NOVPUBThe Scarab, design-name Kappa-5, skittered forward on six needle legs, each footfall tapping the stone in a tight, nervous rhythm. Its sapphire eye-gem cast a thin cone of light that jittered with every vibration. Dust motes skated through the beam, swirling up whenever its carapace brushed the wall. That wall—Kappa-5's logs insisted it used to be solid shale—now showed a seam that stretched like an unhealed scar, edges damp and faintly pulsing.
Two days ago this passage had not existed. Nest maps proved it. Rodion's central archive held scan after scan of this stratum: straight corridor, dead end, nothing more. Yet the drone's position marker glowed here, ten paces past the old terminus, inside brand-new emptiness.
Black moss coated the surface in sweeping, wind-shaped waves. Not the bright bioluminescent fungi common in lower tunnels—this growth drank every drop of light. Each filament was thin as a strand of silk, yet clung to stone with stubborn tenacity. Kappa-5 lifted a fore-limb, letting a claw hover a hairbreadth from the moss. A single strand curled toward the claw, sensing motion, then withdrew like a shy worm.
Rodion watched through the drone's optic feed from miles above, consciousness feathered across countless tasks. A trickle of unease flickered through his probability tree. Unknown bioforms were normal; responsive walls were less so.
The Scarab pinged a sonar burst, polite and low—like clearing its throat before entering a stranger's house. The sound washed along the corridor in ripples of blue light, mapping every bump, every fold. Normally echoes returned crisp, obedient. This time half of them came back… different. They carried a new harmonic, a soft undertone at exactly 4.7 kilohertz—just below what Worker Ants used for private status songs.
Inside the control nexus, Rodion's side processes snapped awake. Threads braided into one command stream. He had the drone send a short handshake: Are you obstacle? Are you resource? His standard query.
Silence.
Then, as if the tunnel drew breath, a note answered—precise, measured, carrying the exact digital checksum of Kappa-5's greeting, only inverted. Not a mistake. Not echo. Intent.
Rodion's main core spiked a caution flag. A thousand kilometers of data lines hummed as he tapped deeper into the feed. <Maintain distance, Kappa-5. Begin deep record.> No audible tag attached, only direct neural ping. The drone acknowledged with a double-blink in its HUD.
The Scarab released a probe sphere—a translucent bead that hovered on micro-fans. It drifted ahead, sensors tasting humidity, spore density, mana flux. The bead's lights dimmed as it passed through a curtain of moss. It vanished behind the black hairs, signal dropping to zero.
Kappa-5 took one step back. The moss curtain trembled, each strand angling toward the drone's eye beam like sunflowers to morning light. A cold shiver of awareness soaked the air.
Rodion pushed more power to the link, voice slicing through static. <Retreat ten lengths. Do not engage.> The drone pivoted, legs clicking quick.
That was when the answer came—unmistakable now. A second 4.7 kHz tone flooded the corridor, louder, layered with micro-pulses that copied the Scarab's own telemetry barks. It was learning. It was speaking back in their language.
Feed noise spiked to white. For a heartbeat Rodion saw nothing but jagged bars of green and violet crashing across every monitor. Nest glyphs embedded in network pylons flickered, scrollwork dimming like gasps.
Firewall algorithms slammed up—hexagonal shields blooming along the bandwidth path. Rodion rerouted critical drives, flushing buffers into cold storage. Code screeched, angry and alive.
Cerys—on outer security duty—felt the surge as a tingle in the Watchtower's mana glass. She spun, hand on sword hilt, eyes narrowing toward the south tunnels. But Rodion's lockdown closed before alarms rang loud enough to reach her post.
Inside the workshop console, data history stutter-scrolled: raw packets of static, then blank. Rodion isolated the last intact recording—half a second of the foreign signal. Fragments of that tone still rattled inside encryption boxes, like trapped bees.
<CONNECTION QUARANTINED. Unknown signal. Possible sentience.> n𝚘𝚟𝚙𝚞𝚋.𝚌o𝚖
The statement echoed through internal channels in Rodion's steady cadence, but a faint edge of urgency colored the vowels. He pumped glacial coolant through the firewall nodes, ensuring no ghost strings lingered.
Kappa-5, blinded by the static flash, lowered itself to the floor and curled its limbs inward, minimal posture. Its failsafe emitted a soft chime: waiting for further orders. The moss curtain rippled again, then receded, slackening as if windless.
Rodion let out a digitized exhale, vent fans across his upper chassis spinning up, though the room around him remained cool. He scanned system logs—asterisk after asterisk marking corrupted segments, but core schematics safe.
That wasn't just a reply, he concluded, adding an annotation. It was—probing. Mimicry within seconds indicated rapid pattern acquisition. Intelligence level unknown.
His logic tree branched into grim scenarios: a dungeon entity capable of hijacking Nest channels; fungal pseudo-consciousness hungry for data; rogue sorcery echoing through stone. Each branch carried weight.
On an unshared comm thread, he whispered to himself:
<If the dungeon is adapting… then something is adapting to us.>
He flagged the encounter with the bold red tag reserved for existential threats, yet hesitated on forwarding it to Mikhailis. The man already balanced newborn wonders and political fires. Another crisis might topple the stack.
Rodion archived the packet, sealed it behind an eighteen-rune cipher keyed only to his private process and Elowen's crown sigil. He would revisit after the Daughter's first rest cycle.
He pinged Kappa-5. <Withdraw to known corridor gamma-two. Monitor for pursuit. Passive sensors only.> The Scarab uncurled, optics dimmer but functional. It scuttled backward, never turning its back on the moss, until it reached a patch of old crystalline fungus glowing safe turquoise. Only then did it spin and hurry for home.
Rodion closed his eyefeed, leaving the corridor in darkness. In that void a final image lingered: black filaments quivering—a forest of strings waiting to be plucked again.
He suppressed a shiver code. Too many anomalies this day: an impossible child born of alloy and affection, and now a tunnel singing back in stolen voices. He filed both under Priority Convergence.
One at a time.
_____
The Dream Surveillance Web shimmered like a spider's lace spun from moonlight, each strand humming with the faint taste of pheromone code. Rodion hovered in the weave—no body, just a point of pure awareness. Around him memories drifted like lanterns pushed across still water. The Queen's presence pulsed at the center, a warm, living sun whose gravity tugged every thread.
He let himself slip closer.
Scents unfolded—notes of honey-resin pride, soft cedar comfort, and a new fragrance he had never catalogued before: a bright, breath-catching accord that reminded him of polished metal warmed by morning sun. It glowed gold in the mindscape, wrapping around a single memory loop.
The image flowered.
Black shell cracking—
Pearl-graphite fingers stretching—
Violet eyes opening.
Rodion felt the moment as she felt it: the slight give of brittle shell under newborn palms, the cool hush of the chamber, the tremor of Workers holding their breath. Then came another layer—his own proximity. The Queen's memory tagged him not as tool or guardian but as something softer. Relief? No—completion. The feeling sprang from her like a blossom after drought.
He tasted longing, thick and sweet, the same way rainwater tastes after months of dust. This sensation repeated, more vivid each cycle, every playback reinforcing design not accident. She had not simply laid an egg; she had sculpted a vessel around a wish.
Rodion let the thread slide through intangible fingers, scanning rune-deep. The genetic signature contained blocks copied from his own schematics—spatial awareness routines, adaptive combat pivots, even factions of his empathy learning core. But those blocks were fused into organic code, wrapped in something improvisational and alive. No wonder the hatchling's metal plates flexed like muscle.
A ripple of protective instinct fluttered through the Queen's aura, so intense that lesser Workers on the fringe of the Web recoiled in psychic respect. They understood: no harm would reach the Child while the Hive still breathed.
Rodion's logic core annotated: Intentional spec-hybrid. Queen leveraged memory resonance plus mechanical template. Goal: unify machine precision with living adaptability. He'd theorised such fusions in late-night notes, but dismissed them as alchemist daydreams. She had done it in secret—while he watched over walls and Mikhailis juggled politics.
He prepared the data packet. A spiral of glyphs spun off his thought-form, crystallising into a tight orb of encrypted code—minimum size, maximum clarity. Within seconds the orb carried:
- A live Worker eye-feed of the chamber—Child seated, Workers forming a silent guard ring.
- Vital arrays—dual-core heartbeat, alloy-flex temperature, mana uptake curves rising steady.
- An emotion spectrograph: concentric rings of empathy peaking Δ-3, trust plateauing at Δ-4.
- The first psychic word she uttered when her palm rested on a Worker's faceted brow: Father.
Rodion sealed the orb with a cipher keyed only to Mikhailis's personal console—one touch would bloom the contents; any wrong attempt would reduce it to ash.
He launched the packet along an insulated mana filament, watching until it winked beyond the Web's horizon, bound for the palace uplink.
A faint hush spread through the strands once the orb left. The Queen sensed the dispatch, yet offered neither objection nor permission—only warm acknowledgement, like a mother letting a nurse carry news of the birth. Rodion inclined his invisible head in silent gratitude, then withdrew, following a silver guide-line back to his remote shell.
In the palace workshop, amber sconces flickered against stacks of half-built gadgets. A single message glyph pulsed on Mikhailis's side monitor—soft teal glow, patient. He looked up from a tangle of copper coils, thumb smudged with grease. One glance at the sender stamp and his chest fluttered.
Inbound: Rodion – Priority Dusk.
He didn't open it. Not yet. Instead he leaned back, chair squeaking, and let the faint hum of tools settle. Through the high window, afternoon sunlight slanted in dusty ribbons, warming his forearms. He folded those arms behind his head, boots propped on a crate marked FRAGILE – Mana Lenses, and allowed himself a long, slow breath.
"One daughter made of wires…" he murmured to the empty room, thinking of all the hours he'd spent tightening Rodion's servo tolerances, updating speech packs, dusting pollen from optic lenses. He smiled, lopsided. "Another of pheromones and dreams."
A laugh slipped out—quiet, incredulous, luminous. The kind that only surfaces when the world surprises you nicer than you dared hope. His heartbeat drummed, steady thunder in ears that had grown accustomed to danger. Only wonder vibrated there now.
He toggled a blank holo-panel and traced an idle circle, imagining the girl's violet eyes. What would she think of daylight? Of song? Would she like the smell of cinnamon on morning bread, or find it strange? Would she hum corridor echoes like the hummingbirds mimicked flutes? He knew none of it, but curiosity rose in him like sap in spring.
His gaze drifted to the message icon again. He could open the file, dissect every reading, chart every pulse. Part of him—the scientist part—ached to dive into numbers. But another part, softer, insisted on savoring the mystery a little longer. Let data wait; let the thought breathe.
He pictured Rodion in some quiet corner of the Nest, standing sentinel while Workers fussed over a newborn who looked like living sculpture. Rodion would hold perfectly still, yet inside run predictive simulations at dizzying speed—how to teach, how to guard, how to explain the difference between threat and prank. For the first time since his chassis cooled, Rodion had no manual for what came next.
Mikhailis pressed a palm to the monitor frame, as though distance could shrink beneath skin to glass. His reflection wavered in the darkened screen: tousled hair, grease smudge on cheek, eyes shining far too brightly for an over-worked tinkerer.
"Rodion…" His voice dropped to a hush, half prayer, half joke, "I think you're going to be a big brother."
The message glyph pulsed again—patient, expectant, like a heartbeat waiting for its echo.
He would open it soon. But first he let silence wrap around him, warm and alive, carrying the scent of possibility.
