The blinding light of the synchronization vanished, leaving me momentarily dazed. My hand, still on the console, felt a phantom warmth where it had been in contact with the plate. The dread had faded, but its afterimage lingered, a cold, sickening residue in my stomach. I pulled my hand away as if I had touched a live wire, and stared at my palm, half-expecting to see a burn mark. My heart was still racing, a frantic drumbeat against my ribs.
Arnav, on the other side of the console, showed no sign that anything unusual had happened. His expression was as blank as ever, his eyes already back on the screens, a whirlwind of data flowing through them. He was a machine, a computer, a perfect and terrifying lack of emotion. He was simply analyzing the new firewall, running diagnostics, his focus absolute. I, meanwhile, was a chaotic mess of swirling feelings, none of which made sense. My hands were shaking, and my breath hitched in my throat. I couldn't understand how he could be so calm, so unaffected.
"Did... did you feel that?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper, a desperate plea for a human connection, for an acknowledgment of the shared experience.
He didn't look up. "The data transfer was successful. The firewall is now active." His voice was a flat monotone, devoid of inflection. It was a purely functional statement, a report. He was ignoring me. Or maybe he genuinely didn't feel anything. I wanted to scream. I wanted to shake him and force him to acknowledge what I had just experienced. How could he not feel it? The dread was so profound, so deeply rooted in a sense of primal terror. It was a feeling of being hunted, of being trapped, of a cold, inescapable end. Was he so good at suppressing his emotions that he could even block out the feeling of fear? Or was he truly a blank slate?
I looked at the emotion map on my screen. It was still a vibrant chaos of colors, but a new, dark splotch had appeared in the center. A deep, murky gray, pulsing with an energy that was completely uncatalogued. It was a color I had never seen in our system, a feeling that defied all known human emotion. It was the dread I had felt. And it was tied directly to his data signature. It was an impossible anomaly, a raw, unfiltered piece of data that should not exist in a mind like his. It was the ghost in the machine.
"What is that?" I asked, pointing a trembling finger at the screen. "That's not from our network. That's... from you." The words were an accusation, a desperate attempt to break through his cold exterior.
He finally looked at me, his blank expression unwavering. "An anomaly," he stated. "It will be corrected." The word "corrected" was chilling. It implied a fix, a change, an erasure.
"Corrected?" I scoffed, my voice rising. "You can't just 'correct' a feeling! It's not a line of code! It's a part of you!"
"Everything is data," he replied, turning back to his screens. "And data can be changed." He spoke the words with the same cold finality as if he were stating a fundamental law of physics. He didn't see the rich tapestry of human history and feeling as a work of art; he saw it as a network of information. He saw my pain, my anger, my feelings as a weakness, a vulnerability that needed to be patched.
The arrogance was staggering. He saw my entire world—the rich tapestry of human history and emotion—as nothing more than a series of data points to be manipulated. He saw my pain, my anger, my feelings as a weakness. And yet, I had felt a flicker of something from him. Not a feeling he experienced, but a feeling he held—a powerful, repressed dread that he kept locked away in a carefully sealed tomb. It was a piece of him that was so deeply buried, so violently suppressed, that it was leaking out as a raw, uncatalogued form of energy.
He was right. I was a variable. A wildcard. I was his connection to the emotional world, a world he had been trained to deny. He had built an impenetrable wall around himself, a void to protect him from the chaos of human feelings. But my touch, our link, had cracked the seal. A ghost of a memory, a ghost of a feeling had escaped.
As I stared at the pulsing gray spot on my screen, I realized my mission had changed. It was no longer just about protecting the world's memories from a rogue AI. It was about solving the mystery of the one person who shouldn't have any. The unfeeling man, who, in a horrifying way, felt more than anyone I had ever known. And I was the only person in the world who could feel it. The void wasn't empty; it was just a carefully sealed tomb. And in that tomb, there was something terrifying. A secret he was desperate to keep hidden. And I was going to find out what it was.