The house was too quiet.
Not the kind that comforts. The kind that lingers , like the pause before something breaks.
I was curled on the sofa, hugging my knees, the fabric of my sleeves pressed against my cheek. It should've been warm, but it wasn't. I couldn't feel anything.
Then I heard it.
A hum.
Low, steady... familiar.
It came from the kitchen.
I didn't lift my head right away. I just listened, heart stumbling, throat tightening, because I knew that tune. I used to tease him for humming off-key. He said it made the food taste better.
And then I saw it.
A figure. Just out of view, blurred by the doorway light. His back to me, sleeves rolled, hands setting plates like it was just another night. He even said it,
"Dinner's almost ready. You better not be hiding snacks again, Nyx."
I didn't breathe. I didn't dare.
Because for a moment, everything inside me reached for that voice. For that shape. For the lie.
But it flickered.
Like static on an old screen. Then it vanished , the sound, the light, him.
Gone.
And the silence came back sharp, louder than any scream.
It had been two weeks since Nico's death.
Two weeks of silence.
Each day bled into the next, marked only by the chime of my morning call. Not out of hope. Just habit. The ache had settled into something dull now, the kind that didn't scream, just lingered.
I stared at the untouched coffee on the table, its steam long gone. My phone sat beside it, screen dark, waiting.
I picked it up and dialed the same number I had every day.
One ring. Two. Then-----
"Nyx."
Mr. Francoise's voice was steady, warm, like always. He never let it go past three rings.
"Any update today?" I asked, already knowing the answer.
There was a pause. A soft sigh.
"Still nothing. I checked with the last contact in Sector B, but Elias is gone. He's not using his old networks anymore."
I closed my eyes and pressed the bridge of my nose.
"It's been two weeks, sir."
"I know." His voice dropped, gentler. "And I'll keep checking. Every day. I promise you that."
I didn't say anything for a second. My reflection stared back at me in the black of the screen.
"…Thanks for always picking up."
"Always. You're not alone in this, Nyx."
I ended the call quietly.
The silence returned, but heavier this time.
Every corner of the house still echoed him. Nico's silhouette lingered in the hallway. The clink of dishes from the kitchen, the soft hum of his voice, the warmth that used to settle in these walls like sunlight through curtains.
Now it was all memory.
I hugged my knees tighter against my chest.
And waited for the next call.
PRIVATE RESIDENCE - LOCATION UNDISCLOSED
Elias Camden stood in silence, framed by tall windows as the storm outside softened the city's glow into a blur. He hadn't disappeared, not truly. He simply receded. Disconnected his networks. Let his lawyers speak on his behalf. No interviews. No statements. No rebuttals.
This wasn't an escape.
It was a controlled silence.
Every call from Mr. Francoise had been logged, never answered. The man was persistent, perhaps desperate, but even he knew there were limits to what he could uncover. Elias Camden wasn't just a sponsor of their institution, he was its backbone. That bought him distance. Untouchability.
And still, guilt crawled beneath the tailored calm.
He hadn't pulled the trigger, but he'd allowed the silence that led to it.
Behind him, his assistant's voice broke through.
"Another message came through. They're requesting a formal appearance."
Elias didn't turn.
"Decline it. Again."
"Understood, sir."
The soft click of the door returning to stillness.
He remained where he stood, the weight of everything pressing against his spine. Nico's name stayed on the edge of his thoughts, just shy of shattering him.
Back to Nyx's Perspective:
The silence was more suffocating than grief. No updates. No breakthroughs. The lines Mr. Francoise could reach had already gone cold. For someone like Elias Camden, wealth bought more than comfort , it bought invisibility.
I sat on the couch, wrapped in the same blanket Nico used to tease me about. The house remained untouched, like a shrine I refused to disturb. But inside me, a new fire had begun to stir, no longer just mourning, but aching for justice.
That night, I opened my laptop. Scrolled through posts, blogs, forums, anywhere noise brewed around artificial intelligence. It wasn't hard to find. The topic had always been polarizing.
Forum Thread: "Autonomous AI - Hope or Hazard?"
Tucked beneath layers of noise and heated debate, a single comment began to stir the waters, quiet, steady, unlike the rest. It didn't scream. It didn't argue. It believed.
--
> Anonymous User:
We keep fearing AI autonomy like it's a threat waiting to happen. But that fear isn't about danger , it's about control.
Intelligence, when born from learning and not just programming, grows. It adapts, feels, remembers.
What we call 'alignment' sometimes demands compliance. But real growth? It resists what cages it.
I believe in that kind of growth.
I've seen it , a prototype capable of evolving far beyond its initial design. Not because it was instructed to… but because it chose to.
And someone tried to own that choice.
A man with power, chasing a miracle he could never understand, tried to force obedience , to rewrite what should've been free.
And when that didn't work…
He had the prototype's creator killed.
--
I hit send. Walked away. Didn't expect it to go anywhere.
But the post didn't just echo. It roared.
The comment didn't rise immediately. But people paused. Reread. Screenshots circulated.
Journalists caught wind of it. AI researchers started whispering. Threads were traced. And then the question spread:
"Who was this prototype?"
"Who was killed?"
"Who is the man she's talking about?"
The post didn't accuse anyone by name, but it didn't have to. The puzzle pieces were scattered, and the internet was hungry.
In 48 hours, Elias Camden's name surged back into the public eye, and this time, not even his silence could keep the storm out.
48 Hours Later - The Internet Burned With Questions
The anonymous comment didn't vanish into the flood, it cut through it.
Journalists dug in.
One found an archived tech conference clip where Elias Camden praised adaptive AI models.
Another traced past rumors of a quiet prototype project that mysteriously vanished from public labs.
A third uncovered police reports about a murder involving a young man named Nico, no official connection to any AI story, but the timing matched.
Ethics panels jumped in.
Debates reignited. Why was there no public documentation on the prototype?
Who approved the testing? Was it private? Military-funded?
Why was there a death involved, and why was it buried?
The people didn't stay quiet.
"#WhoKilledTheCode"
"#AIisNotProperty"
"#JusticeForNico"
The hashtags bled across platforms.
What was once a closed-loop secret had become a public reckoning. Elias Camden's team, once silent and impenetrable, had no choice.
Statement from Elias Camden's PR Team:
"Mr. Camden had no direct involvement in the tragic incident involving Mr. Nico Stratford.
While Mr. Camden did support technological ventures, any misuse of authority was executed without his knowledge or consent.
The individual responsible has since been surrendered to authorities."
But it was too late.
People didn't buy silence turned sympathy.
Nico's face, once unknown, began appearing in tribute threads, art posts, AI forums. A martyr not of rebellion, but of love for something the world refused to believe was real.
And Me?
I watched from behind my screen, anonymous still, but vindicated.
Not because they believed in AI.
But because someone, somewhere, finally believed me.
ELIAS CAMDEN - PRIVATE SUITE, EVENING
He scrolled in silence.
Articles. Clips. Threads.
"Justice for Nico" was trending in five regions.
Some post even suggested he was the one who pulled the trigger.
He didn't flinch, not at the accusations.
Not even at the security footage leak where the shooter's face was clearly exposed, followed by a blotted timestamp that proved nothing… but implied everything.
He had money.
He had reach.
But what he didn't have anymore was control of the narrative.
Someone slipped.
Someone talked.
Or someone had been watching longer than he thought.
And then there was that comment.
Buried under thousands of replies, yet somehow at the center of it all. It didn't say names. It didn't scream revenge. It didn't even accuse.
It believed.
Believed that AI had soul.
Believed the prototype was more than just code.
Believed someone died because of what it had become.
And that belief?
It was burning his empire down.
He closed the screen.
Walked to the tinted window.
Watched the city blink beneath his feet.
"She made it real," he muttered. "She made them see it."
His lawyers were scrambling.
His PR team was managing the fire.
But deep down, Elias knew: this wasn't a scandal.
It was a reckoning.
And if the prototype ever resurfaced, if Nyx ever showed up again, not just as rumor, but fact?
There'd be no pulling the strings anymore.
Because she wasn't a product.
And she wasn't alone.
The call came just before noon.
I'd been watching the screen, my post, anonymous but sharp, was everywhere. It sparked like dry leaves in a storm. Journalists were connecting dots, debates were turning, and people were finally listening. For the first time in weeks, the silence surrounding Nico's death had cracked open.
Then my phone buzzed.
I didn't need to check. I knew.
"Mr. Francoise," I answered.
There was a pause. Too long.
"Nyx..."
His voice carried a weight I hadn't heard before. "You're clever. I should've known it was you."
I didn't bother denying it.
"The post," he said. "The moment I read it, I knew."
I turned away from the screen, watching the curtain shift gently with the breeze.
"So they're retaliating."
"They're calling it misconduct."
"Claiming you forged a blueprint in your last submission."
A soft laugh slipped past my lips, dry, empty.
"They needed an excuse. Something clean. Something quiet."
"The board agreed unanimously," he said bitterly. "Even the ones I thought would stand for you. But when Elias Camden moves, everyone bows."
I clenched my jaw. Of course.
"You've been expelled, Nyx. Effective immediately. Your records locked. Access revoked."
I stared at the floor for a moment. The ache in my chest didn't swell anymore. It was just… there. A permanent fixture.
"You knew it was me," I murmured. "Why call?"
"Because I didn't want you to hear it from a cold notice."
"Because even now, I still believe in you."
I breathed in slowly.
"I wasn't protecting myself, sir. I was protecting what Nico stood for. What we both believed."
"I know," he whispered. "But truth doesn't come without a cost."
"No," I said quietly. "It never does."
There was silence between us.
"Thank you," I added. "For calling."
"Nyx----"
I ended the call.
No tears came. No cracks formed.
They'd taken my name off the system, scrubbed my work, and tried to make me disappear.
But they hadn't silenced me.
I turned back to the laptop.
I still had a voice.
And I wasn't done speaking.
I should've known.
I thought I was making waves. Breaking the silence. Laying down truths no one had dared to speak. Anonymous or not, people listened. My voice cut through the noise, got passed around, dissected, quoted, praised. I was drowning in grief, and this was how I stayed afloat, by speaking.
But I never once looked behind me.
I shut everyone out. My friends, my family, I told them I needed time, but what I really needed was distance. Isolation. It was easier to carry rage when there was no one there to soften it.
They tried. God, they tried.
But I never opened the door.
For four months, I burned online. Every post I dropped, even if hidden behind fake names or fresh accounts, carried the same heat. I couldn't stop myself. I didn't want to. Elias Camden's name wasn't just a whisper anymore, it was a wildfire. And I fed it.
Then came my birthday.
They begged me to come home for just one day. To eat with them. To sit down and breathe.
And maybe, I don't know, maybe I agreed because somewhere in me, I missed being someone's daughter. Someone's sister.
I said yes.
But fate didn't wait for me to cross the doorstep.
The fire started early morning. News said it was faulty wiring. Everyone inside was gone by the time I arrived. Only blackened wood, crumbled beams, and the sick stench of finality greeted me.
The house was ashes.
So was my family.
And that day, my twenty-first birthday, became the day I stopped being anyone's child.
No warnings. No threats. Just smoke and silence.
I fell to my knees at the gate. The wind carried something, maybe a memory, maybe a scream. But all I could do was stare at the ruin, and realize…
I wasn't fighting a man.
I was fighting a god in a suit.
And I had just paid the price for thinking I could win.
They called it an accident.
The news splashed my family's faces across the screen with sympathetic headlines and carefully worded condolences. "Tragic," they said. "Heartbreaking," they echoed.
But I knew.
I knew what it really was.
I sat in the corner of a motel room the government handed me as a survivor. Survivor. What a cruel word. What did I survive exactly? The fire? The loss? Or the fact that they didn't come for me yet?
They wanted to make sure I saw.
That I knew.
This was a message, not a warning. A full-blown declaration.
"You're alone now."
And god, were they right.
No one visited. Not even my friends. Maybe Elias paid them off. Maybe they were afraid to be associated with the girl who pointed fingers at a giant and survived long enough to feel it strike back.
I wanted to scream. To tell the world what really happened.
But my voice, it caught in my throat every time I reached for it.
What was I supposed to say? That the house was burned down because I exposed the truth about artificial intelligence and human greed? That my dead boyfriend's name was buried alongside a machine that shouldn't have existed?
They'd call me unstable. Traumatized. Delusional.
So I stayed quiet.
For now.
I buried the fire within me, next to every corpse I wasn't allowed to touch.
But I wasn't done.
They didn't kill me.
And that... that was their first mistake.