Work Text:
Ares stood at the front of the conference room, posture straight and composed, hands folded neatly behind his back in a calculated imitation of calm professionalism. The silver light caught the edge of his brand-new Encom badge clipped to his belt loop—his picture perfectly centered, black-and-white, his expression polite but uncertain. Below the photo, the name ARES was printed in crisp block letters, the space for a surname left blank. Eve had assured him that he didn’t need to choose one unless he wanted to—when he found a name he liked, or not at all, she’d said with a small smile.
Two stickers had been added to his badge since then—“added personality,” Eve called it. One was a stylized image of his disc, the other a tiny Violator-era Depeche Mode rose. Ares had not removed them.
Around the table sat Eve—laptop open and ready—along with Ajay, Erin, Seth, and a handful of IT staff whose presence Ares had calculated as only marginally relevant to the discussion. He didn’t voice that assessment; Eve had warned him that such remarks were considered “impolite” in human workplaces.
“So, the server needs an update?” Ajay asked, leaning back in his chair as he spun it slightly. “That’s what you’re proposing?”
Ares’ eyes narrowed faintly as he formatted his words. “In the terms of implementing a new firewall, creating higher-performing security programs, and designing automated response systems with improved precision—yes.” He nodded once, tone measured.
Erin frowned, tapping a pen against her notepad. “We already have automated responses.”
“Yes,” Ares replied smoothly, his voice carrying that cool, clipped precision that made even the air seem to still. “However, they lack punctuality and adaptability. Their limitations would fall under the category of insufficient programming. I should have specified that earlier.”
A beat of silence followed. Erin glanced at Ajay. Ajay leaned forward, brow furrowed, as if trying to find the hole in Ares’ reasoning.
“So you’re saying our security isn’t good enough,” Ajay said slowly.
“I am saying,” Ares countered, tilting his head slightly, “that it is functional. But functional is not the same as secure.”
Eve’s lips twitched—half amusement, half pride. Seth smirked like he’d just seen someone lob a grenade into the middle of the meeting.
Ajay sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose before looking back at Ares. “Alright then. Let’s say we humor you. You want to rebuild the entire server firewall—how exactly do you know it needs to be rebuilt?”
Ares paused. Just long enough for the air in the room to tighten. His gaze flicked briefly toward Eve, and he caught the subtle movement of her fingers stilling over her keyboard, her eyes lifting to meet his. Silent understanding passed between them.
“Because,” Ares said carefully, “the most recent collapse was caused by me.”
The effect was immediate.
The hum of the projector, the faint rustle of paper—everything seemed to stop. Every face in the room turned toward him, some with confusion, others with disbelief.
Ares took their silence as permission to continue. “While under the directive of Julian Dillinger,” he explained evenly, “I was tasked with infiltrating your server. In doing so, I created a direct pathway between his system and yours. That allowed him to deposit a payload that completely destabilized your architecture.” His jaw tightened, his voice lowering a fraction. “Unknowingly, I might add.”
He hadn’t known Dillinger would destroy the server while he—and countless other programs—were still connected. He hadn’t known the payload would derezz them all, erasing lives like data fragments in the dark. He had completed his objective: retrieve Eve’s file.
But the cost?
Well, he was here now. With permanence. With purpose. Perhaps the cost had been worth it.
“You made us crash?” Ajay’s voice cracked through the silence, a mix of disbelief and anger. His chair scraped harshly against the floor as he turned toward Eve. “Eve, you’re actually thinking about letting the thing that almost made us lose everything touch the server again?”
Thing.
The word hit harder than Ares expected. It wasn’t new—he’d been called worse, stripped of personhood in more ways than one—but coming from her colleague, in her world, it stung. His spine straightened instinctively, shoulders rigid.
“Ajay!” Eve snapped before he could say anything. Her tone was sharp, protective. “He’s not a thing. Ares is the most capable and intelligent man to be handling this.”
Ajay’s brows shot up. “Eve, did you forget that it tried to kill you? And you trust it with our most sensitive data?”
Those words were far worse.
Ares’ posture faltered—just slightly, but enough that Eve saw it. His shoulders lowered, the confidence he had carried into the meeting dissolving under the weight of old guilt. His hands fell loosely to his sides, eyes cast down toward the polished table.
He had tried, once. Not by choice, but directive. Still, that distinction didn’t matter to most humans. Intent was irrelevant when the damage had been real.
He understood their anger. Their fear. It was justified. His creation had been a weapon, not a man. And yet—Eve had seen something worth salvaging. Worth trusting.
Now, standing under the sterile light of Encom’s conference room, surrounded by wary eyes and human judgment, Ares understood something else too.
“Ares—” Eve started, her voice soft, desperate to undo what Ajay’s words had done.
“I am a thing,” Ares said before she could finish. His tone wasn’t angry—just quiet, resolute. “You are correct. Though I appear human, I am not.”
Eve’s face fell.
“I am not flesh and bone,” he continued evenly. “I am built from binary code and countless patches, lines of logic stacked upon each other. I am designed to learn and adapt, not live.”
Ajay’s shoulders slumped. Guilt flickered across his face, but Ares didn’t stop.
“If you strip me down to my base command,” Ares went on, his gaze fixed on the wall behind them, “I am meant to destroy. I am Master Control—security program designation Ares. I am designed to find weakness and exploit it.”
“Ares, you’re not—” Eve tried again, but he cut her off with a small shake of his head.
“I am Master Control,” he said, firmer this time. “I will always be Master Control. And if…” He hesitated, “…if the Users deem me valuable enough to aid in security, then I will set it as my directive.”
Silence followed.
Ares’ posture was military, formal, and unyielding. His hands clasped neatly behind his back again, the familiar gesture of obedience returning like a reflex. He didn’t look at Eve. Couldn’t.
To them, he wasn’t a man standing at the head of the table. He was code wrapped in skin, a tool waiting to be assigned a function.
Ares felt the cold truth settle deep in his core: He could learn their words, mimic their gestures, even wear their shape—but he would never truly be one of them.
He could have permanence, could think and feel and experience, but did that make him human?
By definition, no.
His HUD confirmed it in cold, unfeeling text:
human [noun]: a bipedal mammal of the species Homo sapiens, characterized by biological processes including DNA replication, neural cognition, and organic emotion.
He stared at the words as they overlaid his vision, sharp and clinical. He dismissed them with a blink, but the definition stayed imprinted somewhere deeper, branded.
No one would ever see him as human.
He didn’t even have a name. He had a designation. A purpose.
MASTER CONTROL // SECURITY PROGRAM // DESIGNATION: ARES.
No DNA. No family. No history except for endless combat logs and compiled updates. His earliest memory was not of birth or breath, but of the sound of derezzing.
He was made to destroy, not to live.
How foolish he’d been to think otherwise.
“Ares?”
The voice pulled him back.
He blinked, realizing only then that he’d left the conference room. The world had gone quiet—colder. When his systems recalibrated, he found himself standing in the server room, the low hum of power units filling the silence. Lines of light traced along the walls, blue and constant, like a pulse without a heart.
He didn’t even remember walking here. His internal navigation had guided him automatically—muscle memory, if he could call it that.
Then he turned.
Eve stood in the doorway, the light from the servers washing her in pale blue. Her expression wasn’t angry or afraid. It was something worse—gentle concern, threaded through with guilt.
He looked down at his hands, flexing his fingers as if searching for proof of something real. “...I don’t believe I belong here, Eve.”
Eve stepped closer, the soft whir of the machines filling the silence between them.
“You do. Ignore Ajay,” she said gently, her voice trying to bridge the distance between them. “I can’t apologize for him, but I’ve known him long enough to know he doesn’t have a filter sometimes—he gets protective. He’ll come around once he sees you work your magic.”
Ares’ gaze flicked briefly to her, then away. Her attempt to explain her friend’s behavior was almost endearing—but it wasn’t the point. He shook his head slowly, the motion deliberate, controlled.
“I mean here, Eve,” he said, voice low but steady. “In your world. I don’t belong here.”
The words hung in the air, heavy and certain.
He belonged with the programs—inside the servers, the endless architecture of logic and light where everything had order. Purpose. Efficiency. No opinions. No fear. No fragile emotions to misread. In there, he didn’t have to pretend. He simply was.
“I was made for the users,” he continued, his tone slipping softer, almost distant. “To serve. To guard. To execute directives. Not to sit in meetings, not to… be looked at like I’m pretending to be something I’m not.”
Eve’s throat tightened. The way he said it—so matter-of-fact, like he was reporting data—hurt more than if he’d shouted.
“Ares…” she whispered, and there was something raw in her voice. “You do belong here.”
He finally looked at her, and the blue in his eyes flickered, faint like a pulse struggling to stabilize.
“You gave me permanence,” he said, his voice low—steady, but threaded with conflict. “You gave me life. But I don’t know what to do with it.”
“That’s life, Ares. No one really knows what to do with it,” Eve replied gently, stepping toward him. “You just—”
He flinched back before she could reach him. The motion was so sudden, so uncharacteristic, that it startled them both.
“I have spent my entire existence being told what to do,” he said, words coming in halting bursts, as though each one cost him something to say. “Every line of my code built around command, around obedience. I learned. I adapted. I… tricked—no, glitched—myself into believing I was something more than what I was made to be.” His hands curled loosely at his sides, trembling with frustration. “But I’m not. I’m lost, Eve. I’m not human. I don’t know what I am. Not just a program, not just an artificial intelligence—something in between. Something that shouldn’t exist. Some… creature.”
The word hung between them, ugly and heavy. For a being of perfect design, he looked profoundly broken. His gaze drifted away.
He had thought purpose could be replaced with freedom. But purpose had structure, and without it, he was coming apart—bit by bit, line by line. His code screamed for direction, for something to anchor to, and there was nothing.
Eve’s voice came after a long, quiet moment, soft but certain. “You’re not a creature, Ares.”
He looked up at her.
“You’re you,” she said softly. “Brilliant, awkward, beautiful, strong—you. And that’s more human than most of us ever manage to be.”
“I’m… I’m not…” His voice broke, crackling with mechanical distortion bleeding into the words. He tried to will it away, to steady his tone, but the sound only deepened, synthetic and raw. That single glitch undid him.
He sank to his knees, the movement slow, heavy with defeat. His gaze fell to his hands—human in shape, perfect in illusion—and for the first time they looked wrong. Fake. His chest tightened with something he didn’t know how to process. He had been sure of himself once, proud of what he’d become outside his function. But now that confidence dissolved, leaving only doubt.
He had fought his own kind. He had gone against his creator. He’d watched Athena derezz, her code scattering across his hand, gone forever. He had met Flynn, or what remained of him, an echo. And still, through all of that, he had convinced himself this—permanence—was living.
But what if it wasn’t? What if he was just a program pretending to be alive?
He couldn’t go back; his existence was tethered here now. And to erase himself, to return to what he was before—would mean obliteration. True death.
The thought struck something primal within him. Death. The concept terrified and fascinated him all at once. Was there an afterlife for a program? A version of peace coded somewhere beyond deletion? Or was it nothing? No data, no light, no reconstitution? Just the end of everything he was?
His breath hitched—not because he needed air, but because the system running his simulation couldn’t keep pace with his emotion. Or maybe it was the desire for air.
Then warmth. Hands folded around his own, grounding him. A forehead pressed against his, her touch steady and sure.
“You are Ares,” Eve whispered. “You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met. You’ve given me something I thought I lost when I lost my sister—you make me feel alive.”
Her voice trembled, but her words didn’t falter. One hand rose to his face, cupping his cheek. “You don’t need to be anything, Ares. But you are something, just like I am, just like everyone else.”
She leaned in, her gaze locked on his. “You get to decide what that something is. You might never have all the answers, but that’s what life is.”
Her thumb brushed his skin, the motion achingly gentle.
“You are my something, Ares.”
He felt wetness on his face—soft, cool, like rain. The kind of gentle drizzle he’d come to love watching from Eve’s apartment window. But there was no rain here. No sky. No wind.
Just the hum of the Encom servers and the cold, sterile air of the basement.
He was crying.
He. Was. Crying.
The realization fractured something in him. His face twisted, a silent stutter of confusion passing over it before his body simply gave up on holding formality together. His head dropped against Eve’s shoulder with a dull thud. His thoughts scattered like broken code, processes stalling as emotion overrode everything.
Nothing responded the way it should. There was only noise inside him—warnings, loops, corrupted signals firing off faster than he could contain them.
He wanted to scream.
To purge it, this ugly, heavy feeling in his chest. This suffocating mess of guilt, shame, grief, all of it clawing to get out. He wanted to burn it away until there was nothing left but silence. Until it was just him again—empty, clean, before this. Before Ajay’s words had cracked open what little peace he’d found, before the weight of his past had been thrown back into his hands like proof of what he’d always feared.
And then he was screaming.
The sound tore out of him raw and distorted. Inhuman, agonized, like a dying speaker shrieking in feedback. The walls seemed to pulse with it. The servers around them caught and mirrored the noise, amplifying it into a ghostly chorus that reverberated through the walls.
Eve didn’t flinch.
She didn’t recoil, didn’t tell him to stop, didn’t run from the sound that could’ve shattered glass. She just held him, arms wrapped around him, her cheek pressed against the side of his head.
She stayed as his system overloaded, as the scream disintegrated into broken noise, then silence.
She stayed while he shook in her arms, proving to him—without words, without logic—that he was alive. That what he felt wasn’t wrong or broken or programmed.
That it was human.
That it was real.
That he was human.
That he was real.