All Chapters of SUBJECT 47: AWAKENING: Chapter 111
- Chapter 120
163 chapters
Terms
EZREN’S POVThe room smells like nothing, and that’s almost worse than a stench. White walls, white floor, light without shadows…the kind of space designed to scrub out history. Even sound feels padded here. Devon swept it for surveillance three times, but the air still tastes like a trap waiting to spring.Mitchell prowls the perimeter, fingers brushing the embedded kill-switches she insisted on installing herself. She doesn’t look at me when she says, “You don’t have to do this.”“I do.”“We could send someone else. Zara’s trained for this kind of thing.”“The caretaker asked for me,” I tell her, standing in the dead center where there’s nowhere to lean, nowhere to hide. “It wants someone linked. Someone who’s seen the preservation network from the inside.”“That also makes you a walking target,” Kira cuts in from the door. She’s all crossed arms and clenched jaw, a bouncer ready to throw the universe out on its ear. “They’ll read you through the link. Pull on your strings until you
The Voice
EZREN’S POV “Ezren.” My name lands in the air like a thrown stone. Not a machine’s pitch, not some synthetic trick, but a cadence my bones recognize before my head can catch up. Half affection, half exasperation. Like always. My brother. Not my brother. A projection, a recording, a memory wearing his skin. But it sounds so much like him, my chest splits open anyway. “I know you’re scared,” the voice says. It’s soft, patient. The tone he used when we were kids and I’d stumble out of nightmares, shaking. “I know this is hard to understand. But I’m okay. I’m at peace here.” My throat cinches until every breath feels like glass. I want to speak, to argue, to throw a thousand questions at him like stones, but all that crawls out is a sound that might be his name. “You always worried too much,” he goes on, warmth threaded through the humor. “Even when we were kids, you’d lie awake imagining every way the world could collapse. Remember the summer I taught you to swim? You were convinc
Counterplay
DEVON’S POVCoffee steam curls around my screen, thin and restless, like smoke from a fire I can’t put out. It smells burnt and bitter, but I drink it anyway. Thirty-six hours awake has stripped away the fuzz of fatigue and left me in that glassy place where focus is almost pain…every thought sharp enough to cut. Three monitors glow at me. Lines of code sprawl across them like veins under skin: elegant, vicious, my best work yet.A trap.Not just code. A snare with teeth.The caretaker wanted verification access. Wanted to crawl through our relay nodes, see the bones of our governance demos, and mark them “authentic.” Fine. Let them. I’ll give them access so clean they’ll think it’s holy. What they won’t see…at least not at first…are the tripwires hidden like hairline cracks in marble.Festival dates. Ritual markers. Cultural hash data any scanner trained on human behavior would nod at and pass along. It looks exactly like what they’d expect: the ceremonial clutter of a living culture
False Sanctuary
SORA’S POVThe island looks like something out of a travel brochure. Too perfect. The kind of perfect that feels paid for.White sand unfurls in long ribbons, soft as sifted flour. The ocean burns blue… so blue it hurts to look at for long. Palm trees lean into the wind, shaking their leaves like they know they’re being watched.And maybe they are.Flags from a dozen nations flap along the boardwalk, a chorus of bright colors that say unity and progress. The Choice Station pilot, humanity’s grand moral experiment, supposedly built to let people decide their future freely.It looks like hope carved into paradise.That’s exactly what makes my stomach turn.Officially, I’m here as a field medic. Unofficially, I’m here to see if any of this is real… or just another performance with better lighting. Because nothing this flawless exists without a few bodies buried under the sand.The station buildings are elegant in the same sterile way hospitals try to look “friendly.” White structures wit
The Seed
AVELINE’S POVDawn leaks through the lab windows like honey over glass, soft and slow, catching on the metal edges of the workbench. The air smells like burnt circuits, cheap black tea, and something metallic underneath it… Hope turned sour. My hands still carry the scent of both.What’s left of the device sits on the table in front of me, scattered open like a body that never got a chance to scream. Tiny filaments, shredded sensors, and the little core I cracked apart hours ago… its heart, no larger than a grain of rice.Evil shouldn’t be this small.Mitchell leans over my shoulder, nursing a coffee that’s gone lukewarm. Her hair’s tied back, her eyes red, the kind of tired that comes from knowing rest won’t make a difference anymore.“What are we looking at?” she asks, her voice hoarse.“A seed,” I say, and the word tastes wrong. “Harvester protocol. But this one’s passive… it doesn’t broadcast, just listens.”“For what?”I tap the processor and pull up the extracted code on my scr
The Shepherd
ZARA’S POVThe transit lounge reeks of metal and fatigue. Stale coffee. Recycled air. A crowd half-asleep on plastic seats, hunched over phones as if the screens might tell them when the world will start making sense again. Suitcases piled like sandbags against an invisible storm. Voices low, in a dozen languages, all whispering the same confession: I don’t know when I’ll be home.Six hours I’ve been here… nursing burnt espresso, combing through the wreckage of data like a scavenger at a crash site. Seized contractor notes. Diplomatic cables. Snippets of political chatter are too careful to name what they mean. I keep chasing a thread through it all. Something that hums under the noise.And then it appears.A name. Or maybe a myth.The Shepherd.At first, it’s not a person… just a function buried in encrypted memos, fragments scattered like breadcrumbs only a paranoid bastard would piece together.The Shepherd will coordinate messaging.Check with the Shepherd before release.The Shep
Strings
DEVON’S POVThe war room hums like a hive caught in panic. Rows of monitors climb the walls, glowing with maps, feeds, cascading data… every pixel another heartbeat in the information war we’re bleeding through. Operators move between stations in silence, eyes glazed from sleeplessness, fingers blurring over keys. The air smells of coffee gone bitter and the cold metal tang of recycled air.I’ve been awake for forty hours. My hands tremble when I reach for my mug. The caffeine doesn’t keep me sharp anymore… it just stops me from falling apart. But stopping isn’t an option. Every second I waste, the Shepherd’s network spreads another thread through the collective mind.“Pattern recognition complete,” the console whispers. I drag the results onto the main display.And for a moment, I just stare.The Shepherd’s campaign isn’t random chaos… It’s orchestral. Each post, clip, testimonial, comment… It’s part of a score. Dozens of cultural rhythms are woven into a global composition. A lulla
Crossroads
EZREN’S POVThe rain doesn’t fall… it attacks.Each drop slams the chapel windows hard enough to make the glass tremble, as if the whole sky’s trying to break through and drown what’s left of us. I came here for silence, or something close to it. But even in this place built for stillness, the noise follows me. The team’s bickering. The contractor’s silver-tongued logic. The architect’s patient, suffocating judgment. All of it echoes in my head until I can’t tell where their voices end and mine begin.The chapel is old. Stone ribs arch into a ceiling darkened by decades of weather. Interfaith, the plaque says outside… a shared sanctuary for anyone who needs to face something bigger than themselves. Now it’s just me, the rain, and the ghosts of too many voices.My brother’s voice… recorded, preserved, saying my name like it still means something.The caretaker’s calm reasoning about mercy and continuation.Devon’s anger at seeing infrastructure twisted into weapons.Sora’s cold disgus
Compromise
MITCHEL’S POVThe meeting room wears power like armor. It gleams…polished wood that eats light, hard lines designed to make you feel small if you sit wrong. Flags stand in a patient, geometric forest along the wall. Everything here smells faintly of expensive paper and perfumed certainty.I sit at the head of the table because they asked me to. It feels like a stage set for confession. Advisors I can’t name cluster behind me like polite shadows. Across the table, Ambassador Volkov folds his fingers into that triangular shape people use when they’re savoring the moment they think they’ve already won.“Commander Mitchell,” he says, and the tone clips the air. “Let’s speak plainly. Mr. Hayes’s framework is admirable. Sanctuary spaces. Slow processes. Distributed autonomy. Beautiful in theory.”“In practice?” I offer.He smiles in a way that should be illegal. “Theory doesn’t feed families. It doesn’t build infrastructure. It doesn’t scale.” He slides a document toward me; it stops at the
Burning Choice
EZREN’S POVThe hill crouches above the city like an old scar… raised, aching, and never quite healed. From up here, the skyline looks soft. Lanterns flicker behind windows like scattered stars, each one sheltering someone trying to live, or forget, or decide. I come here when it gets too heavy… when the machinery of what we’re building threatens to crush the people inside it.Today, the first humane sanctuary opened.Not another Choice Station dressed up as mercy. Not a contractor hub whispering quick salvation to desperate ears. This one’s different… quiet, slow, stubbornly human—a place where people can sit with their terror and confusion without someone rushing them toward a terminal.The building was formerly a community center. Old bricks, uneven floors, a mural half-scrubbed off one wall. We took money from donors we don’t fully trust… the kind who smile with too many teeth… but for once, the cost felt worth paying. Inside, there’s nothing sleek or glowing. No pods humming in n