“What was that?!,” Varian said in a panicked voice as Inez walked behind him and peeked her head over his shoulder.

“There’s someone here. But it doesn’t seem to be a drone,” answered Carmen as she motioned the group to back away a bit which they followed without hesitation.

“How do you know that?,” whispered matteo as he placed a protective hand in front of Piers.

“Because drones don’t make any noise.”

The low even voice coming from Carmen startled the group to their very core. Her demeanor appeared to have drastically change in the span of a mere minute from one of wonder to seriousness. Her wide curious eyes turned hard and focused as her hands started to fiddle with her gauntlet as a desperate attempt of making it work again.

“I’ve only heard of these things happen in urban myths before but with all the the evidence now I don’t think the word “myth” might work anymore. The reason why the Hologlobe and other VSS spaces such as Andromedome or Titanicon became popular in the first place was the invention of UIs.”

Carmen’s siblings quickly realized what she was talking about but the rest were left clueless with what she was saying.

“UIs? What are those?,” inquired Piers, mystified.

“UI stands for uploaded intelligence. It’s when a persons subconscious is uploaded to the Virtual Simulation System. They allow a person to practically live forever even when their body dies. They are extremely powerful in the VSS and can easily infiltrate any virtual world, even private ones, so companies such as Cybrim made defense measurements for those types of situations. But sometimes they can still get through. It’s rare but not impossible.”

“Great we have to deal with ghosts now too?! Oh that’s just wonderful!,” Laren complained as he came into a defensive stance. Keito went to the front of the group and pulled out a dagger from his belt before going into a fighting stance.

“You had that a weapon this entire time? Wait a minute!-” Carmen said before she inspected the dagger for a moment due to how familiar it looked before realizing were it was from.

“That’s a weapon made for the Space Force Defense Squadron! I never even got the model asset for any weaponry from them in the program! How the hell did you get that?!”

He contemplated the question for a moment before shrugging.

“I don’t know. I always remember having this. Don’t really know why” Keito muttered the last part.

Slowly walking their way to the direction of the mysterious noise the sound of shuffling started to increase along with pained groans. The ones who were the most afraid were in the back of the group while the ones who were ready to fist fight a possible ghost were up in the front.

“Guys why are we going towards the strange noise? That is a guaranteed death sentence in every horror movie! The Mexican in me is telling us to get the fuck out of here!,” Varian exclaimed as he gestured behind them to the exit door they walked passed a few minutes ago.

“I have to agree with him. I really am not curious about finding out what that noise is,” Inez added while Hoku wildly nodded in agreement beside her.

“Yeah I don’t really think it’s worth it man,” said Hoku.

“Oh come on were is your sense of adventure? We could literally get video footage of an actual UI break in here! This might be actually exciting,” Enola tried to convince the rest as she waved her phone in her hand.

“Easy for you to say! You guys don’t actually live in this world like we do. Why would a UI go here anyways?!,” asked Laren in total confusion.

“Just for the record it could just be the sound of ventilation or something else. A UI infiltrating my world is still a pretty rare possibility,” reassured Carmen.

Hoku sighed in relief while Enola groaned in disappointment.

“But Killian has infected my sim with a glitch which makes it really vulnerable right now so anything could happen at this point.”

Enola cheered at their still being a possibility that they would see a ghost while Hoku just groaned in despair.

The group finally made it to the door of the hospital room and peeked their heads to look through the doors window slit only to see a person tied down to a hospital bed. They appeared to be struggling to get themselves out of the bed straps and appeared to be in pain.

“It’s…a person,” Varian said surprised at the presence of a person alone this deep in the hidden corridors.

“Why is the academy holding someone here? They could have just sent them to a hospital,” said Laren who was confused why the academy were holding someone who appeared to be a critical condition.

“It looks like they’re holding him hostage. I don’t know about you guys trust in the government but mine is very low at this point. I don’t think they have good plans for this guy. We have to get him out of here,” said Carmen which the rest nodded in agreement.

Keito used the same move he did with the last door and kicked it down. The team rushed inside the room to check on the person only for most of them to stare at the person tied to the hospital bed with pure disbelief.

The person that was tied to the hospital bed appeared to be a young adult man with various scars on his arms and face and had strands of white among his black hair. After the person realized that the group at broken into the room he was being held in he recognized some of them and tears started to well up in the corner of his eyes.

“Keito?,” the person whispered in a hoarse voice.

Keito immediately ran over to cut off the straps holding the person down before hugging him. The siblings noticed their friends were on the verge of tears while Keito was softly crying as he hugged the person. Not understanding why their friends were suddenly crying the siblings turned to Carmen who was just staring at the unknown person like they were a ghost.

“Uh dude who is this guy?,” Enola whispered to her twin in utter confusion.

“He’s Keitos brother…Satoshi. And he’s not supposed to be here at all,” Carmen said softly as she continued to stare at the said person in pure disbelief at his terrible state.

There is pain in the sim but she had never designed any of it to be too graphic. She didn’t even implement some diseases into the world like leukemia and cancer for gods sakes! Why the hell does Satoshi look like he went to hell and back?! Did Killians meddling with the sim really cause things to get this bad? As the questions continued to circle inside her head Satoshi attempted to tell the group something.

“Don’t…don’t trust anyone…they haven’t told you everything. The others are gone. They took them…somewhere…I don’t know were,” Satoshi said weakly as he tried to regain his breathing despite him being in pain for being strapped against the bed very tightly for who knows how long.

“What do you mean “they” took them? Did someone attack you guys on the Moon?,” Keito asked his brother who responded with a yes. Satoshi tried to explain a cit more but started to violently cough.

“Someone find water!,” Keito ordered the others who started to check around the room for any water. matteo found a water bottle in a mini fridge place at the last cubicle of a large shelf and ran over to Satoshi before helping him drink to help with is dry mouth.

“There you go. Easy,” matteo said softly as he helped Satoshi drink from the water bottle since he couldn’t use his arms due to them being sore from the restraints.

“Please you have to help! Please!,” pleaded Keito desperately as he clung into his brothers arm as if he would disappear any second. Carmen could see a flicker of a distorted rainbow colored cloud in Keito’s eyes that caused her stomach to twist with panic.

An early sign of a meltdown glitch.

“I’ll do the best I can. I promise,” responded Carmen as she put a reassuring hand on Keito which seemed to calm him a bit.

Carmen pulled up her glass tablet and scanned the metrics of Satoshi’s behavioral system. She might not have made him herself but she was still capable of analyzing everything that was inside of her world. After scrolling through her tablet in search of a diagnosis for Satoshi’s pain she realized that the touch sensitivity for his model was placed all the way at 80 out of 100. The mere idea of even allowing a AI model to “feel” pain at a level above 45, which is usually the norm, was beyond her.

“I have a diagnosis for him.”

She turned the tablet so the rest could see the pain meter for themselves which caused them to have various reactions ranging from horrified to out right enraged.

“80 percent?! Who the fuck has the audacity to do that?! Everybody knows that a human based AI can’t handle that sort of sensitivity!,” yelled Enola, outraged.

“I can lower the sensitivity but I’ll have to it by some rather- illegal means. But it’s not like it would kill me if I did it,” said Carmen before connecting her glass tablet to her laptop in the real world. It took a few minutes for her to breach to defense wall in the AI which was oddly more weaker than she expected it to be but she wasn’t complaining. She lowered the pain sensitivity to a level 25 which instantly caused Satoshi to sink into the hospital bed with a sign of exhaustion and relief.

“There that should do it! I still need to check the rest of his sense features such as hearing and vision if they were also affected. I’ll also need to find out how the hell he came here since for starters I definitely do not remember making this character.”

The rest looked bewildered at that new piece of information.

“But you spoke about him like you knew him earlier?,” reminded Inez.

“Yeah but that’s because Piers told me about that before but I didn’t quite put a face to the name yet since I made so many AI characters. Now that I’ve seen him I can definitely say I don’t remember making him and the name of his creator on his analysis scan is titled as ‘Unknown’.”

She showed her the screen of her glass tablet to the rest again to show that the creator section in Satoshi’s analysis scan didn’t have Carmen’s name on it.

“Well that is really freaky. Maybe it’s a glitch or something and you have bad memory?,” suggested Enola.

“Maybe. I’ll have to check my character models in my asset folder to make sure.”

“Yeah you might want to do that later because I hear footsteps coming from down the hallway again so that UI ghost might be still around,” warned Hoku, worriedly, as he gestured to the hallway through the door window.

“Right! Varian! Can you check the map on the wall to see were the exit door lead to?,” Carmen asked his brother who nodded before walking over to a map on a wall in the room. The map was similar to the last one matteo was looking at with the only yellow star showing their location changing position. He saw that the exit door lead out into what appears to be an underground parking garage.

“Uh it says that it leads to an underground parking garage. It also says its for “faculty only” so there might be drones there,” Varian said slightly worried at them possibly walking into a trap.

“Well if that’s our only clear shot of getting out of here we better take it. Cause I don’t want to find out what would happen if a UI would actually show up,” said matteo with a worried look.

He may have just heard of the existence of UI a few minutes ago and had never seen one before but the way the mention of the people affected his creator chilled him to the bone.

“Got it! So we have about five minutes before the rest of the drones start searching for us too. We have to go thru the exit and out of the parking lot before that happens. Lets get a move on,” Carmen said as Keito and matteo help carry Satoshi who was having trouble walking on his own.