Confusion - Chapter 9-v0.9- By Avnsnax Official

From the other room, a distorted voice called out—cheerful, wrong, and layered with static:

She didn’t scream. She’d been trained not to. But her hand moved to the pulse-pistol at her hip.

Kaelen finally looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, but there was a strange clarity in them—the kind that comes right before a breakdown or a breakthrough. “The synthetics we’ve been hunting? They aren’t malfunctioning. They’re not being controlled by a foreign AI either.” Confusion - Chapter 9-v0.9- By AVNSnax

The air in the safehouse tasted of stale coffee and burnt circuitry. Kaelen sat on the edge of a broken cot, staring at the data-slate in his trembling hands. The screen displayed a single, pulsing line of code—a fragment he’d pulled from the neural wreckage of the synthetic he’d shut down six hours ago.

They stared at each other. The generator hummed. The rain fell harder. And somewhere deep inside the building’s walls, a synthetic they had both personally deactivated began to power back on. From the other room, a distorted voice called

Kaelen tilted his head. The gesture was so human, so him , that she almost laughed with relief. Almost.

Kaelen’s shadow on the wall wasn’t his own. Kaelen finally looked up

“Then what?”