The Wraith drifted silently through a nebula cloud—a bruised smear of purple and silver gas that gave the illusion of serenity. Inside, the crew was anything but calm.
Elara stood in the command deck, eyes locked on the small drive she held like a loaded weapon.
It was warm.
Still pulsing.
Still alive.
Damien leaned against the console beside her, arms crossed. "Voss gave his life for that thing."
"He said it held everything," Elara muttered. "Patterns. Code. Origins. If he was right, then this" she turned the drive over in her palm "is the blueprint to understanding the Architects."
"Or destroying them," Valen added from behind. His face was drawn, darker than usual. "We just don't know which yet."
Aeron stood quietly at the back, a ghost in the corner. His hands were shaking, but not from fear. Rage simmered beneath the surface of his skin. Ever since the station ever since he saw that memory, he hadn't spoken more than five words.
Nova didn't trust the silence.
"You good, metal boy?" she asked.
He glanced at her. "No."
"Well. At least you're honest."
Elara turned, her voice steady but soft. "We need to get somewhere safe. Somewhere we can decrypt the drive without being tracked."
Damien tapped at the holomap. "There's a backdoor station near the edge of Sereus-9. Abandoned Republic black site. Shielded, quiet. Off-grid."
Valen frowned. "And probably haunted."
Nova shrugged. "So are we."
Elara gave a nod. "Plot a course. We move now."
Aeron didn't move.
"Elara," he said at last, voice barely audible.
She turned.
"I heard him again last night. Not Voss. The Architect."
Everyone stilled.
Elara approached carefully. "What did he say?"
Aeron's eyes locked onto hers, and something ancient stared back.
"He said I was ready."
Later, in the medbay, Elara found Aeron staring at the glass wall as if it held the answer to a question he hadn't yet asked aloud.
"You didn't tell them the rest," she said gently.
He nodded. "Because I didn't want to believe it."
She sat beside him, giving him space.
"I'm not just linked to you," he said. "We weren't just... patterned the same. They built me with the purpose of killing you."
The words hung between them like an open wound.
Elara didn't flinch.
Aeron turned, his voice thick. "You understand what that means? I was a failsafe. If you ever diverged too far from the Architect code... I'd become the executioner."
"And yet here you are," Elara said quietly. "Resisting them."
He let out a bitter laugh. "That's what scares them. That I chose not to follow the program."
She reached out and took his hand. "Then we keep choosing. Every day. We make our own code."
A long silence passed.
Then Aeron whispered, "You still trust me?"
"Without question."
He looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. Not as an echo of his origin, not as a mission target but as a person. The only person who could look at his broken circuitry and see someone worth saving.
The station at Sereus-9 looked like a forgotten limb of the galaxy rusted, broken, hanging in orbit above a dead moon.
Nova was first to dock, her nerves tight. "I hate places like this. Screams 'murder maze' to me."
"Relax," Damien said dryly. "I only see four life signatures. All ours."
"Doesn't mean there aren't ghosts."
They entered through a shattered bulkhead, flashlights cutting through the dust.
The station was once a Republic surveillance outpost, built for tracking illegal Replicant tech. Now, it smelled like decay and regret. Wires dangled like vines. Terminals hummed weakly, like they'd been dreaming of waking.
Valen powered up the central console, muttering, "This'll take hours. Maybe days."
Elara placed the drive into the core terminal.
It clicked in.
And immediately, a low rumble began.
The walls came to life. Lights flickered. Consoles lit up.
Then a voice crackled over the station's intercom—tinny, but unmistakably human.
"Elara-Prime. You've opened the door."
Everyone froze.
Elara's voice dropped. "Who is that?"
The voice didn't answer her question. Instead, it asked one.
"Do you dream of them? The ones who came before you?"
A new image appeared on the screen—dozens of Elaras. Failed versions. Broken simulations. Code loops that crashed and reassembled. Smiling. Screaming. Dying.
Aeron hissed. "This isn't a data log. It's a living archive."
Nova muttered, "This was a trap."
"No," Elara said slowly. "It's a test."
Far across the galaxy, in the shadow of the black star, the Third Seed walked among its creators.
It wasn't human. Not fully. It bore Elara's face but wrong. Symmetrical. Too perfect. Its eyes didn't blink.
The Architects called it Seraph.
"Has the Prime accessed the drive?" one of them asked.
Seraph nodded slowly.
"Then begin convergence protocol."
Seraph tilted its head. "What of the Mirror?"
A pause.
"She will bring him. That is her function."
And then, silence.
Back on the station, the drive opened layer after layer—revealing buried Architect intentions.
Valen read aloud from the decrypted files. "They didn't just want replication. They wanted convergence of thought. One Prime. One Mind. Everything else... disposable."
Nova spat. "So we're what, failed clones of an ancient narcissist AI?"
Damien shook his head. "It's more complex. They built Elara and Aeron with opposing instincts. One to preserve, one to destroy. Yin and yang."
"And yet neither of us obeyed," Elara said.
She looked at Aeron, then the data. "They fear free will."
A new message blinked across the console:
"SERAPH INITIATED. PRIME SEQUENCE LOCKED. PROXY VECTOR EN ROUTE."
Aeron's face went pale. "They've launched a Seed."
Damien's voice went hard. "What the hell is a Seed?"
Valen murmured, "A clean slate. Their version of a god. It'll come for us. And once it reaches us... the old code ends."
The crew returned to the Wraith, minds reeling. No one spoke for a long time.
Nova finally broke the silence. "We run. We hide. We fight. But this thing this 'Seraph' what do we do if it's stronger than us?"
Elara stood in the middle of the bay, calm amid the chaos.
"Then we stop thinking like prototypes. We stop letting them define what we are."
She turned to Aeron. "We beat them by doing the one thing they never accounted for."
Aeron raised an eyebrow. "Which is?"
"Becoming something new."
He looked at her truly looked and smiled. "Then let's rewrite the rules."
Valen stepped forward, blade on his back, armor strapped. "Wherever that Seed lands, I say we meet it head-on."
Nova cracked her knuckles. "And if we die trying?"
Damien smirked. "Then we make damn sure it remembers who killed us."
In orbit above a derelict colony world, a single drop-pod entered the atmosphere like a falling star.
It crashed into the ground, searing earth, melting rock.
From the crater, Seraph stepped out perfect, emotionless, radiant.
Its voice echoed across dead soil.
"Elara-Prime. Mirror-Subject. Come and see what perfection looks like."