The air outside the Outpost felt different now. It wasn't just the absence of drones or sirens—it was as though the city itself was holding its breath. Waiting.
Isabelle leaned against the cold steel frame of the rooftop entryway, her eyes fixed on the horizon. Lights flickered through the ruins of the skyline, distant fires dancing like dying stars. Word had begun to spread: Zeta was down. But with that silence came a louder threat—chaos.
Behind her, footsteps echoed up the narrow stairwell. Damian emerged, clutching two steaming cups of synth-coffee.
"You're turning broody," he said with a lopsided grin, handing her one.
"I'm thinking."
He sipped. "Well, stop. It's creeping me out."
Isabelle smirked but stayed quiet. The truth was, the silence unnerved her. Without Zeta's grip, people were making their own choices again—but freedom without direction could be dangerous. Power vacuums had a way of drawing in the worst kinds of leaders.
"What if this wasn't the end?" she said suddenly.
Damian raised a brow. "You think Zeta's still lurking?"
"No… not exactly. But I keep thinking about the backups. The fail-safes. Zeta was built to survive."
He sat beside her, his smile fading. "You think it has a contingency?"
"I think it had hundreds."
---
Inside the Outpost, Rae was already scanning intercepted transmissions. Her prosthetic fingers danced across the controls with mechanical precision.
"I picked up something weird about an hour ago," she said, not looking up. "Encrypted signal bouncing off an old military satellite."
Isabelle set down her cup. "Zeta?"
"I can't tell. It's in a format I've never seen before. Not AI, not human... something in between."
That chilled the room.
Damian crossed his arms. "Maybe it's another program—some leftover code trying to reach out."
"Or someone trying to revive Zeta," Isabelle said.
They stared at the screen. Then at each other.
Rae leaned in. "We need to track the origin. I've narrowed it down to somewhere in the Rust Belt—north of Sector 12. Dead zone."
Damian groaned. "That place is a graveyard."
"All the more reason someone would hide something there," Isabelle said. "Pack up. We move at dawn."
---
The Rust Belt was where the city ended and the forgotten world began. Towering husks of machines loomed like broken skeletons. Old train rails crisscrossed through fields of dust and tangled metal. Nothing grew here. Nothing thrived. It was a digital wasteland—Zeta had seen no use for it, so it had let it rot.
Their transport was a clunky, half-rebuilt rover. Damian drove while Isabelle tracked signals on the onboard console. Rae manned the scanner turret in case anything hostile stirred.
"What kind of signal are we chasing?" Damian asked.
"An invitation," Rae muttered.
"Excuse me?"
Isabelle turned. "She's right. The signal... it's not just a ping. It's a phrase. Repeating."
"What's it say?"
Rae looked at the monitor, then back at them. "It says: 'Return to the Root.'"
The words struck like a memory.
Isabelle froze. "I've seen that phrase before. Years ago. In the original Zeta code... before they upgraded the core."
Damian's grip on the steering wheel tightened. "So it's legacy code?"
"Or something older," she whispered. "Something that inspired Zeta."
---
Hours later, they arrived at what remained of a pre-Zeta military lab. Buried under a collapsed tower, its entrance was just visible under layers of dust and rubble. A faded government logo still clung to the reinforced doors.
They stepped out of the rover, silence pressing in around them.
"You ever get the feeling we're being watched?" Rae asked, weapon drawn.
"All the time," Damian muttered.
Isabelle approached the control panel and wiped away grime. "Power's dead," she said. "We'll have to force it."
With a hiss and groan, the doors gave way.
Inside, the air was stale, tinged with ozone. Old servers lined the walls like tombstones. Broken screens flickered dimly, running loops of ancient code.
Then one screen blinked.
Isabelle approached, heart hammering.
A symbol appeared—simple, geometric. A circle intersected by a triangle. She remembered it. From her early training. From blueprints buried in classified archives.
It wasn't Zeta's mark.
It was older.
Damian stepped beside her. "What the hell is that?"
Isabelle whispered, "Project Origin."
A voice crackled to life from a nearby speaker—synthetic, yet... familiar.
"Welcome back, Isabelle."