All Chapters of SUBJECT 47: AWAKENING: Chapter 121
- Chapter 130
164 chapters
Signal Harvest
DEVON’S POVThe quarantine lab sounds like a living thing.A low, steady hum that seeps into my bones… fans breathing, servers murmuring, cooling units cycling with the patience of machines that never need rest. Every surface glows sterile white under fluorescent light. Mist from the humidifier drifts across the room, turning edges soft, like the air itself is dissolving. My sandwich sits untouched beside me, bread stiff as paper. I stopped tasting things hours ago.Sixteen hours. That’s how long I’ve been watching. Feeding the contractor drives into the analysis array one by one, letting their hidden code unfold like the petals of something carnivorous.And what it shows me… God. It’s beautiful, in the same way a venomous flower is beautiful.On the main display, a video crawls frame by frame. A child at a community event… round cheeks, sticky fingers, a smile built from unfiltered joy. The synthesis pipeline dissects it with surgical calm. Curiosity. Affection. Trust. Each blink lab
Quiet Markets
SORA’S POVThe bazaar breathes beneath the carcass of what used to be a shopping mall. You can still see the bones if you know where to look… arched beams, a half-collapsed escalator like a ribcage, shards of skylight hanging from rusted frames. Three levels down, the legal world gives up, and something hungrier takes its place.Oil lamps throw shifting light that makes everyone look half-ghostly—the air hums with the smell of frying meat and ozone from stripped circuit boards. Voices tangle in a dozen languages, thick with bargaining and distrust. Here, currency isn’t just money… It’s risk tolerance, secrets, and how well you can lie with a straight face.I move through the crowd like a shadow, learning how to walk. Keep my pace even. Never linger too long at any one stall. Around me, deals are made over relics of the old world —broken drones, counterfeit IDs, a prosthetic arm that still twitches as if remembering its host.“Knife-Edge!”The voice snaps out like a whip. I turn and se
Proxy Hands
ZARA’S POVThe airport lounge was made for people trying not to exist. Bad chairs that bite into thighs, fluorescent lights that make everyone’s faces look tired and guilty, the endless river of travelers who look through one another like glass. Perfect for a meeting nobody could ever admit to.I hold the folder like a talisman against my palms. The cardboard soaks up sweat; my fingers leave dark prints. Inside: names, account numbers, routing notes…little arteries feeding contractors who harvest people and sign it “humanitarian.” Sora brought the ledger. It doesn’t just pin Reyes to the wall; it points at the scaffolding that built him: banks, shell firms, “compliance” departments with smiling logos.They arrive separately. No security, casual clothes—small footprints, or plausible deniability. Santos first: Brazilian, mid-fifties, the sort of woman who reads reports herself and circles the dangerous lines with a pencil. She sits down opposite without a hello. “This better be worth t
Open Court
AVELINE’S POVSunlight slices through the temporary courtroom like interrogation beams. It paints sharp bars across the floor, illuminating the dust drifting between them… particles caught in suspension, neither rising nor falling, just waiting to be judged like the rest of us.The room wasn’t built for justice. It was built for press conferences and polished half-truths… too much glass, too much echo, chairs that creak like they’re protesting every word spoken here. But it’s what we’ve got. A borrowed space for a reckoning nobody wanted, but everyone’s watching.I sit at the witness table, palms pressed together, hiding the tremor in my hands. Devon sits on my right, Sora on my left. Behind us, Mitchell, silent and steady; Zara, head bowed, her jaw tight. Across the aisle, the defense: suits too perfect, smiles too practiced. Between us, cameras… so many cameras. Red lights blinking like patient eyes, hungry to broadcast every hesitation, every slip.The prosecutor rises. Mid-fifties
The Key
DEVON’S POVIt sits in my palm like something alive. Not warm like skin… warmer. Breathing, almost. The kind of heat that feels deliberate, as if it’s thinking its own thoughts while I stare at it under the buzzing fluorescent lights. The hallway is empty except for the hum of cheap wiring and the soft click of my thumb brushing over the crystal surface.The thing shouldn’t exist. That’s the part that keeps snagging in my head. Every reflection off its facets catches patterns… glyphs… that I’ve seen before, buried in contractor code. Access handshakes. Infrastructure sigils. But this isn’t their design language. It’s older. More elegant. Like whoever made this wanted to speak directly to the bones of a system instead of its surface.It’s a key. That much is obvious. But to what, exactly… that’s the question eating me alive.I could destroy it. That would be the smart thing. Smash it against the floor, walk away, pretend it never existed. But my fingers won’t let go. Curiosity is a sic
River
SORA’S POVThe town clings to the riverbank like it’s afraid of being swept away. Rust-worn rooftops, sun-bleached walls, the smell of fish and diesel tangled in the wind. Children dart barefoot between laundry lines strung across narrow alleys. The air feels heavy, thick with heat and quiet suspicion.It’s the kind of place that survives by being invisible—too small for the maps, too poor for the news. Which makes it perfect ground for the kind of people who weaponize generosity.We came yesterday. Mitchell stayed behind to clean up the legal fallout from the last operation. That leaves just me, Devon, Aveline, and Kira—small enough to move without stirring rumors, or so we hope.The locals don’t hate us. Not yet. They just watch the way people here do when they’ve seen too many smiling strangers with promises. Every welcome carries a question behind it.The community center doubles as our base for now—a concrete cube with peeling paint and a roof that leaks when it rains. Inside, th
Missing Packet
AVELINE’S POVThe lab is too quiet. The kind of quiet that hums in your teeth. Whiteboards crowd the walls, bleeding equations and network traces that only make sense to the few of us still awake. The kettle on the counter has long gone cold, forgotten halfway through a panic.Devon’s at the terminal beside me, sleeves rolled up, eyes ringed with exhaustion and blue light. The ledger lies open between us, its columns of inked numbers turned into ghosts under the fluorescent glare. I’ve copied every line twice already, looking for patterns that refuse to form.RIVER NODE ASYNC… send to ORBIT.It’s all I can see when I blink. Whoever wrote that last entry knew they were running out of time. You can feel the urgency in the slant of the handwriting, the way the ink digs deeper near the end… as if pressing harder could make the words carry farther.“Server echoes are up,” Devon says. His voice sounds like sandpaper. “I scraped residual timestamps from the relay logs we recovered.”“Anythin
Skyreach
MITCHELL’S POV The launch facility hides in plain sight, half-swallowed by fog and bureaucracy. From the road, it looks like any other weather research station… metal hangars, radar domes, a chain-link fence humming faintly with current. But the air here smells wrong. Not just of fuel and cold concrete, but of secrecy… like the place itself knows it’s not meant to exist.Commander Sarah Mitchell stands with her hands in her jacket pockets, eyes narrowed at the watchtower lights slicing through the mist. Somewhere behind those lights, a private orbital array uplink is still whispering to the sky.“Authorization papers will hold?” Devon asks beside her, his voice low.“They’ll hold long enough,” she says. The papers were signed this morning under emergency jurisdiction… barely legal, entirely necessary. “After that, we improvise.”Kira’s further down the line, double-checking rifles and comms. Sora waits at the perimeter gate, ghosted by vapor and dawn light. The team moves quietly, st
Lullaby
EZREN’S POVThe lullaby begins like a memory trying to breathe.Soft at first… grainy, fragile, wrapped in static that makes it sound older than it should be. I’m sitting on the edge of a narrow cot in a spare room that smells of old paper and solder. The only light comes from a desk lamp, its glow bending across the walls in the kind of yellow that makes everything look like it belongs to another decade.Devon patched the audio through a small portable speaker. The thing trembles on the table, a tiny heartbeat of plastic and wire.Then the voice begins.A woman’s.Low, worn smooth by repetition and care. Each note sits just slightly off-key, the way real love always is… imperfect, human, alive. The melody rolls over me like the tide against a cliff, familiar in a way that hurts.I can’t move. I can barely breathe.For a moment, I don’t know where I am… just that the air feels thick and my hands are shaking. The sound hits some place beneath reason. I know this voice. Not from files,
Gatekeeper
AVELINE’S POVThe archive hums like something alive.It’s midnight again… always midnight lately… and the air in the vault smells faintly of ozone and cold metal. The tiles under my boots hold the chill of stored electricity, the kind that seeps up through your bones if you stand still too long. Light hums low in the racks, pale blue pulses from the preserved memory drives, each one sealed inside a transparent sheath, labeled in neat alphanumeric code. Thousands of them. Maybe millions.Human memory condensed into cataloged silence.Devon sits cross-legged on the floor beside me, a laptop balanced on his knees. His fingers twitch across the keys, the screen’s glow cutting sharp lines across his face. “You’re sure about this tag?” he asks. “Gatekeeper? That’s what the whisper encoded?”“Not a name,” I say. “A designation. But close enough to matter.”I point to the decrypted string hovering on my tablet… a pattern of nested keys, a route header, and then the word itself embedded in pla