Epione's POV
Walking into the classroom with Chizuru still felt less like entering a university campus and more like stepping into a freshly sanitized stage. The desks were pristine, the digital board hummed quietly, and the students didn't look at me with malicious intent.
Chizuru sat in the desk right next to mine, her movements fluid and utterly silent, eyes remained fixed on the lecturer in front, whilst head would tilt just a fraction every time a door opened or a student dropped a pen.
Total crowd control huh, I thought, pulling out my notebook I guess she really is invested on trying to make me the safest girl from the lower district protected by a walking system with care complex
I glanced sideways at her profile. Her skin looked soft under the bright lights, completely hiding the gleaming metal and segment joints that had detached and extended across the dark lawn like a terrifying, beautiful white raven to drag me back just weeks before. She looked entirely human, She looked the sweet, protective girl who had promised to stand between me and the dark.
But as I watched, a student in the front row stood up too quickly, knocking their chair backward with a loud clack.
My heart did a tiny, involuntary skip. Before the chair even hit the floor tiles, Chizuru's gaze snapped towards the noise. For a microscopic fraction of a second, the warmth in her expression didn't just fade, it vanished. Her eyes went completely blank, a faint metallic blue ring flashing deep behind her dark orbs as her posture went rigid as a steel beam.
If I would try to analyze the action, it seems like the security scanner inside her was running. The machine was looking for a threat, it's exactly like what the books the director gave told me when I was reading it, as if reading a manual of a highly advanced technology.
Then, a student mumbled an apology and picked up the chair, the eerie light in Chizuru's eyes reset.
"Your heart rate spiked by twelve bits per minute, Epione," She whispered, Her voice a gentle, sisterly thread "The trajectory of the falling object was statistically zero percent to your position. There is no need to worry."
"Right," I muttered, gripping my pencil a little lighter to keep my hand from shaking. "Just a natural reflex. We humans are famously jumpy around falling furniture."
Her warm, incredibly sweet smile returned, radiating that familiar, affectionate comfort.
"Oh, of course I'm aware of that," Chizuru replied softly, her voice carrying a deep, genuine tenderness. "Afterall…I was once human too."
I froze
The pencil slipped slightly in my fingers, the lead catching against the paper as my entire train of thought derailed. I kept my eyes glued to my notebook, not daring to look at her, but my mind instantly plugged into a deep, suffocating spiral of thoughts.
Once human too? What does that even mean? Was she talking about her life before the director put her into that fake, synthetic shell? Was she trying to tell me she used to have real, throbbing heart just like mine before they turned her into a bundle of metal cables and wires?
The thought wrapped around my throat like a cold wire. If Chizuru was the blueprint the perfect model they wanted everyone to be, and she used to be a regular person…then the 'Phase Two' surgery they were planning for me wasn't just some crazy experiment. It was a pattern. They had already done this to her. They had already stolen her life and locked it away in a metal frame.
I sat there in absolute silence, the teacher's voice fading into a meaningless static. The hand I was holding in the dark suddenly felt a whole lot heavier. My gaze remained frozen on the messy handwriting in my notebook, but my heart was beating in a slow, heavy panic.
I wanted to turn to her. I wanted to shake her by her perfect, synthetic shoulders and ask the questions screaming in my head.
Why? If she had been human once, why did she agree to let them do this to her? Why did she just hand over her own life so easily? To end up as a collection of metal bones and electric signals trapped inside a gorgeous doll. How could anyone willingly choose that?
She seemed to be doing son well now. She was elegant, brilliant, and powerful. But the thought of her hating her own original, messy, fragile human self enough to let them erase it made my throat tight. What was so terrible about being human that she preferred a cold, calculated eternity?
Nevertheless, I forced the questions down, burying them deep. It was too personal, too dangerous to dig right now. Besides, asking her felt like opening a door I wasn't able to walk through yet, But I made a silent promise to myself: I would find out the truth soon. I had to know what had really happened to the girlo sitting right next to me.
Maybe Chizuru sensed the sudden, icy shift in my mood, or maybe her sensors picked up on the sheer panic radiating from my posture. For once, she didn't press the issue. She quietly looked back toward the front of the room, respecting my silence, I also noticed that she didn't even bring up that creepy brain extraction proposal again for the rest of the morning.
My spiraling thoughts were abruptly cut off by the sharp tap of a marker against the digital board.
"Quiet down, class," The lecturer announced, adjusting her glasses as she stood at the podium. "I have an important announcement regarding our upcoming curriculum. Thanks to a very generous allocation of school funds, we will be conducting an educational field trip next week."
A quiet murmur rippled through the classroom.
"We will be taking a fully sponsored tour around the Dead Sea," She continued, tapping a button to display a map of the gray, lifeless waters on the screen. "You will have the opportunity to observe its unique features and ecological state up close. Please ensure your consent forms are signed by the end of the week."
"Um, ma'am?" a boy near the middle row called out, raising a hand. "Why there of all places? Isn't the shoreline completely restricted because the toxic mist?"
"Exactly! There are rumors that the patrol drones are authorized to shoot on sight if anyone gets too close to the black zones," a girl behind him whispered loudly, her face visibly pale. "My older brother said people go missing out there all the time!"
"Oh, please, you guys believe anything you read on the deep boards like a bunch of high school nerds," A boy in the back scoffed, leaning back in his chair with an excited grin. "The school wouldn't sponsor a trip if we were going to get vaporized. Besides, we might actually get to see the deep-water research rigs up close. That place is legendary!"
"It's legendary because it's a graveyard!" another voice shot back, and within seconds, the classroom started to devolve into a chaotic crossfire of arguments and nervous chatter.
"Class, quiet!" The teacher slammed her marker down the podium, the sharp sound instantly cutting through the noise. The room fell into an uneasy silence. "The trip is fully sanctioned and will be heavily monitored by licensed security detail. There is no danger. Anyone who does not wish to attend may request an alternative twenty-page research essay instead."
That shut up everyone, No one wanted to write a twenty-page paper.
I glanced sideways at Chizuru, but her face was perfectly unreadable, her dark eyes reflecting the cold, pale light on the board. I wonder what's something the mentioned place called for her to get this serious.
Chizuru's POV
WARNING: SYSTEM TEMPERATURE CRITICAL
NEUTRAL ACTIVITY SPIKE: ABOVE BASELINE
TRIGGER SEQUENCE DETECTED: GEOGRAPHICAL COORDINATES [DEAD SEA]
The digital projection of the gray, toxic shoreline on the classroom board was not just an image. To my optical processors, it was a direct gateway to a database I had spent years trying ton partition, lock, and bury under millions of lines of encrypted code.
Yet, the moment the miss Sephiene spoke those words, the security firewalls inside my own mind began to crumble.
I sat perfectly straight. Keeping my fingers wrapped around the edges of my desk, applying exactly eighty pounds of pressure, just enough to keep my synthetic hands from trembling without cracking the wood. Deep inside my chest, my cooling systems begun to whine, spinning at maximum capacity to combat the sudden, violent surge of heat rising from my central processor.
Some of them wanted to go to the Dead Sea…To the rest of the school, it was a mysterious, toxic wasteland. To my parents, it had been the future.
But everything was taken from us, both my parents had designed a groundbreaking initiative: Project Sanbox. The concept was brilliant in its clinical utility. Because Dead sea was a completely lifeless, saline void, it was the perfect natural laboratory. It was a place where they could test volatile, high-energy cybernetic experiments and bio-synthetic neutral conduits without any risk of contaminating living ecosystems. If a prototype experienced a runway biological error or a toxic discharge, there was nothing in those gray waters to infect, mutate or kill. It was a clean, dead slate.
I wanted ton go with them that time, but they refused. Explaining the dangers of going on such an expedition like task, so I was left there, alone.
I remembered the cold rain. I remembered the heavy, metallic smell of blood that seeped through the cracks of the delivery crates left right on our front doorstep. I know so well that my mother and father weren't just murdered; they had been systematically taken apart, tortured for the secrets of their research, before their severed heads were packaged and delivered like household parcels to our home.
The raw, human horror of that memory ripped through my circuits like a lightning strike.
EMOTIONAL OVERLOAD DETECTED.
INITIATING COGNITIVE OVERRIDE.
PREPARING SYSTEM RESET TO COMPLETE COLD STATE.
No, I screamed internally, fighting against the cold, mechanical tide of the AI core trying to force me out. Not now…not again right in front of her.
I felt a sudden, familiar shift in the air beside me. Epione was looking.
Through my peripheral vision, I could see her staring, her eyes wide with a mixture of confusion and growing alarm. She was listening to the high-pitched hum of my internal cooling fans. She was watching my knuckles turn white stark.
I knew she was starting to catch on. Even if she didn't understand the complex programming or the exact boundaries of my neural architecture, she had seen the pattern. She was smart, and starts to subtly realize that whenever things got too intense that my human emotions begin to flood over, a sudden, cold reset will take over. It had happened before. In those silent fractions of a second where I would go completely rigid and blank. She was becoming aware of the invisible boundary that separated my warmth from my machinery.
If the AI completely took over now, my face would go entirely blank for a long run. I would look like a puppet with its strings cut before resetting into that clinical, sapphire-eyed stranger.
She's already afraid whenever the AI take over for a short period, what more if it enters in complete override?
With every ounce of human left trapped inside this metal frame, I slammed my mental defenses back down. Forcing the memories of the blood, the crates, and the gray shores back into their locked partitions. Fighting the AI override with a desperate, silent scream.
I am okay, I told myself, forcing my artificial chest to mimic a steady, rhythmic human pattern. I am here, I still exist, Shinzo…the human.
But as miss Sephiene quieted the class and mapped the remained project on the board, a cold, calculated reality began to settle in my mind.
The sudden, generous school funding. The highly restricted destination that even has the same mapping of my parents' sandbox project. The timing of it all. This trip was not an academic coincidence. Someone was deliberately dragging us back to where and why my family was destroyed.
And this time, I had a sinking feeling that they were setting a trap.
If this trip was indeed a setup, whoever are pulling the strings must be a very brave individual…et al. If they thought they could use this trip to corner me, they are severely underestimating what I'm capable of.
Hmm,l I would let them think they have the upper hand. I would let them roll out their little trap…because the moment they tried to spring it, I'll be there to find out who they are and dismantle them piece by piece.