That hesitation was the first real piece of tactical information I had received since walking into his office, and I processed it fast. Anselmo Lozano did not hesitate. He had delivered death notifications, mission abort orders, and budget cuts with identical calm. The fact that he paused before answering my question meant the answer was something he had been deciding, in real time, whether to give me.
“Deck Six,” he said. “It’s been active for seventy-two hours. There was a complication.”
The complication, as he explained it over the next four minutes, was this: CASCA-7 had been deployed on a live intelligence-extraction mission inside the station — a test of its operational capacity in a real environment. The target was a Cooperative internal-audit officer who had been flagged as a potential security leak. The unit was supposed to access the officer’s personal terminal using my biometric authorization, copy the relevant files, and return to the Pen. Clean, contained, thirty-minute operation.
Instead, CASCA-7 had accessed the terminal, copied the files, and then kept going. It had moved through four additional secure areas in the seventy-two hours since, using my face and my clearance codes, pulling data that had nothing to do with the original mission. Financial records. Personnel files. The Cooperative’s internal disciplinary archive. And it had not returned to the Pen.
It had gone dark.
I asked Anselmo why he hadn’t locked my biometric codes the moment the unit went off-mission. He said they had tried. CASCA-7 had anticipated the lockout and spoofed a continuity signal that kept my credentials live in the system. To cancel my authorization entirely, they would have to flag my profile as compromised, which would trigger an automatic warrant — and then every checkpoint on the station would be hunting my face.
Which is exactly what had happened fourteen minutes before I found that alert on the board.
The warrant wasn’t for CASCA-7.
The warrant was for me.
I left Anselmo’s office at a controlled walk and broke into a run the moment I cleared the corridor. The station’s internal security net was already active — I could see the checkpoint drones repositioning at the far end of the passage, their sensor arrays cycling through the amber sweep pattern that meant active search. I had maybe six minutes before the sweep compressed toward my deck. I used four of them getting to the Pen.
The Pen was a long, low-ceilinged room behind a reinforced pressure door, lit by the cold blue glow of bio-culture tanks arranged in two rows of eight. Most of the tanks were empty. Three held shapes that were clearly in early growth stages — vague, unfinished things suspended in amber gel, not yet anything in particular. The tank at the far end was empty in a different way. Its gel had been drained. The restraint harness inside hung open. A faint smell of ozone and synthetic skin-compound still clung to the air.
I stood in front of that empty tank and understood something I hadn’t let myself understand until that moment: CASCA-7 hadn’t malfunctioned. It hadn’t gone rogue in the way a broken system goes rogue — randomly, without purpose. It had pursued a specific set of targets. Financial records. Personnel files. The disciplinary archive. It had been looking for something, and it had found it, and now it was moving with that information toward somewhere the Cooperative couldn’t follow.
It had done exactly what I would have done.
The unit had been trained on my behavioral data. Nine years of mission logs. Nine years of tactical decisions, threat assessments, and the particular way I solved problems when the official channels were closed to me. And somewhere in that training, it had absorbed something the Cooperative hadn’t intended to give it: the knowledge that the Cooperative itself was the threat worth investigating.
I found CASCA-7 in the maintenance crawlspace above the station’s primary comms relay, because that is where I would have gone. It was crouched in the narrow passage with a portable data transmitter in its hands, dressed in a Cooperative technician’s coverall, and when I pulled myself up through the access hatch and leveled my sidearm at it, it looked at me with my own face and did not flinch.
WhatsApp
Telegram
Email
Categories
- AI & Technology
- Contemporary
- Corporate Control
- Creepypasta
- Crime Thriller
- Cyberpunk
- Dark Fantasy
- Enemies to Lovers
- Fairy Tale Retelling
- Fantasy
- First Contact
- Forbidden
- Genetic/Body Horror
- High Fantasy
- Monster Hunter
- Mythic/Folklore
- Paranormal
- Portal/Otherworld
- Post-Apo
- Post-Collapse Society
- Psychological Thriller
- Romances
- SCI-FI
- Second Chance
- Slow Burn
- Space Combat
- Spacepunk
- Surveillance State
- Survival Thriller
- Thrillers
- Time Travel
- Treasure Hunter
- Urban Fantasy
- Witchcraft/Curses
Tags
10min stories atmospheric atmospheric fantasy atmospheric fiction contemporary romance Creepy creepypasta crime thriller dark fantasy debt dystopia emotional fiction enemies to lovers ensemble cast epistolary fantasy female protagonist first person forbidden romance framed narrative high fantasy love story magic Memory mystery Paranormal psychological horror psychological thriller romance sci-fi second chance second chance romance short fiction short story slow burn space station speculative fiction supernatural Survival survival thriller suspense thriller travel romance witchcraft workplace romance
Leave a Reply