Night settled over the city like a velvet curtain drawn slowly across a window. In his small apartment, Kairo Vale sat cross-legged on the floor, a notebook open before him. The glow from his desk lamp cast soft shadows across the pages, where half-formed ideas and scrawled diagrams sprawled out in uneven lines.
For the first time since his awakening, he wasn't running or overwhelmed. He was observing.
Organizing.
Learning.
He clicked the pen and titled a clean page: **What I Know.**
**1. Percentage Fluctuation**
Numbers above people's heads. Always shifting. Sometimes rapidly, sometimes slowly. He couldn't tell exactly what they meant—emotional state? Confidence? Health? But they responded to thoughts, interactions, intentions. A subtle barometer of a person's inner world.
**2. Auras**
Color fields around individuals. Faint, but clearer the more he focused. They weren't constant. They pulsed and changed with mood, truth, lies, hidden desires. A deep red meant burning drive. A bruised purple signaled inner pain. Pale gold? Confidence—earned or faked. There was depth in these hues, far more than surface emotion.
**3. Threads**
Lines of colored energy. Some stretched outward from people and linked them to others. Some trailed off, leading to locations, objects, histories. He had three main threads he knew instinctively—Elira, his sister. His parents. Familiar and grounded. But dozens more hovered around him now, faint and dim. Opportunities, secrets, maybe even danger.
**4. Object Memories**
By holding certain objects, he could glimpse the moments etched into them—a conversation in a pen cap, a touch in a coffee mug, a betrayal in a phone. The deeper the connection to the object, the clearer the image. But these visions took a toll. They tugged at his brain like static.
**5. Alternate Futures**
This was the most difficult. When he stared too long at a person or a moment, he sometimes slipped—briefly—into another possibility. A future that hadn't happened yet. One conversation veered a different way. One truth exposed. One decision altered. These moments froze time, stretching seconds into stillness.
They came unbidden. Or when he forced it, the strain on his mind was real. Migraine-level pain. Nosebleeds. Fatigue.
**Conclusion:**
He wasn't ready to go full-throttle. Not yet.
Kairo closed his eyes for a second. The silence in the apartment helped. He could hear the ticking of the wall clock, the hum of the fridge, and under it all, that familiar thrum inside him—the low, quiet beat of something alien yet now a part of him.
He wrote down one final line:
**Use threads tomorrow to track secrets in known areas. Low-risk. Low-load.**
A simple task. A start.
He set the notebook aside and stretched, joints cracking, brain foggy from overuse. He hadn't even touched the new limits today—no deep dives, no forced visions. Just passive observation. Still, he felt it: the ache in his bones, the tingling in his spine. His body adjusting. Evolving.
He yawned, curling into bed without even changing out of his clothes. Sleep wrapped around him like a warm coat, dragging him down.
He didn't see the faint pulses beneath his skin.
Didn't hear the distant echo of foreign coding in his cells, rewriting.
Didn't notice that the world he saw now was only the beginning.
Because even in stillness, the data pulsed.
And in the dark—he was growing stronger.