Chapter 3

As I placed my foot on the first step, a commotion erupted from the back of the house, near the patio.

A child was crying. Loudly.

Mark' s head snapped towards the sound, his face instantly filled with an urgent concern I had never seen him show for me. "Alex!" he yelled, rushing past me.

Chloe came running in from the patio, her face a mask of theatrical panic. A small boy, about two years old, was in her arms, wailing. He had a scratch on his arm. It was a minor scrape, but from their reaction, you'd think he'd lost a limb.

"It was the system!" Chloe cried out, her eyes wide as she looked at Mark, but I knew the performance was for me. "The new automated patio shade! It malfunctioned! It retracted too fast and the corner of the frame grazed him!"

She was talking about a new feature, likely one of Chloe's own projects. A vanity project to show her 'innovative' spirit.

"I told you the integration with the legacy systems was risky!" she continued, her voice rising in pitch. She shot a sharp, accusatory look at me. "It must be a bug from the old core. From Ava' s code."

She was blaming me. Blaming my work for a scratch on her son' s arm. She was painting me as a threat, my lingering influence as a poison in the system. It was a brilliant, cruel move. Mark was already looking at me with undisguised fury.

"See, Ava? This is what I was talking about," Mark snarled. "Your ghost is already causing problems."

But I wasn't looking at them. I was looking at the control panel on the wall, its screen displaying a live diagnostic of the patio system. While they were busy with their drama, I was reading the error log.

I walked calmly over to the sobbing child. Chloe instinctively tightened her grip, pulling the boy away from me as if I were toxic.

"It wasn't a malfunction," I said, my voice clear and steady in the suddenly quiet room.

I pointed to the screen on the wall. "The log is right there. The command to retract the shade was manually overridden, with the safety sensors disabled. It was given from a user-level command, not a system-level one."

I turned my gaze from the screen to Chloe.

"The command came from your smartwatch," I said, looking pointedly at the infinity-loop prototype on her wrist. "You made the shade retract. You probably held Alex's arm just a little too close to it."

Chloe' s face went pale. The theatrical tears vanished, replaced by cold fury.

"How dare you," she hissed. "You come back from the dead and the first thing you do is accuse me of hurting my own son?"

"She's right, Mark," Chloe said, turning to him, her voice trembling with manufactured fear. "This is what she is now. She's broken. Damaged. She's trying to hurt us, hurt our family. That thing she created, that Spark AI, it's just like her. A hidden danger."

She was trying to link me to the 'dangerous' legacy code, to paint us both as flawed and untrustworthy.

Mark stepped in front of me, his body blocking my path. His face was contorted with rage.

"You are unbelievable," he spat. "You were always so jealous of anyone who had something you didn't. You couldn't stand that Chloe saved your company, that she and I built a life. A real life, with a family. Something you could never give me."

The insult was designed to shatter me. To remind me that in the three years I was gone, he had built a whole new world on the ruins of mine.

"I want access to Spark," I said, ignoring his tirade. "The full core programming. I have the right. I am the creator."

"You have no rights!" he yelled, his voice echoing in the large, empty-feeling house. "You are nothing to this company anymore. You are a guest in this house, a house that belongs to me and Chloe now. You will not touch my son, and you will not touch my company's property."

"Spark is not your company's property, Mark," I replied, my voice dangerously low. "Spark is mine. And if you don't give me access, I will get it another way. And I promise you, you won't like how I do it."

His face, so full of rage a moment ago, now showed a flicker of fear. He remembered my skills. He knew that threat wasn't empty. He knew, better than anyone, what I was capable of.