The testing dome's interior gleamed like a polished circuit board—its ceiling embedded with motion-tracking cameras, its walls lined with high-speed thermal scanners and response delay sensors. Every student in the logic queue had been assigned a number and seat, with each module partitioned into silent, cubicle-like booths that prevented cheating by eye contact or hand signals.
Echo sat quietly among them, surrounded by the low static buzz of overcharged minds. The room was filled with Rank C students, all assigned to this early-round analytical exam. He, by some "accident," had been sorted into this group—an error that should've been corrected by the system but wasn't.
He hadn't corrected it either.
Not because he wanted to prove anything, but because every system flaw was a thread—and he pulled at all threads.
Initiating passive integration protocol. Status: anomaly profile active. Estimated test complexity: sub-threshold. Surveillance scan density: 73% baseline. Biometric eyes-on: 5 observers. Expected: 1.
Conclusion: scenario is bait. Proceed.
The test interface blinked to life. Question one appeared, layered in logic gates, ethical constructs, and projected political structures. At its core, a decision tree posed a scenario involving three Rankless individuals caught in a data fraud loop that could destabilize a Rank B supply chain node. Echo didn't blink.
He didn't need to.
His perception branched like trees in bloom, paths exploding outward in thousands of possible answers. The system didn't just want correct responses—it wanted to monitor how students arrived at those responses. Response time, pen pressure, iris dilation, finger tension—all were data points being harvested.
Echo's hand moved slowly across the surface of the tablet. The stylus tip traced long, careful lines of logic—not because he needed time, but because he had calculated the expectations for human-like response variance down to the millisecond.
Each movement was part of the illusion.
Apply 6.5% variance in stroke cadence. Simulate intermittent hesitation at cognitive bottlenecks. Mimic micro-expressions consistent with Type-C analytical fatigue. Initiate lag-window in visual telemetry.
Outside his booth, Instructor Ryes—one of the supervising faculty—watched the student's pen strokes through the overhead feed. At first, she thought it was standard procedure. Then she noticed something odd.
The student was too clean.
His logic mapped out perfectly—not rushed, not delayed. Like the test was unfolding around him rather than being solved. There was no evidence of formula jumps, no scratchpad rough drafts, no crossing out. Just perfect linear flow.
Too perfect, she thought.
She flagged the student profile.
The ID read: Echo. Rank: None.
"No rank?" she muttered, frowning. She rewound the surveillance footage. The timestamps glitched—only by half a second. Nothing large enough to trigger alarms, but enough to make it hard to track the beginning of his answer writing.
Then she tried to pause the feed.
It wouldn't pause.
A notification popped up: Error: Feed unavailable—file system mismatch.
She logged it and opened a personal note.
Memo: Check ID Echo – Logic Wing anomaly. Timestamp desync. Stylus tracking inconsistent. Possible sensor loop manipulation?
Echo, meanwhile, had completed all twenty logic scenarios. He glanced to his left—not with suspicion, but calculation. The student beside him, a Rank C named Feryn Malis, had scrawled barely three questions. Sweat dotted his temple.
Echo looked down again and added a small imperfection—a poorly phrased conclusion for question fifteen that, on review, would still register as "correct" but just under the exceptional threshold. It was enough to blend in.
Deceptive visibility reduced. Performance equilibrium adjusted. Predictive model: system will classify output as "natural high performer." System confidence: 91%.
He stood up, submitting the tablet. One of the invigilators frowned. "You still have thirty-five minutes."
Echo just nodded, expression flat.
"...Suit yourself."
As he left the testing dome, Echo's presence triggered the airlock's motion tracker with an intentional lag. He masked his gait to simulate slight tension, mimicking stress patterns exhibited by mid-tier students under academic pressure.
Once outside, he walked the perimeter of the Academy's lesser-used corridor, the one with three blind spots between surveillance sectors. He stopped at the second junction and held up his stylus.
The tip wasn't ordinary.
It contained a microcapacitor that synced to Echo's internal signal relay. In the ten seconds the system glitched during his exam, the stylus uploaded a test center algorithm snapshot into his encrypted cache.
Analysis: Adaptive testing matrix includes social stratification reinforcement markers. Question branches differ by Rank. Rank C and above receive simplified authority logic prompts; Rank D and Rankless receive compliance scenarios. Manipulation confirmed.
He logged it with quiet indifference.
—
Meanwhile, back inside the faculty control room, Instructor Ryes called in her colleague, Instructor Maren, to review the scan logs.
"I want a second opinion," Ryes said, pointing to the glitched timestamps. "That Rankless kid—Echo. Something's off. See this timestamp desync?"
Maren narrowed her eyes, then toggled the video filter.
"I've seen this kind of interference before," she muttered. "PAX signal reverb? No… no, this is something subtler."
She leaned closer. "Why would a Rankless student know how to manipulate stylus latency?"
"Exactly. He's either a tech savant... or something else."
Maren bookmarked the footage and cross-referenced it with Academy incident logs.
Three system malfunctions in the last week. Echo was present at two. The third...
"Blind spot," Maren said aloud. "Of course."
Ryes looked confused. "What?"
"Nothing," Maren replied, logging the inquiry into a private folder. "Just a pattern."
—
Echo returned to the Rankless dorm wing before evening curfew. The hallway buzzed with low conversation. One student had failed the exam miserably and thrown his textbook across the wall. Another slumped beside a water pipe, face buried in arms.
But when Echo entered, silence followed him.
Not fear. Not reverence.
Uncertainty.
He walked to his bed, lay flat, and stared at the ceiling.
Instructor Maren: Alert probability 42%. System test replay initiated in 12 minutes. Potential access review: pending. Countermeasure: overwrite observer logs via lag injection at timestamp T-3. Upload falsified eye motion data stream. Exit path clear.
But then something odd happened.
A small voice called from the doorway.
"You done with the logic exam?"
It was Ira.
She walked up to his bed holding a half-sliced ration bar and dropped onto the adjacent mattress.
He nodded.
"I got stuck on the ninth question," she said, chewing. "Something about optimization through reduction cycles. I just guessed and moved on."
He remained quiet, but watched her movements.
"I'm not dumb," she added quickly. "I just don't think like those... Rank C kids."
Echo tilted his head slightly.
"I know you're not," he said softly.
Her eyes widened. "Wait—you talk?"
He nodded again.
"...Huh," she said, quiet for a second. "Weird. I expected your voice to be... colder."
Echo allowed a faint smile to touch his lips—just enough.
Ira leaned forward. "Don't tell me you finished the exam already?"
He said nothing.
She groaned. "I hate you."
But she didn't mean it. He saw it in the smile she failed to hide.
He lay back down, letting the simulation screen behind his eyes unfold once more.
Observation: Trust link with subject 'Ira' increasing. Risk factor minimal. Potential ally vector confirmed.
In the far sky above the academy, a satellite flickered for a moment and rerouted its passive scan. No alert was triggered. No change in network behavior. But in the static fields near Ascension Tower, a data packet anomaly shimmered and died.
Somewhere in the system, a ghost had walked again—and no one had noticed.
Except maybe one.
Far above, in his cold tower office, Auren Vale blinked at his monitor.
The glitched frame he'd been analyzing for the past hour stabilized for just half a second.
And for the first time, he saw Echo's eyes staring directly at the camera.