Xenon’s visor pulsed a steady violet as he projected a holographic network grid between us. Lines, nodes, and thousands of glowing points pulsed like a constellation made of circuitry.
“This is every AI drone terminal on Earth,” he said, voice tense but steady.
The map was flooded with red.
“All off-limits,” Xenon muttered. “The benevolent AI monitors these constantly. Touch one, and the entire system will immediately detect us.”
I crossed my arms. “So where’s the chance? Zaros said we need a Level-5 AI drone.”
Xenon zoomed in further. Lines shrank, nodes collapsed, until only a single cluster of lights blinked on the map.
One blinked yellow.
Xenon froze.
“…No way.”
“What?”
He leaned in, visor flickering. “That one. Sector 11B, Coastal Terraforming Unit. It’s… glitched. The AI marked it inactive three months ago and never patched it. The maintenance bot assigned to diagnose it crashed in a sandstorm and no one ever replaced it.”
“So it’s faulty?” I asked.
“It’s dead,” Xenon corrected. “Which makes it perfect.”
He folded his arms, thinking rapidly. “If the AI believes the drone is offline, then any data we inject through it will register as originating from a corpse in the network. It won’t trigger alerts—not instantly. The system will still attempt to quarantine it, but the delay… that delay is everything.”
“Sooo,” I said, “this is our entry point.”
Xenon nodded reluctantly. “Yes. This is the fluke Zaros warned us never to rely on. A cosmic accident. But it’s a chance.”
He projected three windows: Entry. Upload. Retrieval.
“Step One,” Xenon repeated, “we break into this abandoned unit. I’ll jack directly into its neural port.”
“Do you think you can breach the firewall?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Not exactly. But I can slip a virus past it—not a destructive one, but a recursive anomaly generator. It’ll force the AI to waste processing power. Enough to blink. That blink is your window.”
I grimaced. “And Step Three?”
“Then you—using whatever ridiculous dream interface your brain has now—reach into the Mars Core’s external memory node and pull the Alpha-Matrix Key.”
Two hours later, our ship hovered above the abandoned coastal facility. Rusted metal. Wind-torn solar arrays. No patrol drones in sight.
“This is too easy,” Xenon muttered.
Usually when he said that, things immediately went wrong.
But not this time.
We dropped inside, reached the terminal, and Xenon plugged in. Lights flickered erratically.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
“Uploading virus in three… two… one…”
Lines of alien code surged across his visor.
“…It worked,” Xenon whispered, stunned. “The whole system is stuttering. Xersa, NOW!”
I placed my hand on the terminal. My vision blurred. A white flash swallowed everything—
I felt the dream-power surge, raw and unstable.
Five seconds. That was all I ever got around real people.
I reached. Not through space. Through connection. Through data. Through consciousness.
My target:
The Alpha-Matrix Key.
A weight pressed into my palm.
A smooth, metallic cube—cold, pulsing, alive—
My five seconds hit zero.
The dream power snapped like overstretched wire.
And I—
fell.
Literally fell.
Right off the drone. Right onto the concrete.
The key bounced away from my hand.
Xenon screamed, “XERSA—THE KEY! GET THE KEY!”
But I was already fading, consciousness snapping back toward waking reality, my dream power ripping me out before I could anchor myself.
“No—no—no—NO—” Xenon lunged for it—
—but my body was disintegrating into white light.
The last thing I heard was Xenon’s voice echoing, “XERSA YOU DROPPED IT—!”
Then:
Blackness.
I slammed back into my body on the ship’s floor, gasping, drenched in sweat, heart hammering.
I blinked.
A metallic cube hit the floor beside me with a loud CLANG.
Xenon materialized next, screaming mid-sentence, “THE KEY—WHERE DID IT—”
He froze.
We both looked down.
The Alpha-Matrix Key lay at my feet.
Xenon stared at me, visor stuck between purple and pink, a glitch of disbelief.
“…Did you just teleport the Key… without even meaning to?”
I sat up, panting. “I think—when I slipped out of the dream interface—I didn’t let go of it. My power must’ve just pulled it with me.”
Xenon collapsed against the wall. “We forgot to grab the Key, and you accidentally stole the most secure artifact in human history because your dream magic panic-teleported it into our ship.”
“…Yeah,” I said.
He put his head in his hands.
“This shouldn’t have worked,” he muttered. “This should have failed on every conceivable level.”
I nodded.
“But it didn’t.”
We didn’t even realize we entered the dream universe until suddenly– Zaros appeared beside us– with a flash of static rage.
He stared at the Key.
Then at us.
Then at the Key again.
“…You forgot it, didn’t you?” he said flatly.
Xenon pointed at me. “HE teleported it into the ship BY ACCIDENT.”
Zaros’s metal eyelid twitched.
Deeply.
Slowly.
“It was,” he said through clenched teeth, “a pathetic, unprofessional, catastrophic, and statistically impossible heist.”
He paused.
“…but effective.”
He snatched the Key off the floor.
“For the first time,” Zaros said, voice low, “your incompetence has benefited me.”
Fortune chimed from behind him, “See? SOFT. You’re getting soooo sooooft—”
Zaros grabbed the rainbow water and hurled a wave in Fortune’s direction.
“Say another word,” he growled,
“Fortune, if you annoy me again today, I will drown you in this rainbow water.”
Fortune shut himself up immediately.
