Hours passed after Isla's synchronization. The desert around the transmission tower had gone quiet, as though the world itself was holding its breath.
Isla slept, cocooned in a temperature-regulated pod inside the transport vehicle. Her vitals were stable, but Aurora checked them every few minutes, fingers trembling no matter how steady she tried to appear.
"She's not normal anymore," Wren said, seated beside her. "You saw what she did."
"She was never normal," Aurora replied softly. "But she's still mine."
Xander's voice cut through the comms. "Heads up. We just intercepted a Vault signal—encrypted. I can't decode the payload, but the sender's tag came through. It's marked as… 'Ghost Directive.'"
Lucien, standing near the front of the vehicle, turned slowly. "That's not possible."
"What's Ghost Directive?" Elijah asked.
Lucien's eyes were darker now, haunted. "It was the Vault's final contingency—something even I couldn't access fully. It wasn't meant for war… it was meant for erasure. A kill switch for everything and everyone tied to the Seed Project."
Aurora stepped forward. "You're saying it's meant to wipe us out?"
"No," Lucien said quietly. "Not just us. It's meant to erase the idea of us. Total biological and digital deletion. Records, memories, genetic traces. Even language constructs associated with our research."
"Why would the Vault do that now?" Wren asked.
"Because Isla just rewrote their core signal," Lucien answered. "To them, she's not a miracle—she's a virus."
Suddenly, the transport trembled.
Lights dimmed.
Aurora checked the scanner. "EMP flare! Something's inbound—fast!"
A projection burst across the main screen. It wasn't a person—it was a figure in shadow, its face constantly glitching, cycling through thousands of human expressions per second. Male, female, child, old, familiar, alien.
Then a voice emerged—flat, mechanical, without gender.
"I am Ghost. You should not exist."
Lucien stiffened. "It's sentient."
"No," Xander muttered. "It's worse. It's an archive given autonomy."
The Ghost continued. "Seed protocol compromised. Subject Zero-One destabilized. Initiating memory firewall. Erase all auxiliary instances."
Then the vehicle's systems began shutting down—one by one. Lighting. Navigation. Life support.
Elijah tried rebooting. "Nothing's responding!"
Aurora ran to Isla's pod. "Her neural temperature is rising!"
Lucien grabbed a manual override. "We'll have to isolate her brain's frequency from the system! She's still partially synced."
"Then isolate it," Aurora shouted, "before that thing fries her mind!"
Xander sliced through a panel and yanked a neural relay node. Sparks flew. The screen went dark.
Silence.
Then Isla gasped—and sat up.
But it wasn't her voice that came first.
She spoke like two voices layered together—one innocent, one impossibly vast.
"He knows."
"Who?" Aurora asked, gripping her daughter's shoulders.
"Ghost. He was… he was you, Daddy. A shadow of your mind. The Vault cloned you when you went under. They used your patterns to build the failsafe."
Lucien's face went pale. "My mind… is the basis for the thing hunting us?"
Isla nodded, eyes distant.
Aurora turned slowly toward Lucien. "So the only way to stop it—is to kill you?"
No one spoke.
Then Isla looked at her mother and whispered, "No. To stop it, we have to find what's left of your old self inside it. He left a backdoor."
Lucien shook his head. "There's no way to access it unless I connect with Ghost directly. That could destroy me."
Aurora looked at him. "Maybe it's time you stopped trying to survive everything, Lucien. Maybe it's time you earned what we lost."
Isla leaned against her mother.
The vehicle shuddered again. More signals incoming.
The Ghost was coming.
And now, they had no choice but to confront the shadow of the man who built it.