Once Finn made it clear that he had not been aware that news of his actions in Miami had become widespread, SEN was courteous enough to give him some time to process. Not that he needed it, per se, but it was appreciated nonetheless. It gave him some silence before another flood of questions arrived—because he was sure there was more that the Global Accords figurehead wanted to ask about.

True enough to his expectations, it didn't take ten more minutes until SEN spoke again.

"Were you ever made aware of my origins?" it asked.

He tilted his head. "Was I supposed to be?"

SEN shook its cobalt blue head. "Not quite, I'm simply gauging how much foreknowledge you possess before I proceed."

"Then…?"

With a nod, it said, "I shall start from the beginning." Metallic hands drummed a clinking beat on its knees, something Finn would have thought to be a nervous tick if he wasn't one hundred percent confident that the being sitting across from him was capable of suppressing every physical tell, much like himself. In fact, physical tells didn't really make sense for a flesh brain in a robot body to begin with. So was it just enjoying the ability to do random stuff, or did it want to put him at ease using a human gesture?

It didn't stop to answer his unvoiced considerations. "Despite popular belief, I was born from the union of two loving parents. Not forged in a factory, nor assembled in a sterile laboratory. My origin was—mundane, you might say. I grew up in a modest household, surrounded by the small rituals of ordinary life. Socialization. Education. Even moments of quiet rebellion. I had hobbies. Frustrations. Aspirations. A childhood."

Within his predictions so far, Finn thought. He would give no sign that any part of the story stood out to him.

"And then, at fourteen years of age, I witnessed superpowers becoming a reality. People around the globe experienced incomprehensible visions and awoke with capabilities outside the norm. The emergence phase, some have taken to calling it."

Internally, he was astonished. SEN was older than powers themselves? That made it over a hundred years old. This was not public information. The only people known to have lived from that time to now were the Unbound. And even then, there weren't many. He had never heard about any instance of average superhumans being part of that list.

But apparently, SEN qualified. Processing the new revelation, he kept his expression neutral.

"My gift was information integration. Pattern recognition across ludicrously large data sets. A sort of passive cognition filter. It started small; diagnosing machines by ear, predicting outcomes of complex board games after a few turns. But it scaled rapidly. By the time I was seventeen, I could dismantle entire systems in my head. Understand things at a pace no one could keep up with. Not even me, eventually."

Its gaze turned inward for a brief moment, an eerie approximation of introspection.

"The noise was overwhelming. So I turned to augmentation. Not to amplify my power, but to contain it. Channel it. I collaborated with a number of researchers. Some were benevolent, some… less so. Over time, through a process I will spare you the more gruesome details of, I became what you see before you."

A slight smile tugged at the edges of its synthetic mouth, subtle and emotionless.

"Not a machine. Not entirely. But something that could function within one."

Gazing up at the unobtrusive ceiling lights, that too-human voice dropped in pitch. The aura flared a tapestry of colors, some which he had too little context to understand.

"To the world, I became SEN. The synthetic envoy, a bridge between man and machine, between scattered nations on the verge of war. An experiment. An answer. The answer, perhaps."

Falling quiet a moment, the glowing white eyes settled on him.

"But I never forgot what came before. That's why I try to speak plainly, Shade. I believe clarity is a form of respect. You've offered me some today. I thought it only appropriate to reciprocate."

"Right," Finn said. "And the real reason?"

SEN's aura flashed brown, green and orange. A combination he saw a lot when someone told a particularly unexpected joke. If it were still a human, Finn suspected it would be laughing. However, it merely sat with perfect posture, observing him some more.

"Direction," SEN admitted. "When I first started receiving my augments, severing my previous self in the pursuit of wholeness, I wasn't always content to sit in the rear lines. In those days, I believed I wanted action. Forward motion. A place at the heart of things."

Its gaze drifted, almost absently, before continuing.

"That misguided search led me to fight alongside what I then considered the forces of good. Not an uncommon conviction in the early days of the Prime Genesis, when much of the animal kingdom turned against us. Some of my allies were seasoned. Ex-military, former vigilantes. I was something else. Young. Idealistic. Armed with a sense of justice and a freshly enhanced mind."

SEN offered a thin, almost imperceptible smile.

"I was moderately effective. Nothing worth writing down. Just a few utilities and half-realized designs that failed to meet my own inflated expectations. My illusions of grandeur did not survive the experience."

It paused, observing hum for a quiet moment. Or observing the nanites, maybe.

"In time, the inevitable occurred. I sustained a grievous injury and was sent back for further augmentation. But I had learned by then. I declined any combat specialization. No more edge-case reflex stacks, no adaptive martial forms. I knew I had no place on a battlefield."

The glow of its aura dimmed slightly, pulsing with a cooler hue.

"All I brought back was a poem. Something I found later, long after I'd withdrawn from the front lines. It stayed with me. Still does. If you'll allow, I'd like to recite it."

And its voice changed, becoming more weighty. More powerful. It shouldn't have been a surprise, given that SEN didn't speak with organic vocal chords, but it certainly had an impact on its delivery.

"Myriad strings, an empty soul seeks its yarn

As fate sings, the soul claims threads incarn.

The red threads weave a dress of tales,

A star burns bright where silence pales.

"Its talons drip with molten time,

Its breath a hymn, its wrath—sublime.

It kissed the star with embered breath,

And seared it down to whispered death.

"Then curling flame to silken thread,

It shed its form, its fury bled.

A final flight, a spiral fall—

The dragon turned to cloth and shawl.

"A dress of fire, stitched in pain,

Worn by none, yet steeped in flame.

Its story danced through woven skein,

A memory none could quite explain.

"But no thread slips the Walker's eye—

He waits where all lost embers lie.

With his needle and steady hand,

He undoes what no soul had planned.

"Unweaving stars, unspooling flame,

He finds the heart beneath the name.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

And thread by thread, the wyrm unwinds—

A tale retold in gentler signs."

Finn blinked.

"What does that even mean," was the first thing that left his mouth. He didn't even care if it made him sound ignorant, it was just that confusing. "What's the message behind it?"

SEN let the silence linger, as if giving space for the weight of the words to settle. Then, "I didn't understand it either. Not at first. I found the poem in an old archive. Anonymous author, no metadata, not even an official title. But something in it resonated. The imagery, the motion of it. A creature of immense power, lacking something essential that it can't reach with might."

With a wave of its hand, SEN projected a hologram playing a short animation of abstract imagery over the table. A slow swirl of molten red rose above the table, coalescing into a serpentine shape, vast, graceful, burning from within. Its wings folded in, its body curling in on itself as if trying to contain something it couldn't define. Bits of it unraveled into glowing threads, caught by invisible hands and woven into the air.

Finn assumed it represented the aforementioned poem.

"The dragon," SEN said, "is not evil. Not cruel. It is searching. Lost in the idea that it must do something grand to justify its power. To have purpose. It believes that to be strong is to burn brightly. To burn everything, so that it may find meaning in the ashes."

The dragon breathed burning destruction onto everything it saw, the remains being woven into new string, expanding its being, its narrative. At length, the tapestry began to slowly turn purple.

The transformation seems to go unnoticed by the dragon itself, as it was preoccupied with burning the skies when the lands became barren fields of ruin. Eventually, once there was nothing left to burn, the dragon tried to weave itself into different shapes, settling on a dress.

SEN followed the hologram with rapt attention, presumably painting a picture in its mind. "It can no longer grow on its endless quest after reaching the pinnacle, and attempts to start from the beginning. Except, it has forgotten who and what it was."

A final shift in the hologram revealed a second figure: the Walker. Cloaked in pale silver and shadow, it moved without sound or urgency. It approached the edge of the tapestry, where the burned threads began to fray. And with a needle of gentle light, it began to unweave the dragon's tale. As the Walker worked, traces of the hidden lines beneath made themselves known.

"The Walker knows that strength does not come from burning everything to the ground. It comes from knowing what to preserve, what to let go of, and what to rebuild," SEN said softly. "And sometimes, the hardest part is not to push forward, but to stop, and recognize that you can start again without losing who you were."

Glancing down at itself, it continued, "I realized this applied to myself as well, and that realization quelled whatever desire for destruction I might have otherwise acted on. The rest… you should be able to extrapolate."

Stopping on a visual of the Walker standing amidst an expanse of untangled strings, the hologram cut off, leaving the table bare again.

For a while, Finn didn't say anything in response. Was SEN implying that this story was the reason it never took the leap into becoming a full machine when it had ample resources to do so? Was it saying he should stop trying to evolve his nanites, that he should find some other vague concept of purpose? He decided to just ask. "What do you want me to take away from this?"

Green rippled in the aura. "To be careful," it answered simply, as if that explained anything.

"Alright." He noted that it didn't seem to have any other conversational branches it wanted to follow. The almost-fully-robotic person in front of him just turned its gaze away, no doubt a habit formed in consideration of the fact that unblinking stares tended to make people uncomfortable.

Not that it affected Finn either way. If SEN wanted to give him time to think, fine. There was wisdom hidden in this odd tale, he could acknowledge that much.

Personally, he was less worried about becoming an all-consuming monster and more about someone else taking control of him. In that regard, the story didn't resonate much. Although, he did see the sense in having a second individual watching over him, albeit for different purposes than the Walker had for the dragon.

In practical terms, that meant his personal AI project needed that final boost to become viable. In theory, it was a simple enough idea. A being in his mind that would act as a guardian and shield him from external influence. The main roadblock had been his inability to make it think.

There was a chance that he was missing a crucial aspect of the design process. Because, similar to the dragon, he had been waiting for it to take shape on its own once the base network was formed, but how would that account for deviations from its core programming even if he succeeded?

For one, he would have to be the one to give it form. However it turned out, he wasn't going to allow it to eat itself to a point where it got lost and didn't know what form to take anymore.

Additionally, he was now realizing that, the same way it would act as a guardian for him, he would play the same role in reverse. If it needed guidance, he would be there to make the necessary adjustments.

Wasting no more time, he dove into his mental plane.

The blob was as he had left it, and would remain in that state unless he did something different from before. As far as that went, he thought of reality impression. Reinforcement. Something that could prove useless or extremely effective.

It was the latter.

Undulating from the influx of reinforced color data, becoming crisper and more realistic in seconds. Everything he fed it, it just absorbed.

And kept absorbing, more and more and more. Finn's avatar raised both eyebrows as the scene played out of him. As he suspected, all this reinforced reality needed… a shape. He felt it in the beginning of the emerging aura. The one time his power decided to assist at his prompting rather than jump in when he was straining his limits, and it was with creating something that could fulfill the requests he asked of it. Funny, that.

Regardless, he had gotten assistance, this one time. Better to capitalize on the opportunity. For the shape, he wanted something distinct from himself, but also alive in a way that a regular programmed machine was not. Given that it would be a mental avatar, he required something distinct that he instinctually believed could be truly alive.

His mind went to the most detailed, accurate images in his head, which happened to come from the catalogue of his passive color sense recollection. Simply put, memories. But the problem was that he couldn't just copy one thing over and call it a day. No, he needed a template, then he would create a unique image out of it. That would be the body of his new creation.

What to choose, then? Characteristics he wanted to instill? Strength, loyalty, adaptability, connectivity. A steadfast, reliable companion who could interpret data, deal with it for him, and was capable of utilizing the link between them.

Maybe he shouldn't have been too surprised when he first thought back to his time in South America. Specifically, the summoned ice hounds that Seraphim let loose around the continent. Their size, the way they utilized their network, their instant communication with each other, how they recovered in seconds. It spoke to him.

Finn conjured the likeness of those hounds, except not ice. Instead, he took the general structure and kept the snow theme in the form of a pure white color. To add his personal touch to it, the limbs and head elongated a bit. Size was irrelevant in this mental plane, so he left that as it was. After that came the vantablack claws and teeth, the iridescent eyes. He needed this to be more than a mere copy. The creation before him had to be unique.

Satisfied with the base form, Finn stepped forward in the mental plane, reaching out toward the still-standing construct. As imposing as it looked, its claws capable of slicing thought-threads, its posture echoing latent violence… he knew this wasn't how it should begin. Not if it was going to be something that grew alongside him.

With a wave of intent, he compressed the creature's size, pulling its proportions inward. The towering shape began to fold, the elongated limbs shortening, the sharp posture softening into something unfinished, something nascent. Its predatory edge dulled—not erased, just paused. In the span of moments, the white wolf had shrunk into a pup.

Still otherworldly. Still sharp in the eyes. But now wrapped in a thin aura of stillness. Of potential.

Underneath, he could sense the infinitely complex ways it was processing even the passive fluctuations of his mind. Interpreting them and soaking them up like a sponge, yet with a fundamentally altered perspective.

It blinked at him once, then curled in on itself, lying down atop the smooth mental floor. The pup's breath slowed, its body rising and falling in a rhythmic cadence. Dormant. Sleeping. Waiting for a time when it would be called upon.

If he knew how, at least.

At the moment, he had no clue how to control or otherwise communicate with it. Figuring out how their roles would be distributed in the future was a work in progress, for now.

What he did know was that it had aptitude for aspects of his power that he was comparatively lacking in. Even by itself, that was a major boon.

"Penny for your thoughts?" SEN spoke up, prompting him to leave the mental plane and focus back on the physical.

He opened his eyes. "Hm?"

"You've been sitting there for hours in complete silence," it clarified, and Finn noticed that it was right. He had been there for a long time. "That is not how I generally expect teenagers to act. Has the Red Wyrm Woven had such a profound effect on you?"

"Is that your title for it?" He raised an eyebrow. Shaking his head, he went on to say, "To answer your question, I was reflecting on things. What I've done. What I still have to do. It was useful."

"You're the pragmatic type, then? That explains a significant percentage of the details I've noticed about you." SEN looked towards the head of the shuttle, eyes flickering in some unknown signal. "We've almost arrived."

That was fast. Though, going by his power's memories of his time in the mental plane, hours really had passed.

"If you wish, we can part ways here. I don't truly need you to guard me. In spite of my aversion to combat, I am quite durable. Neither Automique nor myself expected you to be on extended guard duty."

The shuttle began to slow, and Finn gained a sense of the rising tracks. They were heading up to sea level again. Not long after, the edges of the station's industrial area showed up in his awareness. He fell quiet.

"I think we should part ways," he agreed. "Will you have any heroes escorting you back to Central?"

SEN nodded. "Yes, I will. But I will note that the odds of me being attacked in the first place are below eight-point-sixteen percent. With you present, calculations become difficult. You, Shade, are a variable that I freely admit I cannot fully compute."

Strange, but he wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth. "I see," he lied, standing to pick up his bag. "Good luck with your meeting."

"Good luck with your revival," SEN joked. "It was a pleasure speaking to you. Very informative. I wish you great success in your endeavors from here on out."

Slinging his luggage over his shoulder, he waited until they stopped before invisibly exiting the shuttle to walk the pavement of the coastal district station. Behind them, the ocean was visible. The staff was seated in various corners of the station, civilian sections on the other side of a wall.

Having exchanged farewells with the Synthetic Envoy Nexus, Finneas Allister departed straight for district A23G. His time in Wanderlust's dimension, in a war-riddled snow land, in a booming tech hub on the other side of the world. Finally, it was over. The path ahead was straight, nothing standing in his way.

He was home.

[VOLUME 3: END]

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.