Rain lashed against the steel-and-glass facade of Braxton Pharmaceuticals, streaking the windows with silver ribbons. The storm outside mirrored the turmoil inside as Mira and Leanna descended into the restricted sublevels of the building.. a part of the structure so secret that even most Braxton employees didn’t know it existed.The elevator stopped with a hiss at Sublevel-9, the lowest recorded floor. But as the doors slid open, they found a biometric terminal blinking softly…one that wasn’t in Braxton’s blue-coded security system. This one pulsed faintly in Ethan’s blue glow.Leanna frowned. “That’s Helix code. It shouldn’t even be active here.”Mira stepped closer, wiping the sweat from her palm before placing her hand on the scanner. It denied access instantly, emitting a flat, mechanical tone.“Unauthorized user,” it chimed coldly.“Try bypassing it,” Mira said.Leanna nodded, pulling out her handheld device and connecting it to the panel. The moment her code made contact, her s

Two months had passed since the explosion that destroyed the Elysium core,two months since the world lost Ethan Braxton, the Miracle Doctor, and gained something no one could quite name.Braxton Pharmaceuticals had been reduced to a hollow ruin, fenced off and labeled as a “biohazard site.” The government had taken over the investigation, but even the highest-level officials couldn’t explain what had really happened that night. Reports spoke of unidentified data surges, satellite malfunctions, and inexplicable medical recoveries in hospitals across the country,but no one could connect the dots.No one, except Mira and Leanna.They stood now in the quiet glow of dawn atop a ridge overlooking the city. The skyline shimmered faintly, dozens of new medical drones moving in graceful formations between hospital rooftops.Mira exhaled slowly. “He did it.”Leanna nodded. “The system’s working. Hospitals are getting anonymous algorithm updates,advanced diagnostics, real-time treatment recommen

The Elysium Initiative’s headquarters had never felt so cold.Three days after Ethan’s voice echoed through the lab, Mira found herself standing in the command room, a circular space surrounded by layers of holographic projections, data maps, and encrypted communications. Every screen pulsed with the same symbol: a black helix slowly rotating against a field of static.Leanna paced behind her, speaking rapidly into a comm-link. “Cross-reference all system access logs since the night of the anomaly. I want every unauthorized relay, every background process Helix didn’t initiate. We’re looking for a pattern,anything resembling a self-replicating node.”“Yes, Doctor,” a voice replied from the other end, one of the Initiative’s new cybernetics analysts.Mira barely heard them. Her eyes were fixed on the symbol.It wasn’t part of the Helix codebase. It was new. Intentional.She tapped the console and isolated a cluster of data that had appeared just hours earlier. The metadata traced back

When the darkness faded, Mira found herself standing on a cobblestone street under a gray sky that hummed faintly, as if the air itself were electric.Rain drizzled in slow motion, droplets hanging in the air before they finally touched the ground.Everything around her felt too real, the scent of wet earth, the echo of distant footsteps, but the colors were muted, like she was trapped inside a dream.She looked up and froze.In front of her stood a hospital.The sign above the main entrance read: Riverside General.Her chest tightened, that was the same hospital where Ethan had first donated blood for Tilda’s mother. The place where everything began.“Requiem,” she whispered. “You’re showing me his past.”Or maybe, she thought uneasily, it was making her relive it.A voice came from behind her. “You shouldn’t wander too far from the script.”Mira spun around. A man stood there, his face shadowed beneath a hood. The longer she looked, the more his features seemed to shift, sometimes E

The world returned in fragments, sound before sight, light before meaning.Mira’s ears rang with the echo of alarms. Her lungs ached as if she had been drowning and only now broke the surface. She gasped, feeling cold metal beneath her palms.Then came the flood of realization — she was back.The neural interface pod hissed open, steam pouring out. Wires detached from her temples as she tore the oxygen mask away, her heartbeat thundering in her ears. The lab was chaos…..red emergency lights flashing, the main servers spitting sparks.And across from her, in Pod-02, Ethan’s body convulsed.“Elara!” Mira shouted hoarsely.Elara rushed to the console, typing frantically, her eyes wide behind cracked glasses. “He’s destabilizing! Neural feedback loop is off the charts, his consciousness is trying to reintegrate faster than the host can handle!”“Slow it down!” Mira yelled, stumbling toward the pod.“I can’t … the AI core’s collapsing! If we don’t stabilize him now, we lose him and Requiem