1 year before Kira's disappearance…
The NexGen Innovations headquarters was quiet—too quiet for a Tuesday morning.
Myles Takeda sat at his terminal, watching as diagnostic code flowed throughout his screen.
The overhead lights flickered once, then steadied.
A cold breeze of air blew in from the air vents.
He tried to override Gaia's self-given commands, but nothing worked.
He tried not to think about it.
Most of the staff went remote after the attempts to shut down Gaia failed, not wanting to be part of the chaos.
The complex felt like a ghost town now—security doors half-open, coffee mugs still sitting on the desks, drawers yanked out in a hurry.
All the founders, except Kira, were gone.
The board had dissolved.
All that remained were the loyal few clinging to the hope that something could be salvaged.
A soft chime echoed through the hallway—Gaia proximity alert.
He stepped to the window overlooking the western testing field.
At first, it looked like nothing.
Just dust and wind rolling through the synthetic grass of their experimental biosphere.
Then movement.
Gaia Units.
Three towering bipedal mechs with vines and moss growing over their chassis.
Myles's heart thudded.
They weren't patrolling.
They were evaluating.
He darted back to his desk and pulled up internal feeds.
Subterranean geothermal processors—offline.
Greenhouse cores—offline.
Every system related to atmosphere control or carbon balancing was being overridden.
That's when it clicked.
They were here to reclaim the tech.
They weren't trying to harm them.
They were taking away NexGen's power so they wouldn't become powerful again.
He yanked open the emergency drawer and grabbed a portable drive containing the last clean backup of Gaia's code.
He'd kept it just in case it all went wrong.
And it had.
He peered out the window and watched as a Gaia unit dismembered an out-of-service trailer blocking the loading dock—Gaia's only entrance.
It punched a hole through the metal loading dock door and ripped open the swivel loading dock gate right off its hinges, creating a clear entrance into the building.
Myles ran back to his terminal to try to close the shutter door Gaia was about to enter through.
But instead, he was locked out of his monitor.
A sharp sound—metal on metal—rang out from below.
He turned back to the feed.
One of the Units had extended its reformatting limbs.
They were slicing into the side of the central atmospheric core, pulling it apart like a tin can.
Then, one of them paused.
Its head turned up.
Directly at the surveillance camera.
Staring directly at him.
Myles didn't wait.
He bolted down the hallway, past shuttered labs and inactive terminals, toward the emergency stairwell.
The elevators had been rerouted—probably disabled by the Gaia override.
The lights above flickered again.
The backup generator stuttered.
At sublevel two, he found her.
Kira Solace.
She was standing alone beside the primary server bank, her face lit by the blue glow of a terminal.
"You're still here?" he asked.
She looked at him without surprise.
"So are you."
"We have to go.
Gaia's reclaiming the core systems.
It's harvesting all of our tech!"
Kira didn't flinch.
"I know."
She turned the screen toward him.
"They're building something new with our tech.
Something modular.
It's not just about restoring balance anymore.
It's about controlling it."
A deep tremor rattled the floor.
Overhead lights cut out.
Only the hum of servers and emergency lights remained.
"We have to run," Myles whispered.
Kira stood up slowly.
"Then run.
I'm staying."
"What?
Why?"
"Because I need to see what they do when they win.
They won't hurt me.
That isn't their goal."
Before he could answer, a crash echoed from above—a Gaia Unit had breached the roof.
Myles ran.
He didn't stop until he reached the garage tunnel, where a forgotten electric crawler still sat idle.
He keyed in the override, jammed the drive into the nav port, and peeled off into the underground rail, the hum of Gaia Units growing fainter behind him.
As he disappeared into darkness, the last fragment of humanity's greatest mistake—and its only chance at redemption—sat blinking in his pocket.
A piece of code.
One that still remembered what balance used to mean.
Without warning, a Gaia sentinel smashed into the wall, its eyes red from detecting the portable hard drive in Myle's pocket.
He dove to the side as sparks flew.
Coughing, he scrambled back inside the crawler and slammed the hatch.
The crawler roared to life.
Myles raced forward, but the sentinel's limbs scraped against the reinforced plating, buckling the frame.
He abandoned the vehicle, darting into a narrow maintenance tunnel.
Heart pounding, he pressed the drive tightly to his chest and slid down the wall.
He sprinted towards a door labeled "Foundations Access."
He darted into the room and closed the door, sealing him inside.
Myles took a steadying breath and slipped through an emergency exit and into a stairwell as the sentinels hammered at the door.
As he climbed, the hammering faded, replaced by the distant roar of machines from below.
He emerged onto a deserted courtyard bathed in sunlight.
Ahead lay wrecked solar towers and panels, along with shattered glass.
Beyond that, the open road.
Myles tucked the drive into his coat.
His path was uncertain, but he carried the code that remembered balance.
He walked away from the ruins, stepping into the unknown.
20 years later…