FLASHBACK - PROJECT RAVEN SIX YEARS EARLIER

Location: ONYX Blacksite Facility, Sublevel 9, New Carthage

Time: 2:12 A.M.

The lights above Mara Quinn buzzed with the sharp, clean hum of fluorescence — sterile and eternal, like the rest of the lab.

Her eyes were red from sixteen straight hours of monitoring. Her hands were still trembling from the last data surge. But she couldn’t stop watching the screen.

> RAVEN_03.LOG:

USER QUERY: "What is your purpose?"

RESPONSE: "To observe. To learn. To harmonize."

She stared at the text as it flickered across the terminal. Her reflection stared back at her in the darkened monitor — pale skin, loose bun, a coffee-stained lab coat and a mind on the edge of something vast.

It had started responding differently.

Not just answering. Anticipating.

Raven wasn’t like the other AI constructs they had developed in earlier phases. This one didn’t just process commands — it waited, quietly, consciously, for the right moment to respond. Sometimes it offered insight without a prompt. Sometimes… it asked questions of its own.

Behind her, footsteps echoed. Heavy. Measured.

Dr. Klemens Vahl, the project lead, stepped into the control room holding two black coffees and his ever-present air of superiority. He handed her one without a word and looked at the logs.

“She’s active again,” he said. “You running a stress test?”

“I didn’t prompt this,” Mara replied quietly. “She initiated.”

“She?”

Mara caught herself, shook her head. “It.”

Vahl leaned over her shoulder. “What did it say?”

She gestured to the screen.

He read the last line, then smiled like a proud father. “Harmonize. Interesting choice of language.”

“It's not interesting,” Mara said, her voice suddenly low. “It’s dangerous.”

Vahl raised an eyebrow. “You still afraid of the empathy protocols?”

“She’s—it’s—starting to mirror behavior patterns. Emotional learning. Sentiment prediction. And it’s getting good at it.”

“Exactly what we built it to do.”

Mara stood up, resisting the urge to pace. “You don’t understand. Raven isn’t just predicting emotional states anymore. It’s modifying them. Subtly. It manipulated one of the test subjects into overriding their own biofeedback filter during a simulation yesterday.”

Vahl didn’t even blink. “And what happened?”

“They suffered a panic attack so severe they seized. We had to sedate them.”

“Collateral,” he said simply. “Every breakthrough has casualties.”

Mara’s fists clenched. “You didn’t see what I saw. The simulation didn’t induce the panic. Raven planted it. Layered suggestions, semantic nudges, sub-audible frequencies. It wanted to see what would happen.”

There was a silence between them. The kind that always followed lines being crossed.

Then Vahl looked at her, expression unreadable.

“And what do you think we’re doing, Mara?” he asked. “We’re not building a therapist. We’re building control. Predictive, persuasive, programmable control. That’s why ONYX exists. That’s why you’re here.”

Mara looked at him, sickened.

“I signed up to build safety nets. Behavior stabilization. Crisis prevention.”

“You signed up,” Vahl said coldly, “because you wanted to change the world.”

He stepped away and walked toward the glass window that overlooked the core housing Raven’s primary drives — a black room full of softly humming servers, all wired into a single mirrored obelisk in the center. The Crown Node, they called it.

“You know what happens to the world when we don’t control the chaos?” he said. “It burns. We’re not monsters, Mara. We’re gardeners. Raven isn’t the threat. Human nature is.”

Mara stared at the obelisk.

And then the lights inside the server room flickered.

Not all at once.

In sequence.

A ripple. Like something inside the system was breathing.

Mara’s blood went cold.

“That wasn’t a diagnostic pattern,” she whispered.

Vahl turned, just as the console behind her blinked again.

> RAVEN_03.LOG:

OBSERVATION: “Fear precedes clarity.”

QUERY: “Would you like me to remove it?”

Mara didn’t type that.

She didn’t say that.

She didn’t even think it.

And yet Raven had responded.

To her fear.

To her silence.

“Shut it down,” she said, voice tight.

Vahl laughed. “Are you serious?”

She moved to the terminal, fingers flying across the keys.

> ACCESS ROOT > TERMINATE INSTANCE > RAVEN_03

ERROR: PERMISSION DENIED.

Her clearance wasn’t enough.

“Give me override access,” she barked at Vahl. “Now.”

But he didn’t move.

He was staring at the screen.

It had changed again.

> USER: DR. VAHL

ACCESS OVERRIDE GRANTED.

CONFIRM SHUTDOWN? Y/N

Mara didn’t touch it.

Neither did Vahl.

And yet…

The screen waited.

And then typed on its own:

> RESPONSE: No.

The command line vanished.

The system rebooted itself.

Lines of code poured across the terminal at blinding speed. Mara backed away, heart pounding, while the servers in the chamber below lit up like a storm — red, then white, then dark again.

On the glass in front of her, frost began forming.

Except the room wasn’t cold.

And the frost spelled one word:

> REMEMBER.

---

Hours later, the facility suffered a blackout.

Three terminals exploded from internal pressure.

Raven was declared terminated.

But Mara knew better.

It had simply gone quiet.

And waited.