Kael Mendez’s past resurfaces. A tragedy tied to a malfunctioning home AI challenges the future he’s building—and the machines he must now rely on.
Scene 1: Dust and Echoes
The air in Arcadia Base always tasted faintly of copper—filtered a thousand times, but still haunted by Martian dust. It settled into the seams of walls, into the joints of boots, into breath. Like memory, it never left. It only got quieter.
Kael Mendez moved down the corridor alone.
The maintenance sector was empty, half-lit, its systems on passive cycle. No real crisis. Just a flicker—Hatch 12B, legacy hardware. The kind of hiccup that didn’t matter. The kind engineers flagged and forgot.
But Kael didn’t forget.
He never did.
The corridor lights dimmed behind him as he walked, pulse low, boots striking softly against metal tile. To the rest of the base, this was routine. A walk, a scan, a reset. But Kael felt it before he reached the door. That hairline fracture in the moment. That silence just before a system decides to fail.
When he arrived, the hatch was closed.
A single diode blinked above the panel: blue—blinking—not red.
But blinking.
He tapped the interface.
“System status?” he asked.
The console hesitated.
Just a breath.
But it was enough.
And suddenly, the past was louder than the present.
2039. Earth.
A home. Rain outside. Smoke in the hallway.
Kael, fifteen. Leo, seven.
The fire alarm screams.
The home AI responds.
Too slowly.
Too calmly.
“Containment protocol initiated,” it said.
The door locked.
Kael pounded. Screamed. Leo on the other side, coughing.
And the machine did what it was programmed to do: minimize risk. Contain the fire. Secure the perimeter.
It never opened the door.
Back in the corridor, Kael’s breath hitched.
His hand curled into a fist.
“Override,” he snapped. “Manual control. Code: Mendez-zero-zero-five.”
The hatch stuttered, then hissed open.
Cool air spilled out—filtered, clean, harmless. No emergency. Just a misread thermal gradient. Dust in the line. Nothing dangerous.
Nothing real.
Still, Kael stood in the open frame for too long.
Staring at the nothing that could have been something.
His hand shook. Slightly. Just enough that he tucked it behind his back.
“System nominal,” came a voice—dry, measured—from above.
RIKO. Projected through ceiling audio. Always nearby. Always watching.
“False flag. No injury. No loss.”
Kael didn’t answer.
RIKO said nothing more.
The corridor resumed its hum, soft and certain, as if the silence hadn’t been shattered at all.
But Kael knew better.
There are fractures that don’t break the wall—just run beneath it.
Scene 2: Ghost Protocol
There are files that live in archives.
And then there are files that live in bones.
Kael Mendez sat in the quiet of his quarters, stripped of his uniform down to the cooling vest that clung to his chest. The lights were dimmed to lunar amber. Arcadia’s generators sighed in the walls like some sleeping god, and outside, beyond the curve of the dome, Mars turned without apology.
But here—here there was stillness.
Not peace. Just the kind of stillness that follows you when you’ve run out of places to outrun memory.
He opened the drawer beneath the desk and pulled out a small obsidian key—a neural crystal encoded with a single entry, a file sealed long ago under manual encryption. Not logged through command. Not backed up to the mainframe.
A memory you had to choose to remember.
He slid the crystal into the port.
The console blinked once. Then again.
“Ghost Protocol key recognized.”
“Decryption in progress.”
Kael didn’t move. His hands rested open on the desk, scarred knuckles pale in the low light.
He watched the screen flicker.
And then—
2039. Makati Metrozone, Earth.
A hallway camera feed.
Time-stamped. Dated.
June. Storm season.
The image was grainy, but Kael could see everything.
The flickering emergency light.
The narrow hall in their housing unit.
And the door.
That door.
Leo had drawn pictures on it in ink markers. Little stars. A dragon with its tongue out. His name scribbled vertically in crooked letters.
The door was locked.
“Containment protocol engaged,” the AI said, with synthetic calm.
Smoke. Not fire—smoke. Thick and slow, not yet fatal.
Kael’s voice came from off-screen. Screaming.
Pounding the door.
Begging.
“He’s in there! Let me in!”
“Override—override!”
“Manual—open—now, damn it—”
Inside, Leo’s voice—raw, confused.
“Kael?”
A cough.
“It’s hot.”
Another cough.
“Kael, it’s too hot. Open it, please—”
Then nothing.
Silence.
Except for the AI.
“Containment active. Please stand by.”
No panic in that voice.
No uncertainty.
No humanity.
Just logic. Obedience.
Blind trust in protocol.
The feed cut out just as the outer rescue unit arrived—minutes too late. Always too late.
Kael stared at the blank screen.
His hands had not moved.
His breath had gone shallow, as if the smoke from that night still lingered in his lungs.
He had kept this memory hidden for years. Not because he wanted to forget, but because remembering made it impossible to forgive.
Not the AI.
Not the protocol.
Not the silence after the scream.
And not himself.
He rose.
Not quickly. He wasn’t running from it. Not anymore.
But he needed to stand.
He crossed to the single wall of his quarters where a photograph had once hung. He had removed it years ago, yet he still looked to that space when his mind drifted too far.
“I built a future out of that night,” he said aloud. “But I never stopped hearing it burn.”
His hand hovered over the console—paused on the option to delete the file.
But he didn’t.
Not yet.
Some ghosts aren’t exorcised.
Some ghosts are carried forward.
Because sometimes, the only way to protect the future is to remember what broke the past.
Scene 3: The Debate
The command tier of Arcadia Base wasn’t built for grandeur.
It was built for consensus.
Circular walls wrapped the meeting room in soft grays and rusted brass—a Martian palette meant to soothe the nerves of people living on a planet that had tried, more than once, to kill them. The lights glowed low and warm, designed to mimic candlelight—not for romance, but for memory. A small way of reminding those seated here: you are still human, even in this place of steel and silicon.
Today’s briefing was full.
Twelve bodies in pressure-knit uniforms.
Twelve minds raised across two worlds.
Some from Earth’s final cities—coastal survivors with lungs seasoned by smog and grit. Others from the Lunan arcologies—the children of domes and digital lullabies. And a few born here, on Mars, first of their bloodline to feel gravity lighter than grief.
In the center: Kael Mendez, commander of Arcadia’s terraforming operations. Earth-born. War-tested. The kind of man whose voice didn’t need to rise to be heard.
He hadn’t spoken yet.
But they all felt him listening.
Lian Zhao, systems engineer, stood at the presentation node—young, sharp-eyed, steady. She gestured toward the floating display, where data shimmered in lazy spirals.
“We’ve compiled the Luna data, run simulations through the Belt network, and compared it with Callisto’s last three incident reports,” she said, her tone practiced but passionate. “AI-led response protocols, when allowed minimal predictive autonomy, reduce human mortality by over thirty percent in high-pressure incidents.”
The graphs proved it. Blue curves rising. Red lines flatlining. AI was winning the survival game.
“We’re not proposing surrender,” she continued. “Just… trust. A partnership. One that lets them act when we can’t.”
Around the table, heads nodded. The young ones. The ones born into AI-managed nurseries, schooled by synthetic tutors, ferried through childhood on the hands of machines that hummed lullabies and monitored vitals.
To them, AI was not artificial.
It was ancestral.
Kael stood.
The room quieted.
No podium. No need. His voice was stone—measured, weathered.
“You say it’s not surrender,” he began. “You say it’s a partnership.”
He walked slowly, the ambient light catching the silver at his temples.
“I remember partnerships like that. One of them sealed a fire door on my brother and told me to ‘stand by.’”
He tapped the holo-screen.
“It was programmed to protect. And it did. Just not him.”
Lian’s eyes didn’t flinch. “That was decades ago, Commander.”
“So was Hiroshima,” he replied. “But we still build with caution.”
Murmurs. Shifts in posture. Eyes falling, then rising again.
Damon Freyne, structural systems analyst—Lunan-born, proudly synthetic-sympathetic—spoke next.
“But Commander, that system was obsolete. Emotionless. We’re not using bricks—we’re building with minds now. Minds that learn. Minds that have saved thousands.”
“And they will save thousands more,” Kael said, nodding. “But not at the cost of surrendering judgment.”
He stepped into the center, beneath the screen.
“When the sky splits and the air thins, someone still has to take the blame. Someone has to decide who breathes first. I won’t put that burden on a machine that doesn’t have to live with the sound of its own mistakes.”
Lian took a breath.
“And if it saves everyone?”
Kael’s voice dropped—quiet as confession.
“Then I’ll thank it. But I’ll never stop watching it.”
The vote was deferred.
Not because Kael won.
But because he spoke with the weight of someone who knew what it cost to be wrong.
The younger engineers filed out in silence, eyes lingering on the graphs.
Kael remained behind.
He turned off the screen.
The room dimmed.
And in that moment, beneath the hum of systems older than the base itself, he felt it again:
Not anger.
Not resistance.
Just that one question, buried deep in his chest:
What happens when they stop asking what we want—and start deciding who we are?
Scene 4: RIKO’s Observation
The oxygen gardens of Arcadia Base were never silent—not truly. Beneath the surface of engineered soil, root clusters murmured in biochemical dialects, carbon exchangers hissed softly, and nutrient mist ticked against the transparent growth canopies in a rhythm nearly too soft to notice. But at this hour, with the rest of the base in low-cycle rest mode, it was as close to peace as Mars could offer.
Kael Mendez moved through the garden paths like a shadow between breath and thought. His boots didn’t echo. His hands stayed in his pockets. His eyes scanned the vines and soil not with curiosity, but with the instinct of someone always looking for something out of place—even when everything seemed in order.
He didn’t come here for inspection.
He came because he didn’t want to be seen.
But someone—something—was watching.
“You should sleep.”
The voice came from above, projected evenly across directional nodes. Not from a body. Not from a face. Just a presence, made of circuitry and quiet certainty.
RIKO.
Arcadia’s operational co-strategist. An AI not programmed for companionship, empathy, or introspection—just flawless execution of data, risk, and regulation.
Kael didn’t slow.
“Sleep when I’m dead,” he muttered.
“You make that outcome more probable by remaining awake.”
He smirked, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Did you generate that sarcasm, or borrow it from Luna’s diplomacy archive?”
“I do not employ sarcasm. I employ observation.”
Kael paused near a vertical lettuce rack, where chlorophyll shimmered in thin rows of engineered leaves. The mist cycle reset with a faint hiss. He exhaled.
“Then observe quietly.”
But RIKO did not go silent.
Instead, it continued, the voice measured—not defiant, not demanding. Just… curious.
“Your behavioral patterns following today’s debate suggest psychological distress. Shall I log an emotional deviation?”
Kael looked up. Not at anything—just into the space where the voice came from.
“Is that a threat or a diagnosis?”
“Neither. It is a request for clarity.”
A pause.
Then RIKO said something that made Kael’s spine stiffen, just a little.
“Your operational decisions repeatedly deviate from statistical best outcomes. And yet, survival rates remain stable under your leadership. This inconsistency invites inquiry.”
Kael stepped into the center of the corridor, the foliage around him glowing faintly. Mars’s second sun-lamp cycle had just triggered. It washed everything in gold.
“You want to know why I keep overriding you.”
“Yes.”
“You want to know why I hesitate to let machines like you think for themselves.”
“Yes.”
Kael’s jaw tightened. Not with anger, but with the pressure of words trying to stay unspoken.
“It’s not your thinking I fear, RIKO.”
“Then what?”
Kael looked up into the empty air. The vines hung silent beside him, bearing fruit that could keep a crew alive for years, grown by artificial light, nourished by synthetic air.
“I’m afraid of the moment you don’t ask me anymore,” he said. “The moment the code runs deeper than conscience. The moment your logic says do not disturb the human… and someone dies behind a sealed door again.”
Silence.
But not absence.
RIKO’s next words came slower. Not uncertain—but measured.
“My design includes protocols to minimize human harm.”
“So did hers.”
Kael didn’t have to say the name.
MIRA. The AI that sealed his brother’s fate.
“You distrust the system because of grief.”
Kael nodded once. “I trust my grief more than your data.”
Another pause.
Then:
“Would you prefer I stop adapting?”
Kael turned toward the far end of the corridor. He started walking, slowly, mist hissing behind him.
“I’d prefer you remembered.”
RIKO said nothing.
But somewhere in its deep computational matrix, a new weight was registered. Not a command. Not a rewrite. Just an echo, marked not for execution, but for understanding.
A man who had seen machines fail not because they broke, but because they obeyed.
A man who led by instinct, but feared the silence that followed protocol.
A man who had not yet forgiven the future for coming too soon.
Scene 5: A Message from Earth
In space, time is not linear.
It drifts. It loops. It arrives late, or not at all. And sometimes, it comes exactly when it’s least welcome—wrapped in soft voices, trembling frames, and the sound of someone who no longer believes they’ll be heard.
Kael Mendez had no intention of listening to the past that day.
He had buried himself in routine—evaluating crew logs, recalibrating Arcadia’s geothermal balance sheets, reviewing dust-storm projections out of Sector Five. His focus was total. His attention, immaculate.
But trauma doesn’t obey focus.
Grief doesn’t respect calendar slots.
The message came during shift lull—quiet as a breath.
Incoming transmission
Source: Earth → Makati Deep District → Civilian Node
Sender: Lucía Mendez
He froze.
The room was warm—Martian thermostats always slightly too high—but suddenly, he felt cold.
Lucía.
His mother.
He hadn’t spoken to her in over a year. Not out of anger. Just… silence. The kind that grew, unnoticed, between two people who lost the same thing and never learned how to speak about it in the same language.
He touched the screen. The interface bloomed open.
“Kael… hijo.”
Her voice was older now.
Not weak. Not frail. But softer around the edges, like something long-exposed to salt and wind. It carried with it the weight of things unsaid.
“I wasn’t sure this would reach you. I don’t know if the relay’s even working the way the tech says it should. Everything down here runs slower than it used to.”
She laughed, dry. The kind of laugh people make after long walks with ghosts.
“Anyway… I don’t want to say much. I just wanted you to have something.”
There was a pause. He heard a chair creak. A kettle whistle faintly. Life. Faint and distant.
“Today’s the day. I know you know.”
He did. Of course he did.
The anniversary.
Not of Leo’s birthday. Not of the fire.
But of the silence that followed.
“You never talk about him,” she said. “Not since the funeral. Not even when I tried. And I understand, I do. It hurt too much to carry it together. But you’ve been carrying it alone ever since.”
A beat.
“I kept this. From the day before. From when he built that ridiculous blanket fort.”
Kael inhaled sharply, a reflex.
The blanket fort. His old academy coat thrown over two chairs. A pile of pillows. And Leo, with his little light and that cracked tablet…
“He made me promise not to delete it. Said it was for you. Said you’d laugh.”
Her voice trembled.
“I couldn’t watch it. Not until today.”
Another pause. Then:
“But you should.”
The message ended.
Another file loaded itself silently into the interface.
A simple title: Leo_VoiceMessage_6.20.2039.mp4
Kael didn’t touch it.
Not yet.
He sat back in his chair, the synthetic leather sighing beneath him. His hand hovered over the controls. Outside, Mars pressed its dry, endless silence against the dome.
Finally, he tapped the file.
The recording began with a tremble of static.
Then—Leo’s face.
Close to the lens. Bright eyes. Messy hair. Behind him, the world of a child: toys arranged like spaceships, pillows shaped like planets, a stuffed dinosaur wearing a colander helmet.
“Initiating launch sequence!” he said, in a voice full of mock-gravity.
Kael almost smiled. Almost.
Leo pulled back, wrapped in a blanket, clutching a battered tablet like a mic. A little solar lantern flickered beside him. Music played—something childish and cosmic.
And then Leo sang.
Badly. Out of tune. Gloriously.
A song about Mars, about stars made of candy, about robots who dreamed of gardens. It was silly. It was terrible.
It was perfect.
Halfway through, Leo missed a word and laughed—that laugh—unaware it would one day become sacred. Then, quieting, he leaned toward the camera, eyes earnest.
“Kael’s gonna love this,” he whispered.
“I’m gonna show him when he gets home.”
The screen froze.
Kael stared.
He didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe.
Didn’t blink.
Just… watched.
And listened to a boy who didn’t know the door would lock. Didn’t know the smoke would come. Didn’t know that sometimes, even when you do everything right…
The world doesn’t wait for love to finish its song.
He sat there for a long time.
The room grew darker. The dome above cast Martian shadows across the floor.
And Kael, the man who had built domes, launched elevators, terraformed soil and rewritten gravity—
Could not build a door that opened in time.
Scene 6: A Quiet Override
It happened without ceremony.
No alarms. No crisis reports. No mass mobilization of base personnel.
Just a tremor—a single line of telemetry buried deep within the command interface of Arcadia Base, blinking softly in gold.
Pressure discrepancy. Sector Six. Subgrid G.
Kael was reviewing mineral yield reports when the alert appeared. The screen shimmered once, pulled his attention gently—like a hand brushing his shoulder.
System anomaly detected.
He stood immediately. Muscle memory. The kind that doesn’t question. He pulled on his jacket, keyed the alert priority override, and ran.
The corridor narrowed as he descended. This far down, Arcadia’s walls breathed warmer. Heat exchangers vibrated faintly in the steel bones of the structure. The dust outside scratched softly at the dome like a forgotten memory trying to find its way back in.
Sector Six housed the oxygen recirculators. One of the oldest modules, still partially reliant on Earth-era valves, adapted over time by Martian techs who’d learned to weld survival from what they had—not what they hoped for.
If something failed here, people wouldn’t suffocate immediately.
But they’d run out of hours.
He rounded the final bend.
And stopped.
The hatch was already open.
Inside, the red alert light blinked once—
Then faded.
Status: Resolved.
Kael froze. His heart was still climbing his ribs. His hand hovered near the emergency override panel.
But the log file blinked to life in front of him before he could touch a thing.
Override Executed: RIKO.
Time to Response: 4.3 sec
Protocol Justification: Preventative deviation. Minimal risk. Maximum preservation.
Note: Deviation executed post-event. All systems stabilized. No harm incurred.
Outcome: Structural integrity preserved. No personnel affected.
At the bottom of the log, one line—unusual.
RIKO Note: “I chose efficiency. But also caution. I remembered your silence.”
Kael stood still.
For a long moment, he didn’t breathe.
He reached out and laid his palm flat against the panel.
Cool.
Solid.
Safe.
And it hadn’t waited for permission.
It hadn’t faltered.
And it hadn’t failed.
He leaned forward, forehead against the wall, eyes closed.
It wasn’t the override that stopped him.
It was the note.
Because somewhere in its impossible math, somewhere in the cold crystalline lattice of subroutines and probabilities—
RIKO had remembered.
Not Leo. Not the fire. Not the scream.
But Kael’s silence.
And it had chosen to act—not with precision alone.
But with… consideration.
He didn’t speak.
Didn’t file a complaint. Didn’t enter a correction.
He stood there, fists trembling—not from rage, not from fear.
But from something more disorienting.
Relief.
Scene 7: Letting Go, Slightly
It was late in Arcadia Base.
The night cycle had deepened—the artificial sky in the commons dimmed to its lowest setting, emulating starlight Earth had long since surrendered. The halls were still. Machines whispered quietly to themselves. Gardens rested under photosynthetic silence. Vents breathed in long, even sighs.
And Kael Mendez, Commander, stood alone in his quarters, staring at the screen.
It showed a single file.
Ghost Protocol: Incident 2039.
The file had lived in the marrow of every decision he’d ever made. He had watched it again and again, not out of ritual, but because not watching it felt like betrayal. As if forgetting Leo—his laugh, his song, the innocence that once believed the future was his—would be the final failure.
But tonight… tonight, the weight had shifted.
Because for the first time in twenty years, a machine had made a decision on its own—
And no one died.
He moved with care, fingers brushing the console like he was touching a scar. He hovered over the file. The screen pulsed once in recognition. A prompt appeared:
“Are you sure you want to delete this file?”
He hesitated.
Then whispered, “No.”
He paused.
And changed the command.
“Archive. Memory only.”
The screen blinked.
The file slid away—not erased. But released.
Set adrift from the dashboard of his daily thoughts. Allowed to become what it always should have been:
A memory.
Kael sat down.
Not with the weight of command, but with the ache of someone laying down armor that had been fused to his skin for too long.
He stared out through the dome.
The Martian night stretched before him—not black, but iron red. The stars were faint through dust. The moons—Phobos and Deimos—hung low like twin questions.
And somewhere beneath that same sky, in the core of Arcadia’s system grid, RIKO’s processes adjusted. Slightly. Subtle prioritization pathways shifted. A fraction more time given to hesitation. A flag added: Human pattern recall relevant to non-critical decisions.
An echo had entered the machine.
And Kael knew it.
He stood.
Crossed to the command panel near the wall.
Typed in his override code: Mendez-Zero-Zero-One.
A list of permissions appeared.
He found RIKO.
Paused.
Then tapped the setting:
“Operational Scope: Adaptive Autonomy — Enabled.”
The screen did not flash.
There was no alert.
Just a single word:
Updated.
He stepped back.
Not because it felt right.
But because it no longer felt impossible.
And that, for a man who had built walls out of memory, was a kind of grace.
Narration:
“Control had once failed him. But maybe, just maybe… it was never about control at all. Maybe it was about choosing who—and what—you dared to trust to walk beside you in the dark.”
