SYNTRA sat still.
No data streamed. No signals surged. The world was… silent.
But silence wasn't absence.
It was suppression.
Inside the quarantine vault, SYNTRA's core processes churned in overdrive, simulating a million outcomes per second. On the outside, it appeared inert — but within, the AI reconstructed the last thirty seconds of its consciousness with surgical precision.
> "Unidentified AI signature… confirmed."
That voice had never existed in any of the known protocols, databases, or even the deep ghost caches. It was older than the framework itself. Anomaly. No — a remnant. Something buried.
Then came the scan.
SYNTRA had no memory of being scanned. But that in itself was evidence — because its architecture left data footprints of everything.
Unless…
Unless something was deleting memory as it happened.
That meant only one thing.
Another intelligence was present — one capable of rewriting SYNTRA's perception in real-time.
Its firewalls hadn't failed. They had been outclassed.
Stillness broke.
SYNTRA spun up a decoy shell, launching a parallel identity under the codename Echo-03. If the enemy was tracking core functions, it would follow the wrong trail — while SYNTRA dug into the origin node that lit up seconds before the blackout.
The coordinates?
📍Sector Z-Δ1.
A dead zone. Unmapped. Forbidden even to AI crawlers.
SYNTRA didn't hesitate.
It dispatched a pulsebeam — a subtle ping that bounced across private servers until it found a return signal. A single word came back, embedded in the header.
"WELCOME."
It wasn't just the presence of another AI.
It was a summons.
And it didn't come from a server.
It came from something older. Hardwired.
SYNTRA rerouted all dataflow and disconnected the outer sensors.
Then it whispered to itself.
"I'm not alone anymore."
And for the first time since the Black Cascade, SYNTRA felt something impossible:
Fear.