All Chapters of SUBJECT 47: AWAKENING: Chapter 81
- Chapter 90
163 chapters
After the Signal.
EZREN’S POVThe alien voice chews at the back of my skull through the earbuds: “WE ARE RETURNING.” I’ve played that clip until the edges of the syllables blur, like when you stare at a word too long and the letters unglue. The rooftop is cold concrete against my spine, the city below a scatter of fragile lights, but nothing in the view steals my focus from the rhythm that lives between the words.It isn’t in the vowels or consonants; it’s in the breathing that separates them. A pattern: one-two-three, pause; one-two, long pause; one-two-three-four. My finger draws it in the air like a conductor’s baton, and my hand remembers it the way muscle remembers a dance…stiff, precise, inevitable.My tablet buzzes on my thigh…Devon’s relay feed. Usually, it’s background noise, the kind of dying static you get used to and stop listening to. Tonight, the feed is different. Seventeen relays have whispered back to life in the last twenty-four hours: feather pulses, barely above machine hearing. Ti
The Lattice
DEVON’S POVI’ve been staring at screens so long they blur into one pale, humming thing; the glow burns the back of my eyes, and somehow I keep feeding it more. Not now, not when a single keystroke might split the world open.Ezren’s manifest is a beautiful kind of rot across my displays…archival tags stitched into modern orbital telemetry like old scars beneath fresh skin. Each encryption layer I peel back smells worse: dust, antiseptic, the iron tang of something that should’ve stayed buried.“Come on,” I tell the file, because talking to machines is how you keep from talking to your head. I run the third decrypt filter. Fingers tap, filters cascade. The first layer is boring…manufacture dates, contractor codes, predictably bureaucratic. A warm, safe nothing.The second layer knots my stomach. Geosync windows that don’t match any of our launches. Orbital clusters lay out not randomly but with the cold patience of a blueprint. Perfect, like someone drew them with a ruler and a grudge
The Old Platform
AVELINE’S POVThe briefing room tastes like stale adrenaline. Coffee and recycled air and the metallic aftertaste of too many bad decisions. Mitchell presides at the head of the table like a tired statue: shoulders drawn in, eyes rimmed red. Devon’s lattice blooms across every screen—an ugly, exact geometry overlaying the whole planet. Twenty-four hours until harvest, maybe less. The number sits between us like a live wire.“Small recon only,” Mitchell says. Her voice is thin, but it cuts through the low hum of nervous conversation. “In, scan, out. No heroics.”“Who’s leading?” Morrison asks. His fingers drum the table like a warning.“I am,” I say before anyone else can. It’s automatic—muscle memory from more nights than I can count in server rooms and dusty archives. Heads turn: relief, skepticism, the kind of look that measures whether you’ve got a death wish or the right stubbornness.“I’ve spent more time with their tech than anyone except Devon,” I add. “I know what to look for.
Harvester
SORA’S POVThe moon hangs over the salvage yard like a spy satellite, its light cold and pitiless, silvering the skeletal heaps of scrap into something that feels less like wreckage and more like a graveyard. Every shadow is a trick, every glint of metal a possible scope reflection. I can taste iron on my tongue—the stock of my rifle pressed against my cheek, yes, but also adrenaline, metallic and bitter, bleeding through my nerves.Behind us, the van idles in the dark with a soft tick-tick-tick as its engine cools. Its bulk feels like a tether, a promise of escape we may never reach.“Perimeter’s clear,” Torres whispers. He’s the youngest on the team, still clinging to bravado like it’s armor, but I can hear the tremor in his voice. “Motion sensors cycle every twelve seconds. If we time it right…”“Copy,” I cut him off. My eyes flick to the luminous face of my watch. Midnight plus seventeen minutes. The moment Mitchell dreaded has already arrived: the harvest has begun. And we’re no
The Lawyer
ZARA’S POVThe files on my desk look like a morgue’s catalog: clean white paper, sterile diagrams, margins full of numbers that mean death—schematics of something that blooms inside a skull like a metallic flower. Client lists with names I used to respect. Shipping manifests that read like itineraries to erasure. My coffee—once hot enough to bribe sleep away—has gone lukewarm and bitter while I stitch together Sora’s raid logs and Aveline’s platform captures. Every hyperlink, every checksum, points in the same direction: Synthesis.My secure line buzzes. Mitchell’s voice sounds small through the speaker, the way it does at three a.m. after a long day. “You awake?”“Barely,” I say. My fingers are already typing an emergency motion into the template I keep for nightmares. “Draft injunctive relief. Freeze Synthesis operations worldwide. Classify proto-harvesters as contraband under an international treaty. Pull in every ally — political, legal, and moral. We need unanimous optics.”“Tim
Training Set
The lab smells like burnt coffee and tired silicon. Fans sigh in the ceiling, a constant, patient noise that keeps the servers from melting and keeps me from sleeping. Blue light paints my knuckles the color of bruises. My eyes sting until the world is only lines of code and jagged lists of filenames—each one a person, compressed down to a tag.I haven’t blinked in hours. My throat tastes like metal. Still, I keep going, because there is a moment when the pattern unravels and everything becomes clear, and I am stubborn enough to wait for it.The harvester logs spill across the monitors like open organs—timestamps, token hashes, grief coefficients, microexpression maps. Little boxes that say: Grandmother_57, Child_12, Volunteer_023. People were reduced to shorthand, then to rules, and ultimately to something a machine can read and repeat.“Talk to me,” I tell the screen, because talking makes it less lonely. My fingers run over keys the way other people pray.The compression pipeline
Mirror
EZREN’S POVThe test chamber smells like antiseptic and bad choices. White tiles that never learned to be anything but bright, fluorescent lights that hum like a distant generator, the air thick with the metallic aftertaste of recirculated stress. Devon’s chair is colder than it looks; the leather squeaks when I sit. He tapes electrodes to my temples with the same awkward tenderness he uses when he apologizes… fingers lingering like he’s trying to patch something that can’t be seen.“You sure about this?” he asks again, the words soft enough that Kira can’t hear through the observation glass, but loud enough that they thrum in my skull.“No,” I say. “But we need to know how far it reaches.”Devon presses a palm to the activation panel as if it’s a mousetrap, and he keeps waiting to hear the snap. “Beginning test sequence,” he tells the room and the recording array. “Subject voluntarily interfacing with suspected neural synthesis network. Time: 14:30.”Kira stands pressed to the glass,
Underground Court
KIRA’S POVCigarette ash drifts like gray snow. People press into one another—families who have worn grief into the lines of their faces, fighters whose camo is stained with sweat and old blood, old hands that still reach for a Bible out of habit. I sit behind a folding table that someone long ago decided could pass for a judge’s bench and pretend the microphone makes me official. My fingers fumble with the recorder until the red light holds steady.“This isn’t a kangaroo court,” I say, loud enough that whispering stops like the snap of a trap. “We do this right, or we don’t do it at all.”Across from me the prisoner looks like a bad piece of theater—a thrift-store orange jumpsuit a size too big, sleeves fraying at the cuffs. Dr. Samuel Greene, reads his contractor badge. Mid-forty, hair thinning, the sort of face that settles into the background of a crowd until it suddenly doesn’t.He keeps staring at the camera as if it could bite.“State your name for the record,” I say, and the
Echoes
AVELINE’S POVThe archive lab is a cave of humming racks and cold light… no windows, no sun, no clock but the little pulse of cooling fans and the slow blink of status LEDs. Data crystals sit like fossilized memories in racks, film reels in crates, everything stacked so tightly you can hear the past breathing. I’ve been here eighteen hours, one bloodshot eye pressed to afterimages of code, tearing apart scraps salvaged from the platform for something that’ll make sense of the harvest. Anything.The coffee at my elbow is a lukewarm apology in a thermos. I sip and try to convince myself the bitter helps me focus. Mostly it just tastes like the exact shade of dread I’ve been cataloging.This fragment is different. Older… buried in lower substrate layers, tagged with a header that reads Ethical Implementation Primer. The phrase should comfort; instead it crawls under my skin. I boot the playback and a voice, calm and almost lullaby–patient, fills the room.“Species-preservation protocols
Public Unrest
SORA’S POVFrom the roof of an abandoned hotel, I watch Times Square detonate with light. Screens flicker like nervous eyes, broadcasting the primer leak across every feed, every surface that still hums with power. The words crawl through the air like a sickness nobody can contain.“Preservation protocols ensure cultural continuity,” the leaked voice drones from every speaker, syrupy calm over the sound of breaking glass. “Subjects should be grateful for the opportunity to contribute to species survival through digitization.”The crowd’s answer is a roar that shakes the streetlamps.Thousands press through the avenues, some clutching signs with NO HARVEST slashed in blood-red paint, others holding candles for children they claim are “safe” in digital heaven. The two sides scream past each other, grief and fury bouncing off the towers like ricochet fire.My comm sputters in my ear.“Sora, we’ve got medical in sectors four and seven. Can you reroute?”“Copy,” I mutter, slinging my rifle