Kael froze.
He turned slowly, half-expecting an instructor or patrol bot.
Instead, it was Elias.
The janitor leaned against the wall beside the sim chamber door, mop in one hand, the other tucked into his coat pocket. Scruffy beard, faded uniform, tired eyes that saw too much and commented on too little.
He looked at Kael like someone watching a rerun of a show he’d already seen too many times.
“Not planning to cause any damage, are you?” Elias asked.
Kael shook his head. “No.”
Elias raised an eyebrow. “Then what are you looking for? Nothing good ever happens when a kid comes crawling back here after midnight.”
Kael hesitated. Then, quietly, “I just… need to see something again. From a sim. A glitch.”
Elias sighed. “This place glitches like a drunk dance routine. What kind of glitch?”
Kael looked him in the eye. “Something that felt like it wasn't supposed to be seen.”
Elias tilted his head, considered him for a moment. Then he nodded, stepping aside.
“You always were the curious one,” he said. “Just don’t get yourself deleted. I like having someone around who doesn’t treat me like part of the floor.”
Kael offered a faint smile. “You’re not just part of the floor, Elias. You’re the only guy who knows how to fix half the stuff around here.”
“Damn right,” Elias said, grinning. “System updates lock everything at 0200. Doors seal hard. You get stuck in there, I’ll deny everything and bring you coffee when the sweep team finds your bones.”
Kael chuckled. “You’re a terrible friend.”
Elias gave a mock bow. “The worst. Good luck, kid.”
Then he disappeared into the corridor, mop squeaking behind him.
Kael stood there for another few seconds before stepping inside.
The Tactical Simulation Room was empty.
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Silent.
The floor lights glowed faintly underfoot. The chamber sensors were still active in standby mode, waiting to be called. Kael moved slowly, boots echoing faintly against polished metal and glass.
He made his way to the console platform and activated the terminal. It blinked to life.
Most students couldn’t access what he was about to.
But Kael had spent enough nights helping Elias with storage unit repairs, system caching, and junked override consoles that he'd learned a few of the instructor protocols—scraps of forgotten code from years past.
He typed one in.
[Override: LRN-243.VEY]
The console hesitated. Then unlocked.
Kael didn’t load his file this time.
He dug deeper.
Into the admin layers. Instructor presets. Legacy modules. Most were locked behind firewalls.
Except one.
[VY-0L_GHOST]
No name. No course code. Just a blank slate with an outdated timestamp and the word: UNSTABLE.
Kael launched it.
The sim chamber flickered. Lights dimmed. The air shifted.
A terrain loaded.
Ruins suspended in a void. Black stone, broken pillars, spirals carved into everything like veins. The laws of perspective bent slightly. The further Kael looked, the less real the world seemed.
A fractured obelisk stood at the center. Etched with a spiral.
Then a holographic projection flickered to life.
A teenage boy.
Taller than Kael. Pale-eyed. Expression unreadable. His posture was clean, but relaxed, like someone who didn’t fear consequence.
He raised a hand.
The air trembled.
Not with fire. Not with force.
With weight.
Invisible, crushing, precise. The simulation around him warped. Constructs dissolved mid-materialization. Terrain cracked in concentric patterns. The spiral on the obelisk pulsed once, and then everything around him folded inward—silently, beautifully—like watching a dying star blink into itself.
Kael stepped back.
The simulation snapped again.
A static-filtered conversation followed. The boy stood in front of an older instructor—hard features, military lines, a man trying very hard not to show fear.
“You ignored the override.”
The boy tilted his head. “It wasn’t relevant.”
“You were unconscious.”
“Was I?”
“That... that wasn’t Imprint behavior.”
“It wasn’t.”
The instructor looked shaken. “Then what was it?”
The boy turned toward the camera—no, toward Kael, through the lens of time.
“The beginning,” he said. “Of something buried. And breaking. The Terracore doesn’t imprint.”
The instructor’s voice lowered. “Then what does it do?”
A pause.
Then: “It remembers. And it makes you remember too.”
The feed shattered.
Corrupted data spilled over the interface:
[DO NOT RUN]
[SUBJECT DISCONNECTED]
[CALDERON FAILSAFE INITIATED]
[REINTEGRATION IMPOSSIBLE]
[DO YOU REMEMBER THE WEIGHT]
Kael reached to terminate the simulation—
The room went dark.
Everything shut off. Console. Floor lights. Door locks.
Silence.
Then, one flicker. Emergency backup kicked in. Red strips of light lit the chamber dimly.
Kael was breathing hard now. He stepped back from the console.
The obelisk in the sim room—just before the blackout—had turned toward him.
He wasn’t sure how. There were no moving parts. No face. No eyes.
But it saw him.
He knew that.
He made it back to the dorms without running.
Didn’t sleep. Just lay in bed, lights off, heart still trying to forget what it felt like to be looked at by something that wasn’t alive.
Near dawn, his slate buzzed.
A new file.
No sender. No title. No trace.
He opened it.
One line of text:
"Do You Remember the Weight?"