The floor beneath me no longer felt passive.
It hadn't moved—not in the traditional sense. No grinding of panels. No shifting geometry. But something alive stirred beneath the surface now. Not sentient. Not intelligent. But reactive. The shimmer in the circuit-like symbol pulsed faintly every time I shifted my weight, as though sensing not just presence, but intent.
Patch remained close. Her form slightly hunched, biomech plating still scorched and cracked. Her HUD flickered faintly in my peripheral awareness, but she said nothing. She didn't need to. I knew she was watching the thread with the same cautious reverence I felt. We'd found something the system hadn't meant to expose.
Not yet.
I moved my uninjured hand along the edge of the symbol. No tactile feedback. No ridges. No haptics. But the shimmer followed. The grooves lit under my touch like heat-sensitive ink—fainter than anything I'd seen in the debug room. This wasn't part of the visible system.
It was underneath.
I lowered myself fully, legs folded, breath steadying despite the ache in my ribs. The raw pain from earlier had settled into a familiar throb—a background hum of survival. My mind felt clearer than it had in hours.
Maybe because I finally had something to do.
"Okay," I whispered. "Let's see what you are."
I started mapping.
Not with tools.
With pattern.
The circle was partial—just under two-thirds of a ring—with its open ends tapering into broken hash lines. Within it, faint radial spokes extended outward. Unevenly spaced. Chaotic at first glance.
But not random.
I began counting lines. Estimating angles. Sifting with my perception. My thoughts pulled into shape like puzzle pieces falling into place.
The circle was a clock.
No—more than that. A sequence dial. The kind used in first-gen network lockouts. Rotating permission maps. Manual access indexing.
"Patch," I said, still tracing lines with my eyes. "I need a count of the primary intervals. Every spoke that lines up with a break in the outer ring."
She didn't ask why. Just answered.
"Seventeen."
I blinked. "That's not a standard protocol count."
"No," she said. "Seventeen is prime."
That stopped me.
I ran my hand over the ring again. Seventeen divisions. Two-thirds of the circle revealed. The rest hidden. My blood had only opened part of the symbol. But it was enough.
Seventeen segments. This wasn't for balance. Not some mechanic for a player to crack.
A system like this would never use a prime number for visual symmetry.
This wasn't meant to be solved.
It was meant to be secured.
I stared at the radial pattern longer, realising it wasn't decorative. Not even code-facing. It was internal. A buried protocol—so old it only responded to physical anomaly. Blood. Touch. Persistence.
Hard-coded bypasses.
Like the ones I used to stumble into as a teen, modding ancient network games. Devs back then didn't trust their own UI layers. They'd embed logic in the walls. Geometry as safeguard. Ghost access paths only they could understand.
"This isn't a user thread," I murmured. "It's a backend call. A fail-safe. No one was ever meant to see this."
Patch crouched beside me. Her tail curled around her forelegs—feline, even in her biomech form. "You are not user class," she said simply.
"No," I agreed. "I'm not. That's why it's reacting to me."
I stood slowly, knees crackling in protest. My hand still throbbed, blood mostly dried now—tacky and soaked into my glove. I flexed it once.
Then pressed my palm flat to the ring.
This time, I didn't think yes.
I felt it.
A quiet alignment. Not in code.
In logic.
The system didn't flash a message or summon a menu. It did something far more subtle.
Far more dangerous.
The shimmer contracted.
The grooves folded inward like the aperture of a mechanical eye. Each spoke rotated counterclockwise, micro-adjustments clicking into place until they formed a new pattern nested within the ring.
[PATTERN RECOGNISED]
[CONTEXT: LEGACY BACKDOOR]
[ACCESS CONDITION: NON-STANDARD ENTITY // THREADLESS CLASS]
[OVERRIDE CHALLENGE MODE: ENABLED]
[AUTHORIZATION ATTEMPT: PENDING]
Patch leaned forward, voice low. Precise. "That's not a prompt. That's a handshake."
A cold drop rolled down my spine. "It's testing my logic path."
"No," she said. "It's testing your identity."
That stopped me.
I looked down at the glyph still forming—recursive, fractal, endlessly self-referencing. The system wasn't asking who I was.
It was asking how I thought.
I crouched again, narrowing my eyes. "Then let's give it something worth remembering."
I lowered myself slowly—careful. Deliberate. These weren't just symbols anymore. They were the bones of something old. Buried deep. Never documented. Never shared.
Only passed down in conversation. In late-night half-jokes between devs. The kind you only understand if you've bled into your codebase and prayed the system wouldn't crash again.
I thought of Lou.
The way she used to talk about exploits not as cheats—but as rescue lines. "There's always a way in," she once told me, half-laughing, "if you know the shape of the lock and the rhythm of the lie."
She'd said that during a brutal patch rollback. The night everything fell apart and we had to rebuild the integration module from scratch.
She'd stayed up with me.
Helped me fix it.
Helped me build again.
And now here I was, in a world rewritten by what we never finished.
And the lock?
It was bleeding.
I looked down at the glyph. It had shifted again—no longer rotating, but refracting inward. Each logic ring now formed a loop, but one corner blinked in broken rhythm. Not a glitch.
A heartbeat.
It was echoing me.
Reacting to blood. Posture. Stress patterns. Input logic.
Comparing my identity to something stored and long forgotten.
Patch tilted her head. Her voice, hushed but steady:
"Legacy profiles required biometric engagement to prevent override abuse. This thread recognises you not because you exist, but because you endured."
I blinked. "You mean it needs proof I bled for this?"
"No," she replied. "It needs proof you stayed."
I didn't answer.
Instead, I reached forward. Touched the edge of the inner ring.
The floor didn't move.
But the air thickened around me. A shimmer curled outward like static trapped in syrup. Lines of code flickered at the edge of the glyph. Not readable. Not instructional. Just structure. Column headers. Variable names. Definitions.
This wasn't an interface anymore.
This was architecture.
And I was inside it.
No longer a threadless anomaly.
I was an interrogated variable.
My hand curled into a fist. The glyph pulsed once more—soft, steady.
"Then ask," I said aloud.
"And I'll answer."