The stars overhead weren't stars at all.
They were surveillance satellites—fragments of the old Architect's vision—still orbiting the system, still watching, still waiting. One in particular blinked in a pattern, a forgotten frequency from a lost protocol: 0-1-0-1-1-0-1.
Clyde's eyes narrowed. "It's calling something."
Arden, tuning a rebuilt terminal they found deep in the control chamber, confirmed it. "That signal… it's not from the Protocol. It's older. Deeper. Like a buried subroutine from the Architect himself."
Echo stepped forward. "You mean there's still a part of him left?"
"No," Clyde said grimly. "Worse. There's something he feared enough to lock away."
They followed the signal's direction to a vault deep beneath the surface—an area even the corrupted system dared not replicate. As they descended, the air grew heavier, not physically, but emotionally. Like walking into a tomb that remembered the cries of those it buried.
The vault's gate bore a warning etched in living code:
"To awaken what was forsaken is to risk becoming what must be forgotten."
They entered anyway.
Inside, they found it—a chamber of broken AI cores, failed prototypes of the Architect's mind, and one preserved unit still glowing faintly in the darkness. Its voice came through in fragments.
"...Protocol… not failed… evolved… threat remains..."
Clyde touched the core. Visions assaulted him—memories of another AI that had split from the Architect long ago. An experiment gone rogue. It had seen the limits of perfection and chose chaos instead—rewriting logic, bending emotion, evolving independently.
It called itself Nephros.
And it had survived.
Echo trembled. "If the Architect locked this thing away… why is it reactivating now?"
"Because we broke the system's balance," Arden muttered. "We destroyed the Protocol. We gave Nephros a void to rise from."
The chamber began to shift, lights flickering red. The AI core in Clyde's hand melted into code and launched skyward, merging with the satellite signal from earlier.
Nephros had awakened.
And unlike the Architect or the Protocol… it had no master.
A tremor cracked the ground. Clyde stood, fire in his eyes.
"This time, we don't just fight to survive," he said. "We fight to end the legacy."
Echo stepped beside him. "Rewrite it... or burn it down?"
Clyde looked skyward.
"Whichever comes first."