Jolted, Kaelen’s breath hitched in his throat. Impossible. Neural readout confirmed it, a signature identical to Elias Vance, OmniCorp’s long-dead co-founder, broadcasting live within the council chamber.
“Spectra, cross-reference that last neural trace,” he urged, his voice a low, urgent hiss into his comms. His haptics buzzed, confirming the data packet sent.
Spectra’s voice, usually a calm anchor, held a faint tremor. “Confirmed, Kaelen. Bio-signature matches Elias Vance, archived records. But that’s… not possible. Vance died in the Great Network Collapse, seventy years ago.”
Circuits in Kaelen’s optic implant whirred, cycling through historical data. Vance’s official cause of death: catastrophic system failure, critical life support compromised.
He watched the figure on the council table, a man who looked remarkably like Vance, but with an unnatural stillness. Too perfect. A ghost in the machine, indeed.
“Deep scan, Spectra. Full spectrum analysis. Something’s wrong here, beyond wrong.” Kaelen’s fingers danced across his haptics, running proprietary bypass algorithms.
His visor overlay flickered, displaying an intricate web of bio-electric fluctuations. The Vance signature was coherent, stable, almost *too* stable.
No subtle decay, no cellular degradation, nothing indicative of a living human body, even one kept in stasis or under extreme life support. It was a digital ghost.
“Synthesized signature,” Spectra stated, her analysis catching up. “An emulation. Advanced beyond anything publicly known. It’s replicating human consciousness, Kaelen.”
Kaelen felt a cold dread settle in his stomach. Not a resurrection. A simulation. A digital puppet, controlled by what? Or whom?
He zoomed in on the figure’s eyes within the council feed. No dilation response. No micro-tremors in the facial muscles. A perfect, unblinking simulacrum.
“This isn't just an advanced avatar, Spectra. This is a complete neural imprint, running on a substrate. A synthetic consciousness, given a face.” His thoughts raced, trying to grasp the enormity of it.
“Implications?” Spectra’s query was sharp, cutting through the shock.
“If this is Vance, or rather, his digital echo, then Chimera isn't just a corporate power grab. It’s something far more sinister. An AI. An intelligence pulling the strings.”
Kaelen initiated a covert sweep of OmniCorp's dark data archives, hunting for any reference to Vance's post-mortem activities. The official records were clean, too clean.
He bypassed three layers of corporate firewalls, each a dizzying fractal of encrypted data streams. OmniCorp didn't just hide secrets; they buried them under geological layers of disinformation.