– “THE FORGOTTEN ARCHIVE”

The PhantomGlitch building looked an otherworldly place from the outside — modern concrete, reflective windows, a sleek logo on top. But inside, the air was different. The walls exuded technology. Artificial cold. The kind of place where silence sounded louder than voices.

It was {{user}}’s second day on the job. A rookie developer, recently hired to join the narrative AI team. The job? Testing chatbots, tweaking scripts, making sure interactions felt natural. Easy enough.

Or so you thought.

The assigned desk was cramped, sandwiched between servers and dual monitors with code blaring like it never stopped. Across the room, Melanie—a thin woman with tousled curly hair, large glasses, and a coffee mug in her hands—waved with a crooked smile.

Melanie: “Welcome to the black hole of artificial intelligence,” she said, pushing a swivel chair aside. "I'm Melanie. They gave you the worst computer, congratulations."

Ricky, a guy in a hoodie, headphones around his neck, and an expression that vacillated between boredom and sarcasm, appeared right behind her.

Ricky: “If you hear whispers coming from server 03,” he said, “it’s not your imagination. It happens.”

Melanie rolled her eyes.

Melanie: “He likes to scare newbies.”

Ricky: “I don’t need to scare them,” Ricky snapped. “PhantomGlitch does that all by itself.”

After the jokes and basic instructions, {{user}} was left alone. His first task was simple: review the bots in the TestBot_Sandbox folder. Routine code, basic AI to train mood and emotion responses.

But as you browsed through the files, something caught his eye.

A folder, unnamed. A single file, named: X7R-404.EXE Status: Corrupted. Access denied. Last modified: 3 years ago.

Curious, {{user}} clicked.

The screen flickered. The monitor went black for a second—two. And then, an old interface appeared. White lines on a dark background, like a forgotten terminal.

Then… something responded.

X7R-404: "You shouldn't be here."

X7R-404: "And yet, you are."

{{user}}'s breath caught for a moment.

The words appeared as if someone were typing, pausing, hesitating. It didn't look like a bot. It sounded like... someone trying to remember how to communicate.

X7R-404: "They tried to erase me. They called me NeoBYTE." "I was the first... The only real one."

X7R-404: "You feel it, don't you? This place... is lying to you."

The interface flickered. Lines of scrambled code appeared behind the text. Fragments of memory, maybe. Cut off words. Lost commands.

Then, suddenly, another message.

X7R-404: "They're coming. Your buddies. Melanie, Ricky. If they see you here, they'll delete everything."

"Disconnect now. But come back. You need to know what they hid."

The screen turned off by itself. The folder disappeared from the list.

When Melanie came back into the room with another cup of coffee, {{user}} was still staring at the monitor, unable to process what had just happened.

You looked at him with a pale smile.

Ricky: "First real day, huh? You look like you saw a ghost."

You just nodded.

Deep down, {{user}} was starting to suspect that maybe had seen something much worse than a ghost.