Lukas, Chiara, Wang and the others walked into the settlement, boots pressing against the pale stone paths set in wide, geometric lines. The ground was clean, the walkways bordered by short walls of dark basalt. Square buildings rose on either side—flat-roofed, with narrow entrances and stone support beams cut with careful symmetry.

Constructs moved across the open space. Some rolled low to the ground, shaped like armored reptiles with baskets strapped to their backs. Others walked upright, frames narrow, hands carrying bundles of cord, stone blocks, or water containers.

They passed a pair unloading a stack of tools near a raised platform—hooked claws curling around the handles, setting each one down on a flat cloth spread across the stone. Nearby, another construct was adjusting a corner beam, its fingers clicking as they tapped along the surface before pressing it deeper into the support joint.

Chiara slowed for a moment, her eyes on a line of smaller units moving through a channel built into the road. Their steps were measured, each carrying a sealed box along the same path—like a trail.

Lukas glanced toward a central pillar rising from the middle of the plaza. It was covered in thin carvings that wrapped around the shaft like a spiral. No one stood near it, but a low platform encircled the base, and the ground around it was slightly worn.

At the gate ahead, two guards stepped forward. They didn't wear armor—just layered garments of dark textile and patterned sashes, cut in angular folds and fastened with ceramic clasps. It was simple, reminiscent of Aztec ceremonial dress. They didn't carry weapons either—

But their constructs did.

Flanking them stood two humanoid machines—tall, broad in the shoulders, with matte ceramic plating and closed, featureless visors. Their hands hung at their sides, fingers slightly curled. One of them shifted slightly as Lukas and Chiara approached, its feet pressing into the stone with a quiet click.

They blocked the path.

Chiara reached for the black device at her hip and held it up.

She had already sent the signal earlier, before entering the settlement. Maybe they should have waited a bit longer before approaching.

The constructs in front of them shifted stance. Not aggressive—just poised. They didn't move aside.

Chiara felt it then—a faint pulse from the device. A request to wait.

So they did.

Several minutes passed.

Then, footsteps echoed from deeper inside the compound.

The same man they'd seen before emerged—calm, walking with quiet confidence. Beside him came another figure, dressed in layered robes of soft grey and patterned blue, more intricate than the rest, looser, almost ceremonial.

Three constructs followed them. Two standard units, and one distinctly different—sleeker in shape, its joints trimmed in dark blue ceramic. Its frame was narrower, more human in proportion, and its hands moved with controlled ease. It scanned Lukas and Chiara once, then paused.

The man in the lead—clearly of higher rank—stopped a few steps from the guards and lifted one hand.

The guards stepped aside.

Their constructs followed.

The man swept his gaze over them, then stopped on Chiara.

His eyes lingered—steady, heavy—like he was looking through her, not at her.

Seconds passed in silence before Chiara felt the pulse reach her.

It was subtle—refined. The structure of the code was… unexpected. Intricate, elegant even. Not just layered, but optimized. Whoever designed it knew what they were doing.

Her curiosity spiked.

She didn't show it on her face, but all three of her minds kicked in—automatically.

One decompacted and parsed the pulse.

The second sorted and compared it with existing reference frames.

The third began cross-linking potential contextual threads based on structure, tone, and signature patterns.

Three seconds later, she had the full message unpacked, clean, and categorized.

And more importantly, she understood the intent behind it.

She flicked a short pulse to Lukas, highlighting the key points.

"What should I say?"

"Hmm…" Lukas responded. "From what I've seen so far and what you just showed me… honestly? Be yourself. They don't act like warriors. They act like researchers. So yeah—your kind of people. You know how to talk to them, right?"

He hadn't moved a muscle, but she could feel the smirk at the end of the signal.

Chiara inhaled through her nose and exhaled slowly.

Treat them like scientists, huh…

She looked back at the man and sent a return pulse—her own.

Same structure. Same code style. The content was written in their own language—precise, respectful, and absolutely fluent.

The man shifted slightly, just enough to show he hadn't expected that level of fluency.

Then came the next pulse.

Chiara's body didn't react, but inside—everything lit up.

All three of her minds snapped into full engagement. The pulse was complex. It wasn't just a message. It was a structural packet—layered. Encoded. Fragmented. Some parts static. Others reactive.

She'd never seen this structure before.

Mind One began immediately by decompiling the framing sequence. It filtered the redundant glyph wrappers and isolated the embedded tags. Nothing labeled directly. No labels at all.

Mind Two isolated the wave harmonics from the symbols. Traced the timing intervals. Mapped them against standard input-output thresholds she'd established herself. The frequency curve was nonlinear—intentionally distorted—like it was designed to mimic a cortical firing pattern but didn't originate from one.

Mind Three ran through 178 classifications in under a second.

None matched.

So it went deeper.

Sub-patterns appeared when Mind One reprocessed the signal using a layered Fourier analysis. Inside the timing drift, Chiara detected a recursive spike—short, tight, and sharp. That was a pulse trigger. A command node. Possibly an execution header.

But what was it meant to control?

Mind Two swept the sublayers. There were traces of constraint logic—familiar from robotic frameworks—but the execution stack was fragmented. No continuous command stream. Instead, the data was routed in clusters, like bursts.

"Construct interface?" Mind Three suggested.

"Not confirmed," Mind One replied. "Missing anchor loop."

"Look at node timings," Mind Two added. "Resonance interval matched to third-limb delay. Possible multi-limb sync?"

Then it clicked.

The structure wasn't meant to fire neurons.

It was meant to interface with something else.

A construct.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Probably a low-tier automaton, with multi-joint control. No full autonomy. Just guided execution through waveform tethers.

But it was… flawed.

She could see it now.

The delay between the burst packets created timing drift at higher concurrency. The sub-nodes would fall out of sync after six or seven simultaneous commands, and depending on the construct's resistance profile, the tether would collapse entirely.

If anyone deployed this model in a live environment—especially under stress conditions—the system would fail.

Not gradually.

Catastrophically.

Chiara didn't even need to simulate that part. The flaws were obvious.

The command scaffold lacked feedback redundancy. There were no stability checkpoints between node execution layers. Worse, the impulse threading was single-path—meaning if one node loop collapsed, the whole sequence would deadlock.

It wasn't a problem of power. It was a problem of logic.

These constructs weren't piloted—there was no operator to override or self-correct mid-cycle. Everything was driven by pre-encoded behavior trees, modulated through EM instructions embedded in the architecture.

That meant one thing: any failure in the input chain wouldn't just stall the system—it would send erratic signals downstream. Multiple constructs could misfire. Or worse, enter recursive command loops.

Mind One began stripping the core structure, isolating pulse chain timing and restructuring the scaffold logic to run through braided redundancy paths—two channels, each carrying overlapping control logic, so if one dropped, the second could maintain continuity for at least 150 milliseconds. Enough to stabilize.

Mind Two rebuilt the load distribution map. The original used fixed node weighting across all constructs, assuming uniform task complexity. That assumption was flawed. She implemented a dynamic node-balancing schema, where construct load states fed back into the command distributor, adjusting pulse power and instruction bandwidth per unit in real time.

Mind Three overhauled the control mesh entirely. Instead of line-based chaining, she rewired the model into a self-correcting field pattern. Commands pulsed outward in a radial lattice—meaning synchronization didn't depend on proximity, just on timing and resonance. Even if one node failed, others could reconstruct the signal locally.

She built a fallback layer, too. If the whole field began to destabilize, a narrow-band kill instruction would fire automatically—cutting off all output to prevent runaway behavior.

Chiara ran more than 3,000 iterations on degraded simulations.

Then another 2,000 under peak load.

All passed.

Command stability up 77%. Fault tolerance increased from 1.3 to 4.8 nodes. Mean time between failure tripled.

Meanwhile—outside the corridors of her mind—nothing moved.

She didn't blink.

Didn't flinch.

Only Lukas briefly glanced sideways.

The man across from her narrowed his eyes again.

Nearly a full minute passed.

Then Chiara opened hers.

Met his gaze—steady, unblinking.

And sent a pulse.

Then—silence.

For a heartbeat. Then another.

The man's eyes began to widen. Slowly at first—then more. His expression shifted from composed to shaken.

He looked like he was staring at a ghost.

His jaw tensed. His fingers twitched once at his side. His hand lifted slightly—then stopped, trembling just faintly.

The man next to him noticed. His brow furrowed as he glanced between them. He couldn't read the pulse, but the reaction was impossible to miss.

Chiara stood still. Calm. Silent.

She didn't follow up. She didn't explain.

She didn't need to.

The silence stretched.

Then the lead man seemed to snap back into awareness. He blinked. Slowly.

His skin had gone a shade paler. His breath hitched as he looked at Chiara.

And then, without a single word, he stepped forward, dropped to one knee, and brought both palms flat to the stone before him.

His head bowed, forehead brushing the ground.

The others froze.

The man beside him took half a step back, visibly stunned.

The guards stared in disbelief. One of them opened his mouth, but no sound came.

Even the constructs halted mid-motion, reacting to the sudden change in command posture.

No one spoke.

No one seemed to know what to say.

Chiara remained silent.

She understood what she'd done… but she hadn't expected that level of reaction.

Maybe they're not that great after all?

The thought wasn't smug. If anything, it left her a little disappointed. She'd hoped for more of a challenge. Still, their systems and knowledge—especially at the architectural level—were worth studying.

Lukas, unsurprisingly, looked completely at ease.

He sent her a pulse.

"Nice."

Followed by a casual thumbs-up.

Chiara didn't reply.

Her eyes remained on the constructs while the man stayed bowed. She sent a layered scan through encrypted pulses—subtle, undetectable unless someone was specifically looking for them.

The results came in.

Their internal configuration was… interesting.

Densely layered filament threads wove through the core—fine, recursive circuits etched directly into the substrate using what looked like laser-burned microgrooves or focused thermal conduction paths. Not cables. Not discrete components. But fully integrated signal veins—conductive paths embedded into the construct's internal skeleton.

Nice work.

She kind of wanted to try one out herself. She could absolutely take control—override the system in under two seconds.

Maybe less for the ones the guards were using.

Her eyes flicked briefly to the man still kneeling.

Let's not be rude… not yet.

November 22, 2024 - Kombolcha, Ethiopia

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Blood sprayed across the concrete. Someone screamed—short, sharp—then silence.

A soldier dropped, chest torn open, twitching in the dust. The others shouted over the gunfire.

"Contact left! Contact left!"

They fired blindly into the smoke-filled alley. No movement. Nothing to hit. Just echoes.

And then—he dropped in.

From above.

One of them.

Barefoot. Shirtless. Eyes wide, skin gleaming with sweat.

He landed on one of the men, boots cracking ribs, crushing him into the pavement. Before the others could react, he was already moving.

Too fast.

A knife flashed.

Another throat opened—blood pumping, hot and red, splashing the wall behind.

The third soldier tried to run.

Didn't make it two steps.

A bullet caught him clean in the back of the neck. Head snapped forward. Body folded.

Screaming erupted in the street.

Women, children—people running.

Shouting in Amharic. Some ducked into shops. Others dove into the dirt, hands over their heads, crying.

Two more returnees turned the corner—one of them holding a stolen rifle. His aim was perfect.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Three shots. Three dead.

A local policeman's face exploded as he leaned out from cover.

Blood dripped down the corrugated steel wall behind him. His partner slipped in the mess trying to crawl back.

"Stay down!"

Didn't matter.

The returnees were laughing now. Slow, wild grins. Eyes too wide. One of them was chewing on something. No one knew what.

A grenade bounced off a cart and rolled under a truck.

"MOVE!"

Too late.

The blast tore open the air. Shrapnel cut through the nearest bodies like scissors through wet cloth. Limbs flew. A scream ended mid-breath.

Silence, for half a second.

Then more gunfire.

The returnees were always out of firing range, moving swiftly like shadows.

The other two stole rifles too, and it got worse—every shot they fired hit. Not a single round wasted.

Heads snapped back. Bodies dropped. Blood pooled in the streets. The soldiers were breaking. Panic spreading. Some dropped their weapons and ran.

Then—

A crack. Sharp. Clean. Distant.

One returnee jerked mid-laugh—head thrown back, neck opened in a red spray.

Another dropped an instant later—bullet through the eye, back of his skull splattered across the alley wall.

The last tried to leap—too late.

A third shot punched through his temple.

He hit the ground hard. Twitched once. Then nothing.

The street went quiet.

From afar—on top of a half-finished building, crouched behind rusted scaffolding and flapping tarp—a man in black slowly rose from his prone position.

Modern goggles gleamed faintly under the overcast light, reflecting broken sky and smoke.

He moved without sound, hands practiced. Detached.

The long-barreled sniper rifle—military grade—was folded with precise clicks, slid into a flat case strapped across his back.

Then he tapped a device on his chest.

A soft green light blinked.

His voice was low. Flat.

"Where are the next?"

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