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Elias’s quarters were a study in minimalist efficiency, a perfect reflection of Aethel’s core philosophy. The room contained a sleeping pod, a small desk, a single chair, and a wall screen for approved recreational media. Personal effects were discouraged. As the Warden’s philosophy stated, attachment to things led to hoarding, to inequality, and ultimately to the chaos that had destroyed the old world. Everything was functional, clean, and impersonal.

It was two in the morning. Elias sat at his desk, bathed in the cool glow of his personal tablet, running code that would get him arrested, or worse, if anyone in Aethel’s security division knew about it. He had spent years building this toolkit, a collection of backdoors and custom scripts. He had carefully cultivated access privileges, studying the intricate architecture of Aethel's information systems not for any criminal purpose, or so he had always told himself. It was for the freedom to conduct research without constantly hitting walls of classified data and security clearances that seemed designed to stifle curiosity rather than protect citizens. Now, for the first time, he was using those tools for something that was unquestionably treasonous.

The decryption algorithm he had written worked through the corrupted data fragment from Project Seraphim, layer by painful layer. Aethel's internal security was formidable, but it was not designed to catch someone like him, an insider working with legitimate access credentials. The city's defenses all faced outward, toward the Outlands and the threat of the Blighted. Threats from within were handled through constant surveillance and pervasive social conditioning. Elias had always been the model citizen, quiet and compliant. Until tonight.

The first layer of encryption broke. Then the second. The data began to resolve itself, filling in the gaps and reconstructing damaged sections of code. He saw medical research notes and complex cellular diagrams. The fragment contained partial schematics of something called a "viral vector delivery system." It was, without a doubt, a bioweapon framework.

Elias’s mouth went dry. This was not theoretical research into a potential cure. This was a weapons program, designed for targeted delivery.

He kept digging, using his scripts to bypass security tags that would have raised alarms in any official system. The fragment's origin resolved with more clarity: Helios BioTech, Northreach Industrial Complex, Sector 7. It had been a private firm. He pulled up pre-Blight corporate records, another treasure trove of supposedly classified information he had unofficially archived. Helios BioTech had been a small, discreet company, operating with almost no government regulation. Their listed research areas were innocuous enough, including "longevity treatments" and "cellular regeneration therapies." Their actual research, if this fragment was any indication, had been far more ambitious, and far more dangerous.

The final security layer cracked at 3:47 in the morning. Elias barely noticed the time. What he saw on his screen drove every other concern from his mind. The complete fragment contained detailed research notes, animal test results, and a theoretical framework for something he had considered impossible: true cellular immortality. It was not the degraded, mindless hunger of the Blighted, but a controlled, perfect regeneration. The notes referenced successful tests on cellular cultures, on animal subjects, and on one final, chilling entry. The rest of the line was corrupted, the data swallowed by digital decay, but the implications were terrifyingly clear.

They had succeeded. Or at least, they had thought they had. Then something had gone wrong. Catastrophically, world-endingly wrong.

Elias cross-referenced the dates again. Helios BioTech's last recorded activity was three months before the official Blight outbreak. The location of the first documented Blight infection was the Northreach Industrial Complex, Sector 7. It was the same location.

"My god," he whispered into the silent darkness of his quarters.

But there was more. Buried deep in the fragment's code, he found a partial list of project personnel. Most of the names were corrupted beyond any hope of recovery. One, however, remained intact, as clear as day. Lead Researcher: Dr. Marcus Thorne.

Elias did not recognize the name. He ran it through Aethel’s personnel database. His access privileges were supposed to extend that far, at least in theory. The system returned an immediate response: ACCESS DENIED. CLASSIFIED PERSONNEL RECORD.

This was different from a simple lack of information. This was an active denial, a digital wall. He tried every backdoor he had, every vulnerability he had ever discovered in the city's network. Nothing worked. The file was locked down on a level he had never encountered before, likely on a server that was air-gapped from the main network. Marcus Thorne was a ghost, a name that had been deliberately and meticulously erased from every accessible database in Aethel. Someone had gone to tremendous effort to make sure no one could connect that name to anything.

Elias sat back, his heart pounding against his ribs. The pieces were falling into place, forming a picture so terrible he could barely process it. The Blight was not a natural disaster. It was a weapon, an experiment that had escaped containment. And someone in Aethel knew the truth. Someone with the power to classify records, erase names, and control the flow of all information.

The Warden. It had to be. Nothing of this magnitude happened in Aethel without the Warden's knowledge. But if the Warden knew the truth about the Blight's origin, why hide it? Why build an entire society on the lie of a natural disaster?

Unless his involvement was deeper. Elias’s blood ran cold. Unless the Warden had been involved from the very beginning.

He forced himself to breathe, to think rationally. That was insane. The Warden was humanity's savior, the man who had organized the survivors, built Aethel from the ruins, and preserved civilization. Why would he have had anything to do with the catastrophe that destroyed the world?

But the data did not lie. And the fragment contained one more piece of information, one final, critical clue. It was a set of GPS coordinates for the Helios BioTech facility. If he wanted answers, if he wanted the unadulterated truth, he would have to go there himself. He would have to venture into the Outlands, into the ruins, into the place no one from Aethel had gone in forty years.

Elias stared at the coordinates on his screen until the numbers blurred. The smart thing to do, the safe thing, would be to delete everything. He could forget he had ever seen it and go back to his comfortable life of sanitized research and careful ignorance. But he had spent his entire adult life searching for a cure. Now, for the first time, he had a real lead. The theoretical framework in the fragment was incomplete, but it was more than anyone in Aethel had ever found. If he could get to that facility and access their full research database, he might be able to reverse-engineer a cure. He could save the world.

Or die trying.

With a newfound resolve, Elias began to copy the data to a hardened, encrypted tablet. The die was cast. The decision was made. He was going to escape Aethel.