The Past, Rewired

[thisDerius]

"Ageira can kiss my ass," Derius muttered, his tone carrying that familiar edge of irritated sarcasm as he paced slowly around the edge of the console. "They haven’t done anything truly innovative since the trade lanes went up. Everything after that? Slapped together patents and politics."

He flicked a small metal stylus between the fingers of his right augmented hand, the smooth click of metal on metal adding rhythm to his frustration. His left hand, entirely synthetic and glowing faintly at the seams, traced across a touchscreen as he reviewed the progress of the decryption sequence. The data streams pulsed in familiar patterns of green and blue—but his eyes were trained for the anomalies. The inconsistencies. The places where the Ingenuus encryption faltered, even slightly.

He was just about to launch into another rant—probably something about corporate monopolies and how Sirius would’ve been better off if people focused more on survival than profit—when a subtle, electronic ding chimed from the mainframe console. His head turned immediately, brows raised. Then came the second chime—this time from his personal datapad. The sync was confirmed.

"Looks like a part of the transfer is complete," he said, his voice now steadier, more focused. He stepped toward the main console and tapped through the notifications. "Ten percent. Not bad at all. We might not be here for too long after all."

He leaned against the edge of a reinforced terminal, eyes scanning the data headers now unlocked. Most of it was background metadata—environmental logs, timestamp anomalies, nested encryption shells—but… one entry caught his eye.

“Encrypted Archive: Seth Wither – Revision A.”
He froze for a breath, then reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a thin metal card—an old physical access key, barely used anymore, except for specific backdoor operations he preferred not to run openly. He slid it into the auxiliary port, eyes narrowing.

"Just ten percent in and we're already pulling ghosts out of the machine..." he murmured.

Derius glanced briefly toward the next terminal, where Donagan had moved to continue monitoring. "Let me know if anything spikes. We’ve just brushed the surface—there’s a lot of old skeletons buried in here."

Then he turned back to the console and kept working, his fingers dancing across the screen, unlocking piece by piece of the long-forgotten past.