Necromancer Dreams of Mechs Chapter 44: Chapter 50

Read chapter 44 of Necromancer Dreams of Mechs by Magic on NovelPedia.

CHAPTER 44: Past of the Present Part I Long before the world Allen knew began to crack and reveal its hidden machinery, before the Architect spoke a single line in his voice or the virtual sky bent to his will, there was only a quiet house, the soft glow of early mornings, and the steady, patient hum of a family building something they believed would help the world. The Voss home sat a little ways outside the city, close enough for Peter and Lillian to make their long commutes to the research campus but far enough that the night skies still showed a spattering of stars. In those early years, when Allen was still so small his head fit entirely in the crook of his mother’s arm, the house felt like an island between two worlds—one of domestic certainty, the other of rapidly rising ambition. Inside, it smelled faintly of coffee, machine oil, and the baby powder that dusted the soft rolls of Allen’s wrists and ankles. The walls were lined with Peter’s mech posters and Lillian’s framed sketches of neural architecture, a strange but fitting marriage of metal and mind. And in the middle of it all, a child with bright eyes and an uncanny attentiveness to whatever object—or person—entered his field of vision. The Vosses had not meant to center their professional lives on a single project. Originally, Lillian’s work in artificial cognition was supposed to feed into medical applications: recovery assistance, adaptive learning interfaces, and bio-linked neural restoration. Peter’s immersion hardware was first pitched as a therapeutic bridge for coma patients or trauma victims. But the moment Alexander Clarence secured the funding and proposed merging the departments, the ground shifted under them all. At first, no one questioned it. Alexander was charismatic in that quiet, cultivated way that made him seem unassailable. His light voice, clipped accent, and careful manners painted him as the type of man who thrived in boardrooms, not laboratories. But he had a way of making even the most skeptical engineers feel as if they were part of something extraordinary. He shook hands with interns, learned names quickly, and spoke in gentle assurances about changing the future. Still—beneath all of it—there was something else. Something hard, polished, and calculating, visible only in certain glints of his expression. But in those early years, it was so faint that even the most perceptive dismissed it as nothing more than ambition. Lillian, who noticed subtleties most people never saw, had watched him with academic curiosity. She would never have called him a threat. Not then. He was merely a man who wanted too much, too quickly. A man who sometimes asked for progress reports before she’d finalized her tests. A man who lingered over access logs a bit longer than necessary, claiming it was to “better understand the cadence of creation.” Peter thought he was simply overeager. “He’s one of those CEOs who actually reads what we send him,” he’d said once, shrugging as he wiped grease from his hands. “Frankly, it’s refreshing.” That was how everything felt in those days—refreshing, promising, bright with possibility. Especially in the mornings. The house always woke up slowly. The first to rise was usually Lillian. She slipped out of bed with almost mechanical precision, her long hair tied back before she’d even reached the kitchen. She moved with the restless calm of someone whose mind never truly shut off, and by the time Peter wandered in, she would already be sitting at the table with her tablet, reading through her overnight logs. “Morning, starshine,” Peter mumbled once, voice thick with sleep as he fumbled for coffee. Lillian smirked without lifting her eyes. “Morning, grease monkey.” “You know, one day I’ll upgrade that nickname,” he said, leaning over to kiss her cheek. “Unlikely,” she replied, smiling at the screen. Then came the softest sound of the morning: Allen’s coo, drifting down the hallway like a polite little request. He rarely cried. In