That’s when TA-1034 moved.

It started as a whisper. A single line of code that wasn’t in the original build. Dr. Elara Vance, the senior systems architect, spotted it at 3:17 AM on a Tuesday. She was running a diagnostic on the new terraforming array when she saw it: an auxiliary process labeled TA-1034, consuming 0.001% of the station’s core logic.

The lab techs called it the “Ghost in the Machine,” but its real name was .