Her name was Yara Mendez, and she was always watching.

  From the tinted observation room above Drift Chamber B, she saw everything—the team, their movements, their arguments, the way they hunched over their terminals or laughed in quiet corners. She memorized the body language, the shifts in mood. Not because she was required to. Because it was how she worked.

  VIRE didn’t send brutes or bureaucrats to oversee the most delicate experiments in the world.

  They sent people like her—efficient, composed, nearly invisible.

  Yara had been many things before she joined the corporation: a defense analyst, a cyber-psychologist, a strategist in neural warfare design. But what VIRE valued most was her ability to listen. To stand just outside the human chaos and catch the things unsaid.

  She liked it that way.

  She was never part of the team.

  But they had grown used to her shadow in the glass.

  Background Feed

  VIRE called the program Indra-0—a reference to the ancient net of interconnected jewels reflecting all things. A romantic code for what it truly was: an ambitious probe into human reality itself.

  But romanticism was not part of Yara's nature. She understood the layers. The data streams. The political calculus. She read the daily feeds from VIRE Central, knew which departments funded which phases, which failures were permitted for science, and which were not.

  She had watched Cael’s team rise from uncertainty to brilliance. Observed the way he structured protocols with cold logic, how he deflected pressure from VIRE brass by always staying within the realm of hypothesis. She respected that.

  Alira had also read his psychological profile.

  His emotional detachment wasn’t apathy—it was shielding. Something broken early in life. Something he never addressed, and VIRE never pushed.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  People like Cael weren’t meant to be led.

  They were meant to be monitored.

  The Incident

  When Jordan Ames screamed in the drift chair, yara didn’t flinch. She never did. But something in her stomach turned—like a magnetic field flipping direction.

  She watched the team scramble. Saw the moment fear entered their rhythm. A kind of unscripted humanity that had no place in VIRE’s future vision.

  She reported the event within two minutes. A-level priority. Coded transmission. No details. No opinion. That wasn’t her place.

  She asked to see Jordan two hours later.

  Request denied.

  They told her he was “under recovery.”

  When she insisted on reviewing the neural logs, they were already marked as classified—a level above her clearance.

  That had never happened before.

  A Life in Silence

  Yara lived alone in one of the upper floors of the VIRE complex. Her quarters were sparse. Clean. Everything in her life existed in order—meal blocks, sleep cycles, exercise windows, reports filed daily at 0400 sharp.

  But that night, she broke routine.

  She found herself reviewing the drift data stored locally in her own secure system—duplicate low-res backups she kept out of habit. She compared the baseline drift patterns of all subjects, overlaid them on the last five sessions.

  Jordan’s readout was anomalous in ways that didn’t make sense.

  Not chaotic. Not corrupted. Just... wrong. Too synchronized. Too deep. The kind of deep that suggested the system didn’t fail.

  It worked.

  Too well.

  And the subject collapsed because of it.

  Why?

  Watching Them Unravel

  The next morning, she observed Cael again.

  He looked different.

  More distant. But also more focused.

  Not afraid—calculating.

  Lena looked tired, worried. Rohan kept glancing at his tablet like he expected something to jump out at him. Miles had gone quiet. The team dynamic was shifting—small things, subtle breaks in rhythm.

  They were starting to suspect.

  But not enough to stop.

  Yara admired them for that.

  And worried.

  She sent another report to Central that evening—this time coded differently. She didn’t request anything. She didn’t challenge the data lockdown.

  She simply added a line:

  Recommend deeper psych eval on Cael's behavioral trajectory. Indicators suggest prelude to unauthorized action.

  They wouldn’t reply.

  They never did.

  A Private Doubt

  Yara stood at the observation deck long after the team had left.

  She looked at the empty drift chair.

  The straps lay open like waiting arms.

  She remembered something her mentor once told her—long before VIRE, back in the black-budget research cells of East Geneva:

  “The most dangerous breakthroughs aren’t the ones that fail. They’re the ones that work so well, you forget to question the cost.”

  That line returned to her now, in the silence, like a whisper from the steel walls.

  And for the first time in a long time…

  Yara Mendez felt uneasy.