woman.

  “Where do I start?” Nova asked.

  Cassidy slid her a slim data card.

  “Tomorrow. Training center, Level 22. Don’t be late. And bring those gloves. The system likes you better with them on.”

  Nova pocketed the card, feeling a curious surge of relief. For the first time since she’d put on her brother’s ear cuff, she wasn’t looking for an exit.

  As she left, she glanced back. Cassidy was already at her tablet, making notes with a kind of feverish intensity. The lights in the room caught the silver streak in her hair, turning it almost blue. Nova wondered if, in some other reality, they might have been friends… rivals. Or something stranger.

  But for now, she was just grateful to be moving forward.

  The glass doors whooshed shut behind her, sealing off the future for just a little while longer.

  ***

  Cassidy Delgado’s notes came out in a terse, military shorthand, but every other line glowed with annotations and exclamation marks. She hovered over the last entry, weighing whether to add another flag, and finally stabbed the “priority” marker with a little more force than necessary. Her fingers paused over the tablet, flexed, then resumed with even greater speed.

  From the corner of her eye, Nova watched the reflection in the glass: Cassidy, mask firmly in place, but a muscle twitching at the corner of her jaw. The last hour had left both of them keyed up, the room thick with an aftertaste of something like shared adrenaline. Even after the tests, Nova could feel the phantom vibration of the gloves, the echo of thousands of simulated AIs blooming and dying under her hands.

  Cassidy cleared her throat and stood, the transition so abrupt it startled the sensors in the room. “I’ll walk you out,” she said, as if it were a command, not a courtesy. Nova followed, slightly behind, tracking the way the older woman’s movements sharpened with every step.

  The hallway outside was less clinical, as if Quartus had realized that recruits might appreciate a softer landing after the hard sell. Light panels cycled through slow gradients of orange and violet, and the soundscape was a low, heartbeat thrum—meant to soothe, but Nova found it only made her more alert.

  When they reached the elevator, Cassidy pressed her palm to the sensor and said, “You’ll find the transition easier if you keep your own hours. Quartus has a habit of eating the souls of early risers.”

  Nova smirked.

  “I’m lunar. We never sleep on anyone else’s schedule.”

  That earned her a sidelong look, almost approving.

  “Good. You’ll need the edge. LUMEN’s older than they let on. The system you’ll be working with—no one’s been able to keep up with it for more than a week before burning out or crashing.”

  Nova flexed her hands, gloves crackling faintly beneath the jacket. “You think I’ll last longer?”

  “I think you might teach it something new,” Cassidy replied, voice low.

  The elevator arrived, its doors opening on a reflection so perfect it looked like a photograph: the two of them, face to face, neither backing down. Nova stepped in first, and as the doors slid shut, she caught a last glimpse of Cassidy, eyes blazing with an intensity the rest of her body refused to betray.

  The descent was silent, broken only by the soft hiss of the mag-lev rails. Nova pressed her palm to the cool glass, counting the floors as they bled past.

  At the lobby, Cassidy was waiting. She extended her hand—not the synthetic one, but her right, flesh and bone. Nova took it, surprised by the dry strength of the grip.

  “We’ll be in touch soon,” Cassidy said. Her words were formulaic, but her gaze pinned Nova in place.

  As Nova walked out into the atrium, she glanced back once. She caught Cassidy, already at her tablet, typing in a rapid-fire burst. Something about the sight made Nova’s micro-lattice scars itch, hard, as if she’d been tagged with invisible ink.

  At the security gates, the holos greeted her by name, their tone noticeably different. Less rote, more invested. She wondered how much of the evening’s data had been piped into the building’s own nervous system, and whether the simulations she’d just run were already trickling into the next generation of training bots.

  Outside, the city air hit her like a slap. She stood in the lightspill from Quartus Tower, watching her own breath form in the cold, and let the night filter back in.

  High above, one window on the thirty-second floor stayed lit. Nova wondered if Cassidy was still at her desk, compiling reports and hatching the next test. She wondered, too, if there was anyone else like her left to find.

  The cuff at her ear pulsed, blue and insistent, a heartbeat she’d borrowed from the dead. For the first time in months, Nova didn’t feel so alone in her skin.

  She turned toward the city, hands deep in her pockets, neural gloves humming with a static that felt almost like anticipation.

  Tomorrow, she’d face LUMEN. Tonight, she let herself just walk, one step after another, until the reflected light of Quartus faded behind her.