Chapter 1 – Static
The Codex pinged twice.
Elias didn't flinch. The sound was quiet — low-pitched, clinical, like a heartbeat passed through a filter of glass. His display flashed:
[Codex Status: Synced. C-Rank: 47% toward promotion.]
Almost halfway. Almost meaningless.
The lecture hall buzzed with low murmurs and simulated daylight. Seventy students in monochrome uniforms sat behind curved desks, eyes locked on floating projections of biochemical entropy models and philosophical annotations. At the front, Professor Halberd's voice droned like white noise, too slow for Elias, too fast for most of the class.
Elias's desk hummed as his Codex adjusted screen contrast based on his eye movements. He ignored it. His focus was elsewhere.
A single line of text had appeared in the corner of his display:
[Query Rejected: Insufficient Clearance.]
He frowned. He hadn't submitted any query.
With a thought, he opened the system's log. Nothing. No recent searches. No flagged requests.
Weird.
He reached for his console, tapped the reset pad—just as the text changed again:
[REDACTED MATERIAL LOCATED — Estimated Trust Level: Unauthorized.]
He blinked. A glitch?
No. The Codex didn't glitch. Not without reason. Not unless someone tampered with it.
He shut it down.
Then the Codex turned itself back on.
> Accessing Restricted Archive…
The room around him felt suddenly quiet. Like the light had dimmed without anyone noticing.
Then, without warning, lines of text flickered across the screen:
Entropy Misclassified. Event logs falsified. Directive 72 initiated.
Then another message, smaller, fainter — almost like a whisper inside his mind:
Truth buried. Reset cycle engaged.
Elias stared at the screen, motionless.
The Codex had never shown him anything like that. No one's did. Not at C-rank. Not without clearance levels four tiers above him. And certainly not mid-lecture on a Thursday.
He checked the lecture feed. No one else seemed to notice.
Everyone's Codex was behaving as expected. Color-coded modules. Auto-summarization of the professor's words. Routine. Controlled.
But not his.
His Codex had just pulled back the curtain — even if only for a moment.
When class ended, Elias didn't move. Students filed out. Professor Halberd spoke briefly with a few A-rankers near the front, then left without acknowledging the rest.
Elias was the last one there.
He reopened the Codex. The screen was blank. Clean. Like nothing had happened.
[Codex Status: Synced. C-Rank: 47% toward promotion.]
Exactly as it was before.
Exactly as if he'd imagined it.
But he hadn't. He was sure of that now. The phrasing, the timing, the repetition of words like "reset," "directive," and "misclassified" — they weren't random errors. They were part of something.
Something intentional.
And something hidden.
Elias leaned back in his seat, fingers folded, heart steady despite the sudden cold in his chest.
A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.
He didn't know where the phrase came from. But for the first time in his life, he started to wonder if everything he had ever learned — every rule, every paper, every ranked theory — had started with that exact lie.
And if so…
What happened to the first person who tried to tell the truth?
Chapter 2- Locked Door
The lecture hall was empty now.
Elias stood in the back row, still staring at the Codex interface glowing faintly on his desk. It had wiped everything. No logs. No trace of the corrupted message. Just clean menus and a quiet hum.
But he remembered the words.
"Truth buried. Reset cycle engaged."
The phrase clung to him like static.
He shut the Codex down manually, pressed the magnetic lock, and slipped his datapad into his satchel. Outside, the artificial daylight of the North Wing corridor felt sterile, even harsh. His boots clicked lightly on the polished floor as students passed in groups, debating hypotheses and simulation results like nothing had happened.
Of course they hadn't seen it. The system never slipped in front of a crowd.
But why him?
He took a left at Archive Level B — a seldom-used floor lined with decommissioned labs and old document scanners. The Academy didn't delete everything; some things they just buried. Here, most doors were sealed with digital locks, tagged red:
[RETIRED MODULE – ACCESS DENIED]
He stopped at one. Room 12-B.
The label read:
Restricted Historical Record – Entropy Theory Revision Series 43A
Status: Clearance Level 5+ Only
Entropy again. That was the subject from the lecture when his Codex had glitched. Coincidence?
He tapped the panel.
[CLEARANCE REJECTED – INSUFFICIENT RANK]
Expected. He tried again, this time slipping a learning bypass key into the port — an old debugging tool used for tutoring modules. Not illegal, just frowned upon.
The screen flickered.
For a half-second, the lock light changed yellow. Then:
[System Lock Reinforced. Trust Score Updated.]
His blood went cold.
It wasn't just blocking him. It was watching.
"Clever," a voice said from behind.
Elias spun, pocketing the key.
A girl leaned against the wall, arms folded. Short platinum hair, B-rank badge pinned to her coat. She was familiar — top of the Biogenetics cohort. Kiera Hale.
"You're not the first to try that," she said calmly. "That lock's been reinforced since before I enrolled."
Elias said nothing.
Kiera stepped forward and tilted her head slightly. "Let me guess: your Codex glitched?"
His silence confirmed it.
She smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes. "Careful. The system flags patterns. You dig too deep, it doesn't just block you — it watches how you react when it does."
"How do you know that?"
She shrugged. "Because mine glitched, too. A year ago."
That caught him off guard. "And you're still here?"
"Barely," she said. "But I learned. Don't act like you've seen anything. Don't search the same thing twice. And never — ever — try to open a sealed archive without a cover task."
Elias looked back at the door. The red light blinked slowly now, as if waiting.
"What's in there?" he asked.
"No one knows," she said. "But entropy shows up on more censored logs than any other topic."
She turned to walk away, then paused. "Piece of advice, Ward. If the system shows you something, it's not an accident. It's a test."
"A test of what?"
Kiera looked over her shoulder.
"Whether you're smart enough to pretend you didn't see it."
Back in his dorm that night, Elias couldn't sleep. The words on the Codex screen echoed in his mind — not loud, but persistent.
Entropy Misclassified. Directive 72. Truth buried.
He turned on the console light, sat down at his desk, and brought up the Codex again. It glowed in soft blue.
He opened the query log and scrolled back.
There was nothing there.
But he remembered.
And this time, he typed it manually:
"Directive 72"
The screen blinked once.
Then the response came:
[NO RECORD FOUND]
[QUERY FLAGGED FOR REVIEW – TRUST LEVEL ADJUSTED]
He closed the Codex, heart now fully awake.
So it was real.
And he had just made the system aware that he remembered it.