Beyond the Ordinary

Chapter 7 – Resurrection Protocol

Darkness swallowed the chamber after the tanks shattered. Steam rolled across the floor, mixing with the hiss of released gas. Blue light flickered from the broken containment pods, each one pulsing like a heartbeat.

Gordon stumbled backward, blinking through the haze. The smell of antiseptic and burnt ozone filled his lungs.

Across the room, the woman’s silhouette glowed faintly against the chaos. Calm. Composed. Watching. “Do you feel it, Gordon?” she asked. “The resonance. They’re bound to you.”

“They’re people,” he said, his voice rough. “Not machines.”

“They were,” she replied softly. “Once.”

Movement rippled through the fog. The figures from the tanks stepped forward, men and women, each eerily similar to Gordon.

Same pale skin, same faint blue aura beneath their veins. Their eyes flickered like bioluminescent coals. Hale leveled his weapon. “Stay back!”

The woman didn’t flinch. “They can’t hear you. They only respond to him.”

Gordon’s pulse quickened. “What are you talking about?”

“Your cells are their template,” she said. “You’re the original sequence. The others… they’re echoes. Incomplete. But they’re drawn to their source.”

One of the clones stopped in front of him, a man, roughly his age, with a scar running down the side of his face. His expression was blank, but his eyes tracked Gordon like prey. “What do you want from me?” Gordon demanded.

The woman smiled faintly. “Connection. Completion. You can stabilize them, if you let the sequence merge.”

“You mean kill me,” he said.

She tilted her head. “Semantics.”

Suddenly, one of the clones lunged. Hale fired, two clean shots. The figure stumbled, then straightened again, the wounds closing instantly. “Not human,” Hale muttered. “Not anymore.”

The air vibrated. Gordon’s skin burned; his palms lit up involuntarily. The clones froze mid-stride, their eyes turning toward the glow. “Stop!” Gordon shouted. “I don’t want this!”

But the room pulsed with his energy. The blue light spread from his hands into the floor, crawling up the walls like veins of fire. The clones convulsed, twitching, reacting to his heartbeat.

Hale grabbed his shoulder. “Whatever you’re doing, undo it!”

“I can’t!”

The woman’s voice cut through the hum. “Let it happen, Gordon. You were designed to lead them, to awaken them.”

“Awaken?” Hale barked. “You mean weaponize.”

She looked at him with icy disdain. “Same outcome.”

The hum reached a breaking point. One by one, the clones began to change, their forms stabilizing, their blank eyes gaining flashes of awareness. The scarred one, the first, turned fully toward Gordon.

“I… know you,” he said, voice halting, mechanical at first but growing clearer. “You are… Origin.”

Gordon’s heart pounded. “If I’m the origin, then stop. You don’t have to”

“Protocol…” The clone’s head tilted. “Resurrection… protocol.”

Without warning, the others moved, fast, coordinated. Hale opened fire again, emptying his clip into the oncoming wave. Shell casings clattered across the metal floor. “Gordon, run!”

Gordon turned toward the exit, but the blast door sealed shut. He spun back, panic rising. The woman watched, unshaken. “You can’t kill them. They share your biology.”

“Then I’ll shut them down another way,” he hissed.

He pressed his glowing palms to the ground. The blue energy surged outward in a pulse, washing over the room. For a split second, the clones froze, every one of them screaming in unison.

Then the light flickered and died. When the haze cleared, half of them lay motionless. The rest staggered, disoriented. The woman’s composure finally cracked. “You killed the sequence?”

Gordon stood, shaking, his voice raw. “No. I freed them.”

One of the fallen clones stirred, the scarred one. He looked up at Gordon with something almost human in his eyes. “Help… us…” Then his body dissolved into light, dispersing into the air.

The remaining clones backed away, flickering, their forms destabilizing. Hale holstered his gun, breathing hard. “You just nuked a lab full of your own DNA.”

Gordon stared at his trembling hands. “I didn’t mean to.”

The woman’s fury finally surfaced. “You think you’ve won? You have no idea what you’ve unleashed.”

“Then tell me,” he snapped. “Tell me what Lazarus really is.”

She stepped closer, her voice dropping. “Lazarus was never about healing. It was about evolution. Death was just a problem to solve, and you were the solution.”

“And you lost control,” he said.

Her expression hardened. “We never lost control. We gave it to you.”

Before Gordon could react, she pressed a control on her wrist. The entire chamber trembled. Warning lights flared red. “Self-destruct,” Hale muttered. “She’s wiping the site.”

The woman smiled coldly. “No evidence. No witnesses.”

“Come on!” Hale grabbed Gordon, pulling him toward the far corridor as explosions ripped through the lab. Tanks burst, blue fire cascading across the walls.

Gordon looked back, the woman still standing amid the chaos, her figure dissolving in smoke and flame. “She’s not running,” he said.

“She doesn’t need to,” Hale replied. “She’s already somewhere else.”

They burst through a maintenance hatch into the freezing night air. The lab entrance behind them erupted, a plume of blue-white fire lighting the glacier like daylight. The shockwave threw them into the snow.

For a long moment, neither spoke, just the sound of the mountain groaning under collapse. Then Hale rolled onto his side, coughing. “You alive?”

“Barely,” Gordon said, pushing himself up. “But if that’s what resurrection looks like…” He looked toward the burning mountain. “…we’re all in hell already.”

Hale stood, snow whipping against his coat. “What now?”

Gordon turned toward the horizon, the faint red glow of dawn creeping over the peaks. “Now we find whoever’s left. If there were others before me, there’ll be others after. And someone has to end it before it spreads.”

Hale smirked weakly. “You just declared war on your own creators.”

Gordon met his gaze, eyes cold, determined. “No. I declared war on death itself.”

Behind them, deep under the rubble, a single containment pod flickered back to life, faint blue light pulsing inside. Inside the glass, a hand twitched.