The technician’s excitent was not subtle.
It didn’t co out as volu, because he knew where he was and who could overhear him, but it ca out in movent.
His hands wouldn’t stay still. His pace kept changing as if his legs couldn’t decide whether to sprint or restrain themselves. Even his breathing carried the sa energy as soone trying not to laugh during a sermon.
Aerenyx walked beside him without matching his excitent.
It was like a dog whose tail was wagging so fast it made the rest of his body move.
Shaking his head, Aerenyx kept his posture loose and his face neutral, the sa mask he wore around humans when he couldn’t be bothered to correct their assumptions.
The man’s happiness ant nothing. The man’s importance ant less. He was a set of legs leading Aerenyx toward a location that might place him nearer to Sera, and that was the only reason he tolerated the chatter.
"You’re cleared for this," the technician said again, like repeating it would make it more true. "Special clearance. They don’t let just anyone watch."
Aerenyx glanced at the badge clipped to the man’s chest, then at the door ahead.
The pass system here was layered the way humans always layered things when they couldn’t actually enforce power on the people they feared. Plastic and lanyards and codes and polite signage, as if a different color strip could stop anyone who decided not to stop. It was theater built on bureaucracy, and bureaucracy built on the assumption that everyone accepted the ga.
Aerenyx accepted nothing.
He followed anyway.
They passed through a checkpoint where two guards stood with rifles held too casually. The guards scanned their badges, glanced at Aerenyx’s face a fraction too long, then looked away as if their instincts had whispered sothing they didn’t want to hear. Aerenyx did not give them the satisfaction of reacting. He walked through like he owned the corridor, because in every aningful sense he did.
The technician didn’t seem to notice.
He was buzzing, eyes bright, jaw tight with contained excitent. "Stage Four," he said, voice dropping as if it were sacred. "It’s never— I an, no one has ever stabilized at Stage Three. Not once. This is the first ti and now we are going to witness Stage Four ourselves."
Aerenyx’s gaze drifted to the walls as they walked.
The deeper levels were built differently. Less paint. More reinforced seams. Panels designed to be replaced quickly. The air itself was regulated with a precision that told him the facility had long since accepted that sothing down here could not be controlled by locks alone.
Containnt always changed architecture.
"So you think it worked," Aerenyx said.
The technician’s grin flashed. "I know it worked. The numbers are clean. The thresholds are consistent. The response curve—" He cut himself off like he rembered Aerenyx didn’t actually care. Then he leaned in again, unable to help himself. "They’re calling it a milestone. People are coming in from other sectors just to see it."
Aerenyx made a small sound that could have been agreent if anyone wanted to hear it that way.
He didn’t ask what the subject was. Humans liked to talk around their own fear, dressing it in labels and stages until it sounded manageable. Stage One. Stage Two. Progress charts. Nothing about it changed the fact that they were slicing into things they didn’t understand and pretending the word ’research’ made it noble.
If they wanted results, they were approaching it poorly.
They reached another door, wider than the others, guarded by two n and one woman in clean uniforms. Their stance was different from the corridor guards. Less bored. More alert. They watched the technician, then watched Aerenyx, then chose not to ask questions they didn’t want answered.
The door opened with a soft hiss, like a held breath released.
Warmth bled out first, along with human scent. Then sound. Then light.
The amphitheater was already crowded.
It wasn’t a theater in the comforting human sense. It was a bowl of tiers carved into concrete and steel, the seating built for bodies that didn’t need comfort, only a place to stand and observe. The center was a wide circular floor, sterile and bright, with a platform of articulated tal waiting under overhead arms that hung like patient instrunts.
Too many people had been allowed in.
They packed the tiers shoulder-to-shoulder, necks craned forward, tablets and clipboards held close as if hugging their own importance. So spoke in murmurs that carried anyway. Others watched in silence, faces tight with restrained hunger, the kind that didn’t co from appetite but from the need to witness sothing that would make them feel included in history.
Aerenyx stepped into the room and stopped, not because he needed to but because the crowd forced him to.
Bodies pressed from behind, the flow of arrivals still feeding into the space. He could feel the heat of them. He could sll them. He could hear the uneven rhythm of their breathing and the way it shifted as they tried to share air without admitting they were uncomfortable.
The technician leaned close, grinning like a child showing off a trick. "Isn’t it sothing?"
Aerenyx looked at the center platform again.
Restraints lay open, neat and waiting. The platform itself could change configuration, sections sliding and locking into place with chanical confidence. He recognized the design type. Humans loved modularity because it made them feel prepared. They built chanisms that could beco anything, then congratulated themselves when it beca the sa thing again and again.
The technician pointed out people in the tiers like introductions mattered. "That’s Dr. Sato from Refinent. And that’s Havel’s superior, see? And those two are from Hematology, they never leave their wing."
Aerenyx tracked the faces with minimal interest.
One of them slled wrong. Another held themselves too still in a way that suggested borrowed skin. Aerenyx did not care enough to na which Sin it might be, and he cared even less about the humans who stood beside it as if that proximity ant prestige.
The technician’s voice softened. "They’re all here because it’s never happened before."
Aerenyx finally looked at him fully.
The man’s eyes were shining. His hands were clenched together so tightly his knuckles were pale. His entire body looked like it was trying to vibrate out of its own skin, as if he might explode into applause the mont sothing moved in the center.
He would have been insufferable if he weren’t so easy to ignore.
"Tell what Stage Four ans," Aerenyx said.
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