Wealth Accuracy

Chapter 5. The Whispers in the Code

The instructor’s “office” was a sterile, soundproofed interrogation room tucked away in the administrative wing. The air was cold, recycled, and smelled of antiseptic and anxiety. Commander Jax, the instructor, didn’t sit behind his desk. He paced, a predator circling its confused prey.

“What was that, Verdent?” he asked, his voice dangerously calm. “A new piece of tech? A jamming device smuggled in from the Rust Markets?”

Roewi sat stiffly in the metal chair, his mind racing. The official story, the one he’d rehearsed in his head during the walk over, felt flimsy. “I don’t know, sir. I just… focused. I was angry. Maybe it was a fluke in the arena’s dampening field.”

“A fluke,” Jax repeated, stopping to loom over him. “That ‘fluke’ momentarily destabilized a Prime-class Chrono Drive. We’ve run diagnostics. There was no external field interference. The anomaly originated from you.”

[Elevated stress markers detected. Deception is suboptimal. Recommend strategic omission.] Vextor’s advice was cool, a logical counterpoint to the hot panic rising in Roewi’s chest.

Strategic omission. Right.

“I have no system, Commander,” Roewi said, leaning into the one undeniable truth. “You’ve seen the logs yourself. A hundred percent rejection. I have no explanation for what happened.” He let a sliver of his genuine frustration bleed into his voice. “Maybe your precious System Core doesn’t know everything.”

Jax’s eyes narrowed. It was the wrong thing to say, a challenge to the institution itself, but it had the ring of a desperate student’s defiance. He couldn’t prove otherwise. Not yet.

“You are confined to quarters until further notice. All your access codes are revoked. You will report to Medical for a full bioscan. And Verdent,” he leaned in close, his voice dropping to a whisper, “if I find you’ve been tampering with forbidden tech, your expulsion will be the least of your worries. Division Zero takes a very dim view of system corruption.”

The words were a confirmation of his deepest fears. They were already thinking in that direction.

He was escorted back to his dorm by a silent proctor, the walk a parade of shame under a new, more dangerous guise. The news had spread. Students didn’t just ignore him now; they watched him, their whispers hushed and tense. He was no longer a zero; he was a contagion.

Back in the suffocating silence of his room, the fear began to curdle into a cold, hard resolve. They were coming for him. The academy, Division Zero. He needed an ally. He needed information.

There was only one person he could even consider. It was a massive risk, but staying blind was a greater one.

Hours later, deep into the academy’s artificial night cycle, he used a low-level system override Vextor had taught him—not to open his locked door, but to create a temporary, ghostly gap in the digital log of the ventilation system. He slipped out, moving through the maintenance corridors like a phantom, his senses heightened, listening for the tell-tale hum of patrol drones.

He found Myra in her workshop, a chaotic sanctuary of humming servers, scattered tools, and the sharp scent of soldering iron. She was elbow-deep in the guts of a decommissioned training drone, her brow furrowed in concentration. She didn’t hear him enter.

“Myra.”

She jumped, spinning around, a hydro-spanner raised like a weapon. Her eyes widened when she saw him. “Roewi? What are you? You’re supposed to be confined!”

“I need your help,” he said, cutting off her panic. He didn’t have time for pleasantries.

She stared at him, lowering the spanner slowly. The concern from the dojo was gone, replaced by a wary, technician’s assessment. “What did you do, Roewi? In the arena. That wasn’t a ‘glitch.’ I’ve seen the raw data. You emitted a resonant frequency that shouldn’t be possible without a high-level system core. A very high-level one.”

This was the moment. The precipice. He took a breath. “I can’t tell you everything. It’s too dangerous… for you. But I need to know what Division Zero is doing. What are they looking for?”

Myra’s face went pale. “You are the anomaly they’re hunting.” It wasn’t a question.

[Caution. This unit’s emotional state is volatile. Trust is an unquantifiable variable.] Vextor warned.

“They think I am,” Roewi said carefully. “And if they decide I am, they won’t ask questions. They’ll just… delete me. You know what they do to system errors.”

He saw the conflict in her eyes, fear warring with loyalty, the instinct for self-preservation battling against their years of friendship. She looked at the boy she’d grown up with, now standing in her workshop like a hunted animal.

“They’ve deployed Level-7 diagnostic probes,” she said finally, her voice barely a whisper. She turned to her main terminal, her fingers flying across the keyboard. Lines of complex code scrolled past. “They’re not just scanning for energy spikes anymore. They’re looking for data ghosts, archival echoes, anything that smells… pre-Collapse.” She pulled up a heavily encrypted file. “I managed to fragment a data-packet. It’s corrupted, but the keywords are clear.”

She highlighted a section of garbled text. Roewi’s blood ran cold as he read the fragments Vextor helpfully clarified in his vision:

[...protocol... V-X-T-R... Class: Forgotten... Eradicate...]

“They know, Roewi,” Myra said, her voice trembling. “They don’t know it’s you yet, but they know what it is. And their only directive is to eradicate it. You have to run. Now.”

Before he could respond, a silent, crimson alert flashed on Myra’s main screen. Her breath hitched.

“Oh, no.”

“What is it?”

“A Division Zero containment team. They just passed the outer perimeter checkpoints. They’re heading for the residential sector.” Her eyes, wide with terror, met his. “They’re coming for your dorm, Roewi. They’ve triangulated the source.”

The hunt was over. The hounds were at the door.

[Immediate threat level: Critical. Host survival probability: 3.7%. Evasion protocol required.]

Roewi’s mind went blank for a second, then crystal clear. There was no more hiding. No more running. They were here.

“Thank you, Myra,” he said, his voice strangely calm. “For everything. Forget you saw me.”

He turned and fled back into the dark, narrow corridors, not towards his dorm, but away from it, deeper into the academy’s labyrinthine underbelly. He was a ghost again, but this time, he was a ghost with teeth, and the system that had created him was now sending its best killers to exorcise him.

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