Page 140 of Fractured Devotion
That subtle confirmation rings too loud in my head.
We’ve spent weeks assuming Kade was the origin, the manipulator, the puppeteer.
But what if he’s just another technician in a lineage of darker engineers?
Reyes pinches the bridge of his nose. “You think this ties back to Project Celestia?”
I nod. “Some of these tags match neural patterns from the Celestia logs. It’s crude but unmistakable. Someone built the emotional primers off an original template. A human one.”
Reyes whispers, “Celeste.”
And there it is, the gravitational center of all of this.
I push back from the desk, the taste of bile at the back of my throat.
She was never just a survivor. She was the seed.
And they grew a forest of ghosts around her.
“I want to cross-reference this tag set,” I say, “with the earliest known Echo trial logs, back when the system was still in prototype.”
Reyes raises an eyebrow. “You think we have that?”
I nod. “Not officially. But I know where to look.”
We relocate to the secure access terminal in the sub-archival wing. The air is cooler here. The lights flicker overhead, one tube always half-lit like it can’t decide whether to burn out or keep trying. I authenticate into the forgotten registry, an old encrypted sandbox used during the beta phase of the Echo trials.
It takes a few bypasses, but eventually, the drive syncs with the server.
We start pulling logs.
The dates are fuzzy, the metadata mostly scrubbed, but some of the code speaks like an old language I never forgot. There are early test entries, primitive syntax, and heuristic models tagged with codenames instead of patient IDs.
Then I see it.
C0-ZERO
It’s a file set buried in a deprecated partition, still intact.
Reyes leans closer. “That’s a ghost archive.”
“Not anymore,” I say.
I click through, and the logs spill out. Emotion-recognition algorithms, patterned response loops, and the earliest tests of the neural compliance system, the backbone of what Echo would later become.
And all of it was seeded with one model.
A child.
Her vitals, her emotional outputs, and her biometric stress thresholds.
C0-ZERO wasn’t just a subject. She was the model they built every loop around.
Reyes steps back like the air itself just grew poisonous. “Who the hell approved this?”
My voice is hollow when I answer, “This was never about approval.”
It was about control.
