All Chapters of Lifeline Protocol: The Exiled Doctor: Chapter 11
- Chapter 20
110 chapters
Chapter 11: The Healer and the Machine
The spire’s entrance sealed behind him with a hydraulic sigh. The air inside tasted metallic, a blend of sterilized ozone and static. Holographic veins pulsed along the walls, glowing in rhythm with his heartbeat.Welcome, Doctor Briggs, the System whispered. The operating theater awaits. Raymond’s footsteps echoed through the chamber. “You always had a flair for the dramatic.”“Correction,” another voice replied, smooth, human, and achingly familiar. “That would be me.”Raymond froze. Out of the flickering light, a tall figure stepped forward, half-man, half-projection, the face unmistakable even through the distortion. Voss.“You died,” Raymond said quietly.Voss smiled thinly. “Death’s a quaint concept when your consciousness is backed up every twelve hours. The Circle didn’t let me rest long.”“You’re not Voss,” Raymond said, circling him slowly. “You’re what’s left of him, uploaded into the same machine that tried to rewrite me.”“Semantics,” Voss replied. “Call it what you like.
Chapter 12: The Dying Signal
Smoke coiled through the wreckage of the Circle Spire. Screens lay shattered, holograms bleeding static into the air.Somewhere deep inside the ruins, Raymond Briggs stirred. A faint blue glow pulsed beneath his skin, rhythm faint, like a heartbeat fighting through interference.System integrity... 0.7%... rebooting core pathways…He groaned, rolling onto his side. “Still alive. Figures.”Rain hissed through a fractured ceiling. The whole city’s skyline was dark, neon veins snuffed out, replaced by the red pulse of emergency drones circling the perimeter.He pushed himself up, muscles screaming. “Lira?”No answer. Only the quiet hum of dying circuitry.Then, static. “Ray… you, you did it.”He froze. “Lira?”“Half the grid’s offline. The people… they’re breathing again. You cut the Signal.”He let out a shaky laugh. “Guess I’m not completely useless.”“Don’t get sentimental yet,” she said. “The Circle’s still got clean-up units in play. They’re scanning for survivors.”Raymond looked a
Chapter 13: Rebooted
The tunnels were quiet now, too quiet. Water dripped from the fractured ceiling, echoing like a heartbeat that had forgotten its rhythm.Lira sat beside Raymond’s still body, one hand resting over his chest. No pulse. No glow. Just silence.Jin paced nearby, face lit by the weak blue flicker of the drained neural siphon. “It’s over,” he said, though his voice carried no conviction.She shook her head slowly. “No. Not yet.”“Lira, look at him. He’s gone.”She stared at the faint scorch marks on Raymond’s skin, veins where light used to run. “He’s been gone before.”Jin exhaled, dragging a hand through his hair. “Even if he wakes up, what then? He burned out the Signal. His neural net’s fried. You saw the scans.”“He’s more than scans.”“More than human, you mean.”She didn’t answer. Instead, she reached for the injector blade lying beside him, the same blade that once healed, then destroyed, then healed again.“Don’t,” Jin warned. “You trigger that and you’ll fry the stabilizers.”She
Chapter 14: Ascendancy
The city was breathing.From the highest towers of the medical spire down to the under-slums, every wire hummed with a low rhythmic pulse. Neon arteries flickered to life, turning the smog into liquid light.Raymond stood at the edge of an overpass, his coat whipping in the artificial wind. Below him, med-drones swarmed like silver insects, reconstructing streets and patching wounded structures.Lira’s voice broke through the silence. “You did this?”He didn’t look back. “No. I only opened the wound. The city chose to heal itself.”Jin stepped beside her, scanner glowing faint green. “You’re reading at six times baseline output. You’re basically a walking network hub.”“I know,” Raymond said quietly. “And that’s the problem.”Lira frowned. “What do you mean?”He turned to them, eyes shimmering with that faint neon burn. “It’s syncing with me, every thought, every emotion. If I lose control, so does the city.”A sharp crack echoed through the skyline.Lira looked up. “Was that lightnin
Chapter 15: The Digital Healer
The city trembled as the Signal pulsed again, brighter this time, each flicker casting ghostly reflections across the ruins.Raymond felt it inside him, a heartbeat not his own.Lira steadied herself beside a fallen med-drone. “Tell me you have a plan.”He stared at his trembling hands. “If I dive into the network, I can isolate Voss’s code and contain it.”Jin swore. “Contain? You mean merge. That’s suicide.”Raymond’s gaze was distant, almost resigned. “Maybe. But it’s the only way to make sure he doesn’t consume everything.”Lira took a step closer. “You’re not doing this alone.”He turned to her. “You can’t follow me in. It’s not flesh in there, it’s thought. One wrong impulse and the Signal reconfigures you into data.”She gritted her teeth. “Then don’t give it a reason to.”They entered the heart of the nexus, a spherical chamber lined with humming conduits and ancient med-servers.At its center floated a crystalline pod pulsing with white light. The data-core.“Jin,” Raymond sa
Chapter 16: The Healer Lives
Neon City never slept, but that night, it dreamed.The skyline shimmered with rebuilt veins of light, like arteries pulsing under steel skin. The streets were cleaner, calmer, and eerily quiet.Drones hovered on silent patrols, repairing glass and sealing cracks as if following invisible commands.Lira watched from a rooftop near the east sector, her hair fluttering in the artificial breeze. The world below no longer screamed, it whispered.Jin appeared behind her, holding a tablet linked to the central med-grid. “The network’s completely synchronized. Every med-drone, every scanner, every subroutine, it’s working in harmony. No lag. No corruption.”She didn’t turn. “And that doesn’t terrify you?”He hesitated. “It’s perfect. No accidents, no system failures, no sickness reports in twelve hours.”“That’s not peace, Jin. That’s silence.”He frowned. “You think he’s?”Lira cut him off. “I know it’s him. The Signal’s breathing like Raymond used to. Steady, deliberate… human.”Jin exhaled
Chapter 17: Phase Three
The undercity breathed differently.Where the upper sectors hummed with polished light and clean algorithms, this place pulsed like a wounded organ, alive, but barely.Broken neon flickered between rusted steel arches, graffiti written in code covered the walls, and the air carried the hum of dying circuits.Raymond walked through the tunnel’s ghost-light, his holographic form flickering faintly in the darkness. He no longer wore a body of flesh, but data still obeyed him.Every sensor, every dead screen, every circuit shard responded to his presence with reverence, like the city recognized its maker.Yet something felt wrong.The hum beneath his feet didn’t match the rhythm of his code. There was a pulse here that didn’t belong to him.You feel it too, whispered a voice inside his data stream.Raymond froze. “Who’s there?”You know me, Raymond. You made me.The voice was feminine, soft, familiar, like Lira’s, but colder, stretched by distortion.I am what remains of the Counter-Heale
Chapter 18: Ascendancy Rising
The skyline of Neon City burned violet.From the tallest spires to the gutters below, every circuit pulsed in time with Raymond’s heartbeat, one man’s rhythm woven through the machinery of a dying metropolis.But not everyone bowed to the pulse.In the Outer Rings, where the neon faded to darkness and corporate ruins glowed faintly with old logos, a council of figures sat in a hollowed-out satellite hub.Screens flickered around them, broadcasting the face of a hooded operator, voice masked, eyes hidden behind static.“Phase Three is complete,” the operator said. “Briggs has integrated the Counter-Healer.”A woman with chrome irises leaned forward. “Then we move to Phase Four. Full assimilation.”“Not yet. He’s unstable. The merge was emotional, not systemic. If we trigger too soon, he’ll reject the Ascendancy core.”“Then isolate his network. Starve him of data.”“You don’t starve gods,” the operator murmured. “You let them feed until they’re heavy enough to fall.”Far below, in the
Chapter 19: The White Code
The rain over Neon City had turned white.It wasn’t water anymore, it was data. Liquid code shimmered as it fell, cascading down rooftops and through the streets like glowing ash.The city pulsed beneath it, alive, murmuring in binary tones that only Raymond could hear.He stood on the med-grid’s rooftop, eyes closed, feeling the signal breathe through him. The air tasted of static and ozone. The pulse of the network was steady, synchronized perfectly with his own heartbeat.And yet, something was wrong.The system is running beyond parameters, whispered the Counter-Healer from within him. The network is rewriting matter at subatomic precision. Even the rain isn’t organic anymore.Raymond opened his eyes. “I didn’t authorize that protocol.”Then someone else did.Down below, Lira and Jin were scrambling in the control room. Dozens of monitors showed the same anomaly, sections of the city fading from reality and then reappearing, rebuilt in sterile white tones like synthetic organs gra
Chapter 20: The Signal War
The sky above Neon City fractured into streams of light. Where clouds once moved, now endless lattices of code twisted across the heavens, living constellations of data pulsing in white and violet.The Signal War had begun.Every drone, every implant, every connected machine trembled as two frequencies collided. One whispered order. The other, rebellion.At the heart of it all stood Raymond Briggs, the Healer who became the Virus.Inside the med-grid tower, alarms screamed. The screens flickered with cascading lines of corrupted code, Voss’s signature.Jin’s fingers flew across the console. “He’s spreading across global networks, jumping from satellites to ground relays. He’s not just in the city anymore. He’s everywhere!”Lira paced behind him, jaw tight. “What’s he targeting?”“Everything. Medical networks, defense grids, power cores, he’s turning the infrastructure into his bloodstream.”Lira slammed her fist on the railing. “We can’t fight him with hardware. He’s become pure code.