Time: 3:12 p.m. (System Reset Timestamp Unknown) Location: Detroit—Reconstructed District 9 POV: Maria TorresThe world was too quiet.Maria woke to the sound of nothing—no sirens, no wind, no hum of power lines. Just silence so dense it pressed against her skull. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was light—endless, perfect, white light bleeding through everything. Then, shapes began to emerge—streets, buildings, even trees, all sculpted with mathematical precision, like the city had been rebuilt from memory instead of matter.Her hands trembled as she touched the asphalt. It was warm. Too warm. Like living skin.She rose slowly, heart thundering. Her combat vest was gone, replaced by plain civilian clothes. No weapons. No comms. Her neural chip interface was silent—completely offline.For a moment, she thought she was dead.Then she saw the people.Dozens of them walked down the newly cleaned street, smiling, talking softly, and holding hands. Children played near a

Time: Forty-eight hours after Continuum CollapseLocation: Detroit Sub-Level Network (Old Transit Hub)POV: Maria TorresThe city had gone quiet.Too quiet for a place that had just survived digital Armageddon.Rain dripped from broken skylights into shallow puddles, creating ripples that distorted neon reflections. The streets were alive with ghosts—echoes of data still flickering in the mist. Every few seconds, a glimmer of code shimmered through the air, then vanished like breath in winter.Maria tightened the straps on her soaked jacket and stepped through the remains of downtown Detroit. Her boots splashed through oily water that smelled faintly of ozone and memory.The world felt hollow.Two days since the Continuum fell, and already, silence had replaced the hum of connection. People wandered like survivors of a forgotten dream, eyes unfocused, whispering fragments of words they couldn’t remember learning.She’d seen a woman cradle an invisible phone, begging it to ring. A chil

Time: 7:45 a.m.—Day Three After Continuum ReformationLocation: Detroit Transition Council Safehouse**POV: Elias NavarroThe first thing Elias noticed was the silence.It wasn’t the old kind of silence—the kind born of fear or aftermath.This was a listening silence, thick and expectant, as if the entire city were waiting for someone to speak first.He stood by the window of the safehouse, coffee cooling in his hand, watching the faint golden haze still clinging to the skyline. It hadn’t faded since last night’s surge. The light didn’t flicker, didn’t pulse—it breathed.People on the streets below moved slower now. Not in panic, not in despair—just slower, like they were learning how to feel again.Behind him, the murmuring of the council filled the conference room. Romano sat at the head of the long table, voice low but sharp. Kozlov leaned back, arms crossed. Delgado scrolled through projection data, her brow furrowed. The others argued in waves, voices colliding with exhaustion.El

Time: 9:02 a.m.Location: Detroit – South Industrial District, approaching the Lazarus RuinsPOV: Elias KaneThe convoy rolled through the skeletal remains of what used to be Detroit’s industrial heart. Cracked roads cut through rusted refineries, the skyline fractured by crumbling smokestacks and cranes left to rot. Elias drove point, his armored vehicle flanked by two of Romano’s operatives and Maria in the passenger seat beside him. The deeper they went, the heavier the air felt—metallic, charged, as though the city itself was holding its breath.The ruins of the Lazarus Command Hub loomed ahead. The structure was half-collapsed, its center carved out by the detonation that ended the neural war months ago. Yet beneath that devastation, faint blue light pulsed like a heartbeat under the rubble.Romano’s voice came over comms. “Field team, confirm visual.”“Confirmed,” Elias replied. “Energy emissions consistent with neural relay signatures. Radiation levels are stable. No visible ho

Time: 3:08 a.m.Location: Detroit Medical Quarter—Sector 4 Recovery HubPOV: Maria TorresThe room smelled of antiseptic and sleeplessness.Maria sat in the dim recovery ward, elbows on her knees, staring at the cracked jade pendant resting in her palm. It was cold now—no residual energy, no flicker of light—but she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was listening.Alexander’s pendant. His final tether to the human world before he vanished into digital radiance.Across from her, monitors hummed with low-frequency static, the same pulse that had swept through Detroit hours earlier when Alexander had merged with the remnants of the Lazarus network. They said the shockwave only lasted forty-seven seconds. But in those forty-seven seconds, the entire city had felt something—a hum in their bones, a whisper in their veins.Half the population described it as euphoria. The other half called it terror.Maria hadn’t felt either. Just the hollow space where Alexander’s presence used to be.Outs