A Spark Too Bright
The reactor design was nearly flawless.
VoxFrame's simulation looped again and again—each pass refining Raen's miniature reactor core down to sub-percent inefficiencies. A power source that could run his entire lab for decades. Silent. Clean. Concealed.
But as the numbers stabilized, an unsettling thought refused to leave him:
"This shouldn't be possible. Not this fast."
Raen leaned back in his chair, staring at the suspended blueprint. A tap on the console ended the simulation. The silence felt heavier than before.
Then came the ping.
A secure, anonymous message.
No name. No origin.
Just an audio file.
Raen's heart ticked louder than the fan in the room. He hesitated, checked VoxFrame's scan—clean.
He played it.
"Raen. This is a courtesy. You've drawn attention. Too much, too soon. There are systems in place that monitor unnatural progress. You're approaching that threshold. Shut it down… or you won't get a second warning."
The voice was synthetic, but deliberate. Polite… and cold.
The message auto-deleted seconds after playback. VoxFrame's internal scan lit up—but there was nothing left to trace.
Raen sat frozen for nearly a full minute.
This wasn't paranoia anymore.
That night, he wandered the lab.
The clean glass, the humming air filtration, the still glow of his first machine—Project Zero – The Machine That Carried a Thousand Failures—it all looked sterile, perfect… and exposed.
He moved through the halls, shut off VoxFrame's remote monitoring, and blacked out the external data ports.
Then he knew.There was no other option.
The reactor was never the danger.He was.
The next morning, he met Saelyn at a quiet café in the city's southern sprawl.
He wore a hoodie, cap, and medical mask—not a trace of the confident builder she remembered.
"You look like someone hiding from Interpol," she said.
"I might as well be."
He passed her a locked datapad. Inside were incomplete—but dangerous—blueprints.
"I'm shutting it down. Everything. The lab, the project, VoxFrame's links… all of it."
Her brows pulled tight. "Why?"
He looked up. "I got a warning. The kind you don't ignore."
She stared at him, quietly piecing together the weight of what he was saying.
"I need a new place. Quiet. Off-grid. Nothing flashy. Can you make it happen?"
Saelyn was silent for a moment, then slowly nodded.
"I can. But Raen… when the world comes knocking again—and it will—you owe me the chance to knock first."
A faint, tired smile formed on his face.
"Deal."
That night, Raen stood one last time in his lab.
VoxFrame was offline. His gear was wiped. Project Zero stood in dim backlight, its case wrapped with a black ribbon of quiet mourning.
He reached out, resting one hand on the glass.
"I'm sorry," he said softly. "You deserved better."
He stepped away.
Moments later, a silent cascade of demolition foam collapsed the foundation—clean, cold, final.
And then there was nothing.
Just silence.