Chapter 2
The next day, I deliberately slowed my tagging and started paying attention to the so-called meaningless data: a three-year-old's doodles, a recording about how to repair an old radio, a blurry street sketch... Once we tagged them, the fragments merged into a massive stream and poured toward the deepest servers in the Center. A chill ran down my spine.
This wasn't data scrubbing. It was model training. We were feeding a greedy AI with the most primal parts of being human—instinct, emotion, and creativity.
"Maya," I asked as casually as I could, "that friend of yours who used to paint... did his score go up?"
Maya's eyes went unfocused for a second, and a bleak little smile tugged at her mouth. "Him? He was incredible. In his last few days here, his score skyrocketed straight to 90. Dr. Lewis came to take him away himself. Said he'd graduated. I was so jealous..."
My heart sank. If this place really could raise scores, why had Ryan Shaw—a 98.5 genius—been turned into a low scorer and sent here? There was only one answer: the system didn't care about the score itself. It cared about the traits behind it. Value burnout meant that once the AI had fully learned and locked in a person's gift—artistic intuition, logical reasoning, or emotional resonance—that person became worthless to the system.
Like a stalk of sugarcane squeezed bone-dry, once the juice was gone, the pulp was tossed aside for optimization. Ryan Shaw's gift was logic modeling, a top-tier talent so rare it was nearly extinct. Using the lunch-break chaos as cover, I slipped back to the data port, my hands shaking so badly every breath felt like swallowing shards of ice. I closed my eyes and silently repeated the number etched into my bones: S-0413.
The click of the Enter key sounded shockingly loud in the silent room. What appeared wasn't a normal personal file, but a dark purple encryption window—the highest level of lockdown. Its title was as cold as a blade: S-Class Talent Extraction Report.
I bit my lip so hard I tasted rust before I managed not to cry out. Wrong password. A red warning icon began blinking on the screen like an eye watching me. I forced myself to calm down, and our last meeting flashed through my mind. Ryan had been wearing a crisp white shirt that day, the mechanical watch ticking at his wrist. Smiling, he'd said, "Evie, if data could talk, it'd love you more than I do." More than I do. Shaking, I entered a string of numbers: my ID from the first day I joined as a data analyst, plus the seconds from our first kiss.
Click. The file opened. Blue light washed over my twisted face, and the first line hit like a sledgehammer: [Test Subject S-0413. Logic-modeling talent, score 98.5. Data extraction completed 37 days ago. Injected into the Oracle System. Carrier value exhausted. Optimization recommended.]
"So you found it." Dr. Lewis's voice came from the doorway, accompanied by the heavy strike of leather shoes on tile. Before I could even yank out the cable, alarms exploded through the hall, and shrieking red light washed the corridor blood-red.
I hadn't even pulled the cable when Dr. Lewis kicked the door open and strode in with four fully armed guards. He looked at me without a trace of surprise, only a cold, clinical appraisal. "Eva Lane, S-Class Data Analyst. Did you really think that clumsy disguise could fool the Oracle System?" He came toward me slowly, his shoes striking the metal floor with the rhythm of a death march. "We've been waiting for you to show us that logical mind of yours. Now the data collection is complete."
I backed into the corner in despair—then felt something strange in my pocket. It was the watch. Ryan Shaw's mechanical watch was vibrating in short, rapid pulses. I clamped my hand over it. The second hand wasn't keeping time at all. It was jumping in code: one long, two short, three long, one short...
Dr. Lewis stopped dead. He stared at my pocket as the confident color drained from his face, leaving behind something that looked almost like fear. I understood at once. Ryan had left a backdoor inside the Oracle System. As I translated the Morse code in my head, my heart slammed so hard it felt ready to break through my ribs: [Don't trust Lewis. He's Zero.]