Rain tapped against the small window of Room 2B, the cheapest room in the worst dorm on campus. The heater formed a loud noise every few minutes, and the Wi-Fi was slow unless you hacked it yourself.This is what Jay did, and Jay Elric wasn’t the cool type. He didn’t play sports, including partying because he didn’t have designer shoes or gym clothes. He religiously wore an old black hoodie and always looked like he hadn’t slept enough. Because most nights, he hadn’t.Jay is studying cybersecurity major at Silverton Tech, holding on by scholarship money, leftover pizza, and tutoring freshmen in Python and digital forensics. He lives alone, talked to almost no one, and avoided group projects like a virus. The majority of people view him as weird, quiet, or maybe just rude.But Jay had a secret, and sometimes, he heard voices but not voices like someone going crazy. Real thoughts from other people’s thoughts. Sometimes, a whisper and other times noises people made in their thoughts. It

Three months later, Jay had graduated and somehow landed a job at Virexon Corp, a sleek cybersecurity firm with clean offices and dirty secrets. On paper, it made no sense Virexon didn’t recruit from Silverton Tech often, and when they did, it wasn’t for entry-level misfits. Jay hadn’t even applied directly the offer came through a vague recruiter email with no interview—just an NDA, a start date, and a warning: “No outside projects permitted during your employment.” He didn’t trust it because the hiring was too fast with the onboarding too smooth. They gave him the system card access on his first day but what they didn't know he was far too deep for a junior analyst. But Jay needed money because he was late on rent with his laptop barely working. And part of him the reckless part wanted in, so he played along. He wore the suit with memorizing department names. He laughed at bad jokes from his supervisor, a hollow man named Mr. Cormac who wore his smile like a barcode. Jay drank th

The following day Jay was sent by the company he works for to do a strange task with a co worker going to an unknown location with a helicopter. The helicopter sliced through the sky like a silver blade. Jay sat strapped in the backseat, staring out the window as forests blurred below. The wind roared outside, but inside, it was silent too silent. Halden sat across from him, arms crossed, eyes hidden behind black tinted lenses. She hadn't spoken much since they took off.Jay could feel her mind like a ticking clock constant, steady, unreadable. Prism had warned him: Halden is the original weapon. But Jay couldn’t run now not without knowing what she knew. “Where are we going?” he finally asked. Halden didn’t look at him. “To see your future.” Jay clenched his fists. “I thought I was just a junior analyst.” She smiled faintly. “You’re much more than that. You just don’t know it yet.” The words sat heavy in his chest he’d heard them before from Prism. From the Rebellion about s

Jay stood in the ruins of what had once been Virexon Tower. Smoke curled into the sky with sirens wailed somewhere in the distance. But he didn’t hear them not fully. His ears rang with static, and his mind hummed with something more powerful than adrenaline. Something had changed inside him he didn’t just hear thoughts now he could alter them, mold them and bend them. His hands weren’t glowing, but his brain was being modified. And deep inside his neural pathways, he felt it: the code of something ancient something planted. The last voice he heard from the Architect before the collapse hadn’t been fear it had been acceptance. “Jay, are you even listening?” Zia’s voice broke through the cloud in his head her hair was streaked with dust, and her eyes were still glowing faintly from the overload she took during the explosion. She looked shaken but grounded like she always did. “Yeah,” Jay said slowly. “I’m here. Just… processing.” “Not surprising,” Calyx added walking towards them

A year later.... The café was quiet except for the soft hum of old synth jazz and the buzz of neon signs outside. The girl, maybe sixteen, maybe seventeen, wore a cracked smartwatch and patched up denim with a “Free the Fire” sticker on her jacket. Her name was Nova she wasn’t famous and she wasn’t trained. But she had something no one else had a file left behind by a ghost. The map glowed on her tablet screen it wasn’t a normal file. It responded to her thoughts it changed shape when she concentrated. It whispered sometimes, not with sound, but with feeling like someone was guiding her. Because Mindfire was still alive and he had become the signal. “Are you seeing this?” she whispered. Across the table, a boy with silver dyed eyebrows leaned in. He had sharp eyes and a metal implant at the base of his skull, blinking faint blue. “Looks like Neural code,” he said. “But layered in frequencies I’ve never seen.” “It’s talking to me,” Nova said. “Like… it knows me.” Ren frow