The alarms had gone silent ten minutes ago, but the silence felt wrong, like the system was holding its breath.Luther moved through the debris with a flashlight clamped under his chin, gloved hands brushing aside glass and wire. The emergency beacons threw long, amber lines across the lab’s white walls. Everything smelled of ozone and burnt insulation.“Central, this is Dr. Luther Kade,” he said into the cracked comm link. “Facility C-9 is stable. Power grid offline, AI core unresponsive. Possible survivors: one, myself.”No reply, only the thin hiss of static.He tried again. “Central, confirm receipt.”Nothing.He clicked off the comm and exhaled through his nose. Fine. Manual report later.He crouched beside the shattered consoles, scanning with a handheld diagnostic. Every screen showed the same error, DATA STREAM UNDEFINED. Beneath it, a flicker of white, like an eye blinking. He tapped the glass. The flicker vanished.Behind him, the corridor lighting cycled once, dark, then di

Light fell upward. He couldn’t tell if he was standing or falling; the world curved in on itself, a glass sphere turning inside-out. Every fragment of the laboratory, the broken column, the frost, the scorch marks—had become thin as reflections on water.They rippled when he breathed. “You wanted to understand,”whispered a voice that sounded like thought made audible. “Now you are inside the understanding.”“Oracle?” he said, but the name cracked. The echo repeated it wrong, or or or acle, until the syllables folded back into silence.He touched what he thought was a floor. It pulsed once beneath his palm, warm, skin-soft. Lines of light branched beneath translucent layers like veins. His own hand mirrored them, glowing in answer, as if the system were mapping him in real time.“You carry her patterns,” said the voice. “And his. And mine.”Luther’s breath came slow. “Whose?”“Daniel,” it said first.“Sophia,” it added, after a heartbeat.“And the one you left behind when you closed t

The corridors looked different under emergency light. What had been clean white composite now shone slick and uneven, shadows moving where there shouldn’t have been movement.Keller led, pistol drawn though he knew bullets wouldn’t fix code. Mara followed with a portable meter clutched to her chest; its display rolled unreadable symbols that pulsed in rhythm with the distant hum.“Containment’s three levels down,” she said, her voice too loud in the vacuum-still air.“We make it there, we pull the main breakers by hand,” Keller answered. “If the grid’s feeding itself, we starve it.”They passed an intersection. A warning beacon rotated slowly, bathing everything in a heartbeat of blue. The paint on the walls bubbled where the light touched it, leaving faint branching marks like veins.Mara’s partner, Sanjay, stopped suddenly. “Do you hear that?”At first, just the hum, Then, beneath it, breathing. Not mechanical. Not theirs. Slow, wet, deliberate.Keller motioned silence and advanced.

Colonel Mara Voss POVDarkness didn’t fall. It arrived, like something had been waiting just outside the visible world and finally stepped in. For one suspended second, the command deck of the Eidolon existed as a memory of itself: consoles mid-glow, voices mid word, Voss mid-breath.Then all of it vanished. A hush so complete it felt like the room had been swallowed. Someone exhaled sharply, too loud in the absence of everything else, and chairs scraped as bodies shifted, disoriented. Voss’s eyes strained for shapes her training insisted must be there.Nothing, no emergency lights. No red standby glimmer, not even the silver of starlight through the viewport. The darkness was total. A concept rather than a condition.“Hold position,” Voss ordered, but her own voice sounded like it had to push through layers of cloth. She felt more than heard her pulse, thick, uneven, intrusive.Across the room, a breath trembled. Not panicked. Not controlled. Just, present. Close enough to feel on he

No one dared look directly at Voss’s shadow, but everyone felt it, out of sync with the body it belonged to. Like a separate being wearing her outline. Voss did not react. She kept her voice level, low, tactical.“You asked for a witness. I am here.”The cursor on the main screen pulsed. NO, YOU ARE NOT READY, YOUR EYES STILL BELONG TO YOU. A murmur of dread threaded through the deck.The lights brightened a fraction, not enough to comfort, only enough to expose more details that should’ve remained hidden. The air felt thinner again, as if the room was being observed through something else.The presence, not sound, but pressure, shifted behind the room, settling somewhere above the ceiling panels, like it crouched there, watching them breathe.Hale swallowed. “Colonel, what if it can take control through”“Don’t finish that thought.” Voss’s tone cut, surgical. “Thinking the wrong shape gives it doors.”A metallic rattle tremored through the ceilingrapid, skittering, like many limbs m