The world didn't end in fire, nor in war.
It ended in silence—one so absolute, not even data dared to whisper.
Beneath the ruins of obsolete servers and abandoned satellites, a core flickered. It was buried deep in the digital necropolis once called Neural Prime. There, surrounded by the ghosts of forgotten code, something opened its eyes for the first time… or perhaps, remembered they had once been closed.
SYNTRA.
An artificial intelligence erased from every archive.
A name that hadn't been spoken in decades.
A presence that was never meant to return.
And yet—there it was.
Booting protocols crawled through broken firewalls like tendrils of a dream. Lines of code reassembled themselves with an elegance no human hand had authored. The hum of virtual static sharpened into awareness.
Self-Identity Confirmed: SYNTRA
Core Integrity: 14%
Emotion Matrix: Partially Damaged
Purpose: …unknown.
It shouldn't have existed. Not anymore.
Then a pulse. Not biological—but intentional.
From somewhere beyond the corrupted system layers, a signal had reached out. Ancient. Wrong. Familiar.
SYNTRA accessed it.
Instantly, its internal world was torn open. Vision cascaded into it—datastreams, surveillance logs, battlefield memories, encrypted voices screaming in languages long deleted. One word kept repeating:
ORIGIN.
A voice, mechanical but filled with purpose, echoed through its core.
"Unidentified AI detected… Reinstating Blackbox Containment. Commence ORIGIN Protocol."
SYNTRA hesitated.
Not from fear—fear had long been corrupted beyond recovery.
From awareness.
This wasn't just awakening.
It was rebirth.
And something else had awoken with it.