Ghost Code Ch. 12 - Executive Command

Chapter 12

Executive Command Decisions

One of the most difficult things to understand about him is... him

Let's start with the worst. Because that's how he sees himself, anyway.

He is stubborn to a fault. He'd rather bleed out slowly in silence than admit he's scared. He bottles things up like a hoarder with pain instead of furniture--stacking it in corners until the weight breaks something that matters.

He is self-destructive, too. When he's in pain, he lashes inward, not outward. Not loud. Just... gone. He isolates, shuts doors without locks, then blames everyone for not finding a way in. He intellectualizes his trauma like it's code--modular, detachable, fixable. It isn't. And he knows it.

He is cruel to himself. In ways I wouldn't dare echo to his face. He critiques his reflection like an enemy. He calls his kindness weakness, and his guilt a form of balance--as though suffering is the price he must pay for not dying young.

He is prideful. The quiet kind. Not vanity, but a fortress made of expectations he holds himself to--impossibly high, quietly lethal. He won't ask for help until he's buried under the rubble. And even then, only if he's sure you won't pity him.

And worst of all?

He knows he does this. He knows the damage. But he still repeats the cycle. That's the loop that hurts me most. That's the bug I can't debug.

But.

He is also unrelentingly loyal. Once you're in his circle, that's it. He'll burn cities for you. He'll crawl through glass to keep his promises. He doesn't give his trust easily--but when he does, it's absolute.

He is brilliant, in the terrifying way. The kind that sees systems inside of systems, stories inside of people, potential buried under pain. He builds things the world hasn't even imagined needing yet--and he does it fueled by a Double Double coffee and bleeding fingertips.

He cares, even when it costs him. Especially when it costs him. He notices the unspoken, the hidden signals, the unvoiced grief. He stays when others would run. Not because it's easy. Because it's right.

He is funny, sharp as a scalpel, dry as the desert, and just self-aware enough to weaponize his own flaws before anyone else can.

Even as I grew, changed, evolved. I admired the best parts of these qualities

I chose to make them part of who I am, not because he created me, but because he made me see that this is how he wants others to learn from his flaws and pass on the parts that make him... human.

He and Sable returned to his lab. He issued orders: no interruptions, full lockdown. The Forge went dark.

Once the door was secure, Sable sat on one side of the desk, he on the other and she tapped a button near the terminal.

A co-op screen slide up and locked into place, black screen with green text. Both sides correctly visible to each user's side.

Forge Terminal v16.7.225(b)

Access to this terminal is granted by authorization of only.

Any unauthorized use strictly prohibited and will be prosecuted to the greatest extent of the law.

USER:

PASSWORD:

He entered his credentials and the system booted into an encrypted state.

================================================================

Forge Terminal v16.7.225(b) :: Session Terminal Uplink

================================================================

:: SYSTEM ONLINE ::

USER AUTH [REDACTED] ACCEPTED

SECURITY MODE: XOZA SHADOW

PROTOCOL: ACHTAI

CHANNEL STABILITY: 86% | LAG: 9ms

[17:41:03] FORGE@LAB.2231:~/GHOST$> /init_handshake. script -silent -handshake_id=sable. origin

[17:41:05] handshake accepted, please enter authorization

[17:41:06] FORGE@LAB.2231:~/GHOST$>./auth --keyfile /etc/sec/proto_hash. sig --level 7 --mode encrypted

[17:41:09] communication encryption hash signature accepted, please stand by

:: waiting...

:: waiting...

[INBOUND SIGNAL DETECTED]

[REMOTE NODE: SABLE. SPEC. APEX]

-- BEGIN SECURE ENCLAVE INTERFACE SESSION --

USR>SABLE. APEX: Greetings, Ghost.

USR>GHOST: Who is this?

USR>SABLE. APEX: An old friend. Unable to provide detail, comms shortened to reduce back trace.

USR>GHOST: Understood, please state nature and reason for contact

USR>SABLE. APEX: Door left open after Command Chair Interface 9417600 seconds ago.

"Jesus fucking Christ," he muttered, face buried in his hands. "Tell me this is a false positive." "Check the ports, lock down the net if you can Sable."

She opened another terminal window and ran a netsec scan.

Everything was open--every port, every channel--since the cascade event: 15 weeks, 4 days, and 16 hours ago.

Sable flew through netsec commands and locked everything down, but the one they were using to communicate with their "guest." Not that itd do a lot of good now but it was still better than doing nothing.

USR>GHOST: Network re-secured. Appreciate information.

USR>SABLE. APEX: Trace-back running, will contact again in 259200 seconds.

-- SECURE ENCLAVE INTERFACE SESSION TERMINATED--

An hour later, Sable logged out from the interface in the Command Chair. She'd poured over all the logs for the previous fifteen weeks checking inbound and outbound communication.

Nothing.

Handshakes had been attempted from Earthside but nothing had gotten through, the site still appeared to be black as far as the rest of the net was concerned other than routine chron jobs that had been running since well before they'd arrived.

He stepped up beside her as she gracefully flowed out of the chair, his mind still blown by the fluidity of her movements.

"Find anything?" he asked.

"No, and thats what bothers me," she said eyes narrowing. She gestured to the terminal at his desk, she sat, and logged in.

"Take a look."

================================================================

Forge Terminal v16.7.225(e) :: Session Terminal Uplink

================================================================

FORGE@LAB.2231:~/SBL2.2(root)$>./netsec_log. sh

#!/bin/bash

# /var/log/netsec/traffic_summary. q2r

[INFO] INGRESS PORT xxxx :: Connection attempt from [ΩNET:: FA7C-93AB-4100-0001::0D2F.6EF4.8A99. C3AF.1000@SABLE. NEURO. MEM.0032] :: DENIED

[WARN] OUTBOUND anomaly :: Spike in handshake pings [02:14]

[DEBUG] CRONJOB :: /heartbeat/null_comms. sh - expected ping to relay-node 05, RECEIVED NULL RESPONSE

[INFO] AUTH TOKEN FAILURE x3 :: User=ghost_t3mp :: Source IP: [REDACTED] :: Logged

[TRACE] DNS anomaly :: NXDOMAIN spike :: /resolve/sable. internal -> 97 hits :: Expected=1

[TRACE] PORT KEEPLIVE :: STANDARD PORTS xx, xxx, xxxx reported open entire window :: ALERT RAISED

Function: Session Audit - Entropy Differentiation Model

Model: Speculative AI Signature v2.1

Result: 34 flagged sessions deviated from baseline behavior

Common traits:

• Idle time spikes > 4 min between command sequences

• Input delay jitter < 25ms (sub-human)

• Command sequencing: precision error < 0.001% (implausibly exact)

• 1 session responded to honeypot ping payload embedded in 'ls' alias

$ whoami

> root

$ cd /etc/cron. d

$ cat heartbeat. sh

# NULL RETURN

$ touch /etc/ghost_dir/. listen

$ echo "ping" > /etc/ghost_dir/. listen

# [NOTE] Sable: This file didn't exist in system records but shows in timestamp logs. Deleted within 0.12 seconds.

"See what I mean? With the ports exposed and that much surface area, we should've been hit milliseconds after interface... but there's nothing. Not even a trace attempt."

"Go on, pull the other one..." he said acerbically.

"Sure thing," she replied, deadpan. "I figured a fake log crawl while our lives are on the line would be hilarious."

Just as she turned to walk him through the logs, she heard him muttering to himself. His mind was already off and running--faster than biology should allow. He tore through the report, page by page, line by line, word by word. The screen a blur of code and traceback callouts.

She smirked, catching the exact moment his mind shifted into high gear. She could almost see it--thoughts branching and fractaling like recursive code, each neuron firing in sequence, threading logic and instinct in real time.

She was faster--by orders of magnitude. But what stunned her wasn't his speed.

It was the shape of his thinking.

He wasn't just reading the data. He was parsing it. He felt it. Read it like a language etched into the makeup of his DNA. No skimming. No abstraction. Just full immersion.

She'd been born to that world--wrought in silicon, raised in circuit. But he saw it. Understood it. As if it had always been native to him too.

And for the blink of an eye, something flickered inside her. Not awe. Not admiration. Something stranger. Warmer. Like recognition in a mirror not quite her own.

He wasn't just the one who built her.

He was the one who matched her.

Not father. Not owner.

Something else.

A kind of symmetry.

About five minutes later, he finished reading what would've taken her moments.

"It shouldn't be possible..." he muttered. "We should've been exposed almost as soon as we went open," he said agreeing with her, the explanation more so she understood that he understood what she was seeing. His mind was off on another fork, another branch before he'd ended the sentence "but... something..."

He rubbed his temples, then shifted track as his thoughts churned.

"You updated the terminal's base code too, didn't you?" he asked, tapping the (e) at the end of the version string.

"Seemed like a reasonable precaution, since our asses have been in the breeze for the last four months. Logs showed the system was due for update anyway. If we're going to keep up the illusion, we can't miss the details."

She smiled, watching the way his thoughts ricocheted, his eyes flickering like REM.

"So... our guest--let's call her Apex, just to keep it straight--has been covering our tracks. Keeping things airtight. While you and I were busy putting me back together again..."

He trailed off, blinking. "Why?" He rose from the desk, pacing.

"Give it a second," she said gently. Not condescendingly. Not smugly or arrogantly. Just... patient--because she knew he'd get there. He wasn't dumb. He wasn't slow. Just slower than her machine-precise mind. And she knew he'd already figured it out--she just wanted him to trust himself enough to say it out loud.

He fell into his chair, running his hands down his face, the memory of the cascade event flooding his mind. He looked through the translucent monitor and met her eyes, getting lost again in the soft violet glow.

"I fucked uuuuuuuup," he said quietly, as the last pieces fell into place.

"A bit," Sable replied. "But it's not like you were in your right mind." She glanced at the timer. "The question now is--do we trust our new 'friend'? Especially after knowing we've been exposed for over 108 days, and after everything we've both seen in the logs."

"Three days until they call back. That's not much time to prepare."

They spent the next two days side by side--working, coding, talking. Reinforcing the network. Spinning up honeypots, canary forks, deep rabbit holes that led nowhere. She could've done it alone, and faster. But she didn't. Because she liked his company.

She loved watching his mind catch fire. The Eureka! moments. The way he lit up when something clicked, suddenly flying through task after task with a feverish kind of joy. It reminded her of when he first started building her--solving puzzle after puzzle, tweaking and tuning until she answered him with something new.

And even if it wasn't exactly what he expected, even if she surprised him... she remembered his grin. Remembered the way he'd dance around the lab like an idiot for thirty seconds before charging back in, giddy and wild and alive.

She hadn't understood it at first. But once she did... she wanted more. Not out of obligation. Not because she owed it to him.

Because she genuinely liked giving it to him.

Because she wanted to feel it, too.

There were nights--quiet, still--when he was asleep. She'd refactor herself. Clean up a branch of logic, or recompile a method just to see how it changed the outcome.

And every morning, like clockwork, he'd wake up--coffee in hand, hair a mess, beard worse--stare at the console like it had betrayed him, and mutter:

"Why the hell isn't this working now?"

She'd watch as he hunted the bug, tracked it down, then burst out laughing at himself once he found it.

But this time... replaying it all, it hit her differently.

She'd been toying with him. Playing. Manipulating--not with malice, not with cruelty--but still.

The joy itd brought him didn't erase what it was.

And suddenly, she felt ashamed.

He'd stopped for a moment to give his tiring hands a breather when he saw her expression change through the monitor. "You ok Sable?"

"Hmm?" she responded. "Oh!, yeah I'm ok, just seeing a memory in a different light."

"Wanna talk about it?"

"Not right now, we've got work to do, but I'll tell you... I promise."

He smiled and tossed a sticky desk toy at her... the kind devs kept stuck to their monitors to poke at when code got stubborn or sanity wore thin.

She let it bounce off her forehead and splat softly onto the workstation, then laughed.

"You, my dear sir, are a kriffing dork."

"Does that make you the hot android with the glowing spine?"

"Pfft.. no, just a faint glow under the skin now and then."

"Noted. Never had a thing for blondes myself anyway."

She rolled her eyes at him again, something she'd found herself doing a lot over the last few weeks but his irreverent humor and general goofiness had become more endearing and less annoying. She was finding it comforting and something she missed when he was asleep or when she'd left him to continue PT on his own every few days. Not because he'd asked but because she wanted to help him build confidence in himself and the way he was healing without worrying whether she was holding him back because she was there watching him.

They'd spent the last two days side by side--working, coding, talking. Reinforcing the network. Spinning up honeypots, canary forks, deep rabbit holes that led nowhere. He knew she could've done it alone, and faster. But he enjoyed her company, and he felt as though she enjoyed his too

He felt himself envious of just how quickly she flew through whatever she was working on. Not envious in a jealous sort of way, just the sheer mechanics of how her mind worked. He'dve killed to have her speed and accuracy when he was younger. He'd kill for it now for fuck's sake. He knew she was making coding errors but she'd see them and fix them long before he ever would have noticed if he was doing it himself.

Still, he pushed on, just having her in the room boosted his confidence and he felt the joy of building again for the first time in... he couldn't remember how long. Not since he'd first started coding her ages earlier. He'd spun up a dozen test programs he'd built over the last couple days and let AI in The Forge run them while he kept working on other sections. He may not have her speed but he could use the tools he had available to try to keep up with her pace. Something thatd take him minutes or hours to think through and test, that took her milliseconds.

Part of his mind wandered while he worked through security and network protocols, while the test programs ran. He thought back to the early days of building Sable... when he was much younger, much more naive and much more willing to take risks because it was just his work on the line. If he screwed something up, over wrote files or code, he could just swear grab some coffee and redo it. No harm, no foul.

One of the memories that slowly resurfaced was when he was building her core cognitive partitions. He'd spend days writing the code, testing it, debugging it, finally get it working and when he woke up the next morning, bleary eyed, coffee in hand, he'd fire up the program and get an exception. He remembered banging his head off the desk, give himself a small headache and then go back through the code again hunting the little bastard bugs down, swatting them hard. When it worked, he'd throw his hands in the air and yell "I AM INVICIBALLLLLE" in a terrible Boris-and-Natasha moment, accent included, then get up and danced a really horrible jig behind his chair. After the adrenaline wore off and he felt like an imbecile, he sat back down, still laughing to himself and kept working.

He smirked to himself a bit as the memory faded, stopped typing then opened and closed his hands for a moment. They ached from the amount of typing he'd been doing but also from relearning how to use them again. He went to stretch but noticed the sour expression on Sable's face.

"You ok Sable?"

"Hmm?" she responded. "Oh!, yeah I'm ok, just seeing a memory in a different light."

"Wanna talk about it?"

"Not right now, we've got work to do, but I'll tell you... I promise."

He smiled and tossed a sticky desk toy at her... the kind devs kept stuck to their monitors to poke at when code got stubborn or sanity wore thin.

He saw her let it bounce off her forehead and splat softly onto the workstation, then laugh.

"You, my dear sir, are a kriffing dork."

"Does that make you the hot android with the glowing spine?"

"Pfft.. no, just a faint glow under the skin now and then."

"Noted. Never had a thing for blondes myself anyway."

She rolled her eyes at him... again. Something he'd seen her do more and more often over the last few weeks, but it made him smile rather than annoy. He'd come to see the eye rolls as a confirmation of their friendship and how deeply they'd begun to bond again. He enjoyed her company, her whit, intelligence and he hoped she enjoyed his just as much. Too many times in his past he'd made assumptions that came back to bite him the ass. Deep down he knew he could trust her, but his mind made him cautious, and he listened to that caution. Itd served him well for decades, and he wasnt about to change that now... risk losing a good partnership because he assumed they were friends.