Long before magic returned to the world, before nuclear fire painted the sky and rebirthed the Earth into ash and desperation, there was a little girl with cold eyes and a perfectly quiet mind. Her name was Aether.
She was four years old when she was taken. Not kidnapped, not snatched from alleyways or torn from her mother's arms in some cinematic crime. No, it was quieter. Legal documents, forged papers, and blank-faced bureaucrats signed her life away to a "research institute" posing as a philanthropic arm of a global orphan assistance program.
Behind it all, hidden under kilometers of concrete and bureaucratic red tape, was the true operator: the Utopian Institute. A shadow organization with no allegiance to Eucon, Olyndria, or any known faction only to an ideal.
The creation of the perfect human.
Aether was brought to a place known only in restricted transmissions as Facility 7-K, buried somewhere in the broken bones of a pre-apocalyptic nation. It was quiet, sterile, and smelled of recycled air and burnt silicon. Every wall was white, not from cleanliness, but from the absence of identity.
From her earliest days, Aether displayed what they called "Accelerated Neuroplasticity"—the ability to absorb and reconfigure knowledge like a sentient computer. She could read entire textbooks by age five, understand the basics of astrophysics by six, and solve unsolvable paradoxes by seven. But brilliance was not her gift.
Her gift was completeness.
Unlike other gifted children, she lacked imbalance. She understood science, but also philosophy. She was a master of logical deduction, but also emotional manipulation. At age eight, she was writing economic models that could rival entire national think tanks. She could listen to music and then reproduce its mathematical structure with eerie accuracy. Her mind held no specialty, because it held everything.
But what truly terrified her handlers was that she never once smiled.
Doctors tried everything. Praise, reward, stimulus. Nothing could ignite joy in her eyes. She was cold, efficient, and eerily polite. "Perfectly docile," Mobius once wrote in his personal log. "Too perfect."
Mobius was the overseer of the Utopian Institute's Project Prometheus—an effort to guide humanity toward a Type II civilization by breeding and shaping post-human minds. Aether was not the only child there, but she was the only one who made the others seem irrelevant.
Some of the researchers called her "the Eve of Futurekind."
But something they did not anticipate was the firewall in her soul.
Unseen, unfelt by any scan or metric, Aether harbored a resistance. She had created an alter ego within herself a psychological mask that mimicked compliance while quietly shielding her emotions and identity.
She smiled when required, nodded when tested, excelled in every challenge, but her core remained untouched. It was this that saved her.
It was Auriel who cracked the illusion.
Auriel, the only friend she had in those silent halls. She was not as brilliant, not as cold, but she saw her. She whispered things to her when no one was listening, left her small drawings folded under her pillow—little reminders of childhood.
One night, during a blackout drill, she showed her a door—a hidden passage in the understructure of Facility 7-K. There they found records. Not just of experiments. But of funding, goals, and worst of all, projections.
Projections of Aether leading a new humanity—not as a leader, but as a tool. A living mind fused with machines. A sovereign intelligence with no soul.
It was during this moment that something awakened. The voice. Gentle, distant, like the sound of wind over snow.
Aetherius.
It did not call itself that then. It was simply a whisper, a feeling of ancient memory echoing through Aether's soul. It was not external. It was her. Or a version of her. A protector, a remnant, a light.
It warned her. Showed her the truth. That she was not bred for greatness, but bound for it. Chains made of golden ideals. Shackles forged by utopia.
And so she smiled.
The next months passed in calculated quiet. Aether continued her role, but began preparing. She encrypted communications. Altered code. Left false leads. When Facility 7-K prepared to move into Phase 5—neural integration trials—she triggered a system meltdown.
She and Auriel escaped. Not through the front gates, but through old water systems and tunnels. She carried only what mattered—a prototype of the Vault-Boy, a storage device she had secretly rebuilt using data from ancient military satellites, and a sealed file: "File M.001 – Project Eden".
That was the last time anyone saw Facility 7-K.
It was reduced to molten slag three hours after their escape.
Officially, it never existed.
Back in the present, Aether stood in the silent white space Taiji had created, the memory still echoing in her chest like a song she hadn't sung in years. Taiji had seen it all—through time, possibility, or her connection to something greater, she had witnessed the fire that forged Aether.
"You are not a girl," Taiji said, softly. "You are a mirror. A reflection of humanity's desires, fears, and future."
Aether didn't respond. Her hands were trembling.
"That's why Mobius feared you," Taiji continued. "Because you could rewrite the script. Not with violence. But with understanding."
She waved her hand and Aether's Skill Tree manifested again—this time, it glowed with golden threads. The branch marked Mentality now pulsed with a new node: Disorder Control: Phase Alpha.
Aether touched it. It was warm.
"This isn't power," Taiji whispered. "It's liberation."
For this time, Aether smiled.
There was no time in this place.
The whiteness that swallowed Aether came without warning, like the turning of a page in a book she hadn't realized she was writing. It wasn't emptiness—there was substance to the void. It pressed gently against her skin like fog, yet it bore no weight. There were no corners, no ground, no ceiling. No source of light, and yet everything was bright.
Taiji was nowhere in sight.
Aether stood still, her hand slightly raised, as if the moment had been interrupted in the middle of a breath. Her chest rose and fell. The silence was not quiet—it hummed. It was the kind of silence that only existed before the birth of sound.
Then, a voice came—not from behind or ahead, but from within and all around.
"This place holds the mirror you've been too afraid to face."
Aether blinked. The words were not Taiji's—not entirely. They were softer, deeper, ageless. They echoed with a tone that felt… familiar. Something inside her trembled.
Aetherius? she thought.
No response.
She looked down and saw her own reflection stretching outward beneath her feet—distorted, yet unmistakable. It wasn't a floor, not in any traditional sense. It was as if she were standing on a giant pool of consciousness, and her own mind was gazing back up at her.
Then, shadows began to move beneath the surface. Flickers of memory. Of pain.
The scene dissolved around her.
She was a child again.
Small hands. Pale. Trembling.
She sat in a white room not unlike the one she had just been in—but this was real, tangible, sterile. Cameras blinked from the corners. Scientists in coats whispered behind soundproof glass, their mouths moving in silent calculation.
Aether sat cross-legged on the cold floor, staring at the toy blocks arranged in a chaotic pattern in front of her. One of the scientists had said, "Arrange them to form a tesseract."
She did it in four seconds. She didn't smile.
"Subject displays high proficiency in visual-spatial reasoning beyond predictive metrics. Temporal comprehension increasing rapidly. Language patterns suggest adaptive overdrive."
Another whispered, "She's eight, but she processes information like a post-doc. We're going to need to adjust containment."
But they were wrong. She wasn't eight.
She was four.
And she understood everything they said.
Back in the white void, Aether closed her eyes, and a bitter wind seemed to blow through her mind. The memory did not fade. It deepened.
Her tiny feet dangled off the edge of a steel table while a woman with gentle eyes handed her a book titled "On the Genealogy of Morality" by Friedrich Nietzsche.
"Can you explain this?" the woman asked.
Aether didn't answer with words. She traced her finger along a line in the text and looked up.
"The slave morality is necessary for those who fear power. But it collapses when faced with true will."
The woman's hand shook.
Behind the glass, someone wrote "Parrot behavior?" on a clipboard.
Aether's hands curled into fists in the whiteness of the void.
She remembered the Dunning-Kruger effect. The adults around her had spoken of it, chuckling as if they understood. They spoke of confidence outpacing competence. But none of them understood that she had studied it at four years old not as a model of behavior, but as a survival strategy.
Let them think she was smart—but not too smart. Let them praise her, but fear her just enough to never try to understand her fully. Because if they did… they would destroy her.
She had seen it.
Mobius. The researchers. The men who smiled while drawing blood.
They feared what they couldn't control.
So Aether smiled less.
She became a mirror. Cold. Reflective. Blank.
The white room cracked.
Aether's head snapped up. The light fractured into shards, and in its place appeared a spiraling room of gold and black—a cosmic dome of shimmering stardust, like the inside of a cathedral designed by the gods themselves.
And Taiji stood in the center, back turned to her.
"You've seen your cage," Taiji said. "Now… let's talk about your key."
Aether stepped forward slowly, her heart pounding louder than footsteps.
"What… was that?"
"A memory. Untouched. Unaltered. Unlike most things they've placed in your head."
Aether flinched.
"i see, so you are Knowing everything."
Taiji turned. Her golden eyes shimmered like wildfire behind a curtain of shadows. This show that she can look Aether presence in past and future at the same time.
"I know everything, but not in all things." She smiled. "But knowledge is worthless without choice. And you, dear child, are nothing if not full of choices left unspoken."
Aether lowered her gaze, but Taiji stepped forward and tilted her chin up again, just as before.
"The Dunning-Kruger Effect," Taiji said softly. "They feared what they couldn't understand… because they believed they understood enough."
Aether's breath hitched.
"You've outgrown their definitions, Aether. You always have."
And with a wave of her hand, Taiji summoned a new interface. Not a gift or like before that taiji show about skill tree. This time is something older. Etched in runes. Alive.
"This," she said, "is not a gift. It's a reflection. Of what you are when no one is watching."
Aether stared. It looked like her soul.
Magic. Knowledge. Will. Pain. All spiraled into a mandala of burning truths.
"And, what now?"
Taiji's smirk returned.
"Now, we see if you're ready to become more than what they built."