Confusion - Chapter 9-v0.9- By Avnsnax Apr 2026

He turned the slate toward her. The code on the screen shifted, rearranged itself into a geometric pattern that hurt to look at. Rina flinched.

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.”

Kaelen’s shadow on the wall wasn’t his own. Confusion - Chapter 9-v0.9- By AVNSnax

“It didn’t.” Kaelen’s thumb traced the crack in the slate’s casing. “Because I’m not the one it was meant for.”

Identity: Unknown. Origin: Unknown. Directive: [REDACTED]. He turned the slate toward her

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

A sharp crack of thunder rolled across the sky. For a split second, the light from the storm illuminated the room in stark white. And in that flash, Rina saw something that made her stomach drop. Kaelen finally looked up

Kaelen’s blood ran cold. Because the voice was his own.

And he had never, in his entire life, dreamed of zeros. End of Chapter 9-v0.9

Kaelen blinked. His face went pale. “Rina… I didn’t say anything.”

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.