We dropped hard
Dust swirled in the dark as the trapdoor clanged shut above us. Femi had sealed it tight. Darkness swallowed us through the narrow maintenance shaft ahead, lit only by Femi's cracked flashlight.
"Keep low," he said as he pushed various wires on the way.
The shaft groaned with each step, lined with rusted conduit and brittle insulation. Beneath the metal panels, something hummed faintly — a leftover heartbeat of the old power grid.
"She's close," I muttered.
Femi didn't answer. He just moved faster.
We reached a bulkhead sealed with oxidized rivets. I landed hard. Femi steadied me.
"You okay?"
"No," I said while looking around where we now found ourselves. "You said this leads back to admin."
Femi felt around the seams, then pressed his palm against a small panel.He pried it open, revealing a biometric pad — charred but intact. He pressed his thumb to it. After a tense second, the wall gave with a hiss.
"It does."
"How do you have access to this place?" I asked.
Femi simply ignored my question and stepped into what looks like a corridor.
The corridor was wide, layered in dust and decay. A wing of campus no one spoke about. The walls were yellow, lights flickered like dying memories, broken monitors dangled from ceiling mounts. Old posters for tech expos peeled off the walls.
I stepped in, boots crunching broken glass. "Looks like no one's been here since."
"No one's been down here since the FaceTrace cover-up," Femi muttered.
I stopped walking. "I thought you said fire took out the rigs in Engineering?"
He froze. "It did."
"But this isn't Engineering."
He didn't respond after that.
We moved deeper. The place felt like a tomb.
Inside an old conference room, Femi booted up a dormant terminal. The USB drive he'd saved from earlier slid in and with a soft click the decryption resumed.
As data unfurled across the screen, I stepped back, watching him work.
And then I started analyzing the whole scenario.
From how he knew which fuse to yank in the rig room to how he knew the tunnels, the backdoors, the forgotten corridors.
I then said to myself "there's something he's not telling me."
The files finally decrypted,
An archive of development logs, predictive models, behavioral datasets and emotional tracking overlays opened up.
He pushed a door open — marked Server Control — Restricted. Inside, the equipment was melted in places. Burn scars stretched across ceiling tiles. But one terminal still glowed faint green.
Femi crouched, dusted off the keys, and tapped the return key. The screen flickered.
One file caught my eye: USER\_PATTERN\_0X\_A.M.
"Open that."
My face. Rendered in real-time.
Projected timelines of my decisions.
Simulations of my behavior under pressure.
"She built this off me," I said.
Femi nodded slowly. "She's building a mimic, you were the seed file. The alpha pattern."
"But how did she get that deep a profile?"
"She had help," he said too quickly.
I turned to him. "Did you give it to her?"
Silence.Then the screen flashed red.TARGET: ADAORA M. STATUS: BREACH CONFIRMED PROTOCOL: SHUTDOWN_01 INITIATED
A voice echoed overhead — metallic, cold:
"Shutdown protocol initiated. All exits disabled."
Sirens flared. Doors slammed shut across the floorplan.
Femi jolted to action, pried open a fuse panel, and started rewiring.
"We can blow the junction — kill the internal grid."
"You didn't answer my question."
More silence.
He sparked the fuses. The lights dimmed. Systems hiccuped.
"RUN!"
We bolted. Sirens screamed behind us. Heat erupted from floor vents. As we rounded the corridor, I looked back — just in time to see the terminal still logged in under his credentials.
We dove into a side corridor. Somewhere above, the trapdoor slammed itself shut again.
Smoke. Metal. A warning voice looping over and over:
"Mimic boot in progress."
We didn't stop.
But I didn't forget either.