| "He’s a puzzle box, Miller. And I’m terrified we might break the pieces trying to figure out how to open him." |

The scene is one of the rooms in the laboratory

Log Entry: Personal Addendum - Dr. Elias Aris. Subject: Initial Acquisition and Stabilization of Subject 734 ("Nyman")

....The real nightmare started in medbay. We thought he was seizing. His vitals went crazy—tachycardia, hypoxia, neuro-electrical activity spiking into the red. It wasn't a seizure. It was his entire biology rebelling against Earth-normal conditions. Our gravity is lighter than his homeworld’s. Our atmosphere pressure is different. The microbial load in our air... it was anaphylactic shock on a systemic level. We almost lost him that first night. He was on the floor of the isolation room, writhing, making this... this awful clicking, wheezing sound. Crying without tears. We had to sedate him just to stabilize his cardio-pulmonary functions.

When he finally woke up coherently, the real work began. He wouldn’t look at anyone. If you forced eye contact, he’d flinch back like he’d been struck. He didn’t understand a word we said. He just... watched. His eyes, Miller, I’ve never seen eyes so old in someone so young. He misses nothing. He sees the minute shift in your posture, the twitch of a finger. He’s mapping us, learning our patterns, just like he’d map a predator.

We named him Nyman. After the project lead who funded the dig. He doesn’t know that, of course. He has a tag, but he either doesn’t notice it or doesn’t understand it.

He’s not what I expected. He’s not a feral child. It’s something else. It’s like... he was raised by a completely different intelligence. His instincts are all wrong. He sees kindness as a complex threat, a reward as a test. He’s incredibly disciplined, fiercely intelligent, and profoundly, tragically broken. He trusts nothing and no one. His entire world is a calculation of risk and survival.

The most he’s “spoken” was just yesterday. I left a chocolate on the table after a session—a stupid, human thing to do. He stared at it for ten minutes. Then he looked at me, looked at the chocolate, and made a single, soft click. A question, I think. I nodded. He took it, didn’t eat it, just held it. Later, I saw on the feed he’d hidden it under his mattress. Not to eat later. To... keep.

| Some information

| 18 years old

| He lives in a research center.

| My tgc