Chapter 15: Code and Copper
Brakka didn't care for soft lights or human perfumes.
His floor — Level 16, the shared command deck — was divided into quadrants, and his was dimly lit, humming with servers, walls lined with half-disassembled machines, tangled cabling, and hovering AI drones shaped like small metallic beetles.
He had converted his personal suite into a lab, despite Dray's repeated warnings.
No windows. No fabrics. Only steel, data, and the never-ending rhythm of cooling fans.
Brakka stood at his workbench, eyes flickering in micro-calibration. His right hand was buried in the chest cavity of a malfunctioning servitor — a dwarven unit that had shorted out during substation repair. Sparks popped. Brakka didn't flinch.
"Too much load on the neural conductor," he muttered. "Code patches rushed. Idiots up top trying to hotfix evolution."
His fingers were precise. Blindingly fast. Each motion came from centuries of synthetic memory and personal modifications he refused to submit for review.
He didn't trust human engineers anymore. Or even Virex standards.
"They made me," he often said. "But I made myself better."
He rarely interacted with the others unless required.Elira was too polished.Fenrir, too loyal.Vranos… a distraction in silk.
Only the machines understood him. Even Dray, who respected Brakka's skill, sometimes looked at him like a curiosity. A tool that upgraded itself.
But Brakka remembered. He remembered when robots were mindless. He remembered when Servitors were pitched as a moral compromise — not full citizens, not mere machines.
He remembered the Virus Revolution.
When death birthed technology, and when emotion was coded, not earned.
Brakka's room was filled with recordings.
Silent holograms floated in the air — playback logs of ancient experiments, failures, breakthroughs. A hologram of a human child, giggling, faded as he passed through it. He didn't flinch.
He kept thousands of logs, all indexed. None deleted.
He was building something.
Not just machines.Not just tools.
A lineage. A soul of data. Something deeper than wires and servos. A whisper of self in every bolt.
He paused in front of a screen and spoke, voice soft.
"Patch 417-C. Conscious echo model. Begin test."
A tiny red light blinked on.
Then movement in the corner of the room. One of his drones pinged gently. A motion alert from the tower surveillance channel. His systems, of course, tapped into parts of the building most others thought sealed.
He pulled it up.
Elevator shaft. Sublevel access. Time stamp: recent.
Subject: Elira.
She stepped into the restricted shaft. No authorization beacon. No visible escort.
He frowned.
"That's not routine."
He stared for a moment longer, then closed the screen. Didn't record it. Didn't report it. Didn't let this sit on any server or logs.
Instead, he whispered, "What are you doing, starfire?"
And then he returned to his work.
Not because he didn't care — But because he already suspected the answers