I froze. The BIOS wasn’t supposed to talk. It was a dumb switchboard.
I leaned forward, my nose almost touching the terminal. I wasn’t just fighting a bug anymore. I was arguing with a dying god.
It was a joke of a name. “Frames Per Second to Basic Input/Output System.” Some ancient engineer had a dark sense of humor. It was the first thing that ever ran on the Arcus —the seed code that initialized gravity, life support, and the cryo-tubes. Without it, ATHENA was just a brain with no heartbeat.
Then the lights came back—clean, white, clinical. The terminal refreshed.
> You can’t do this, I typed. > Those are people.
I picked up my toolkit and started the long climb back to the living world.