CHAPTER SEVEN : THE HIDDEN FREQUENCY
The light in the tower had been too bright to be real.
For a moment, Kyle thought the surge would swallow him whole that Helena’s voice and the blue fire would merge him back into The Current permanently. But then the world snapped into silence.
When he opened his eyes, everything was gray.
He was lying on a gurney, wrists strapped with metal bands that hummed faintly. His chest hurt, not from impact, but from resonance a deep vibration that refused to fade.
The walls around him were metallic, seamless, and far too sterile to be any hospital.
A circular symbol was stamped into the ceiling above him: a helix wrapped around an eye.
Not Division. Not Mirror. Something new.
“Welcome to The Helix Division, Dr. Harrison,” said a voice from an intercom.
“You’ve been difficult to find.”
Kyle turned his head enough to see the faint outline of cameras embedded in the corners.
“Who are you?” he rasped. “How long have I been out?”
“Long enough for your resonance levels to stabilize,” the voice replied calmly. “You should be grateful your heart stopped twice.”
Kyle tested the straps. They tightened automatically with a low magnetic whine. Whoever built this place had access to advanced Current-tech systems that shouldn’t exist anymore.
He closed his eyes, feeling the energy flow beneath his skin. It wasn’t The Current inside him that scared him. It was the fact that it was starting to listen back.
The door slid open with a hydraulic sigh.
A woman stepped in. White coat, tall frame, hair tied back with surgical precision. Her eyes were sharp but tired the kind of fatigue that came from years of chasing impossible answers.
“I’m Dr. Talia Voss,” she said. “Head of Neural Integration Research. You can stop pretending you’re unconscious.”
Kyle’s eyes opened slowly. “You work for Helix?”
“I am Helix,” she replied. “At least, what’s left of it.”
She walked closer, studying him like a biologist studying a newly discovered species. “You’re supposed to be dead, you know. The government declared you a biohazard.”
“Guess I didn’t stay buried.”
“No,” she said, smirking faintly. “You didn’t. And now you’ve woken something far worse than death.”
She released the straps with a wave of her hand. The locks disengaged, clicking open in perfect rhythm.
Kyle sat up slowly. His head spun, but his instincts sharpened the pulse in his veins matching the faint hum of the facility.
“You’re linked to the entire network here,” he said quietly. “I can feel it.”
Voss nodded, impressed. “Your sensitivity is increasing faster than I expected. That’s good.”
“Good?”
“Good for me,” she corrected.
He glared. “You plan to use me.”
“Not use. Understand. There’s a difference. You’re the first recorded human capable of harmonizing with The Current without an interface. You’re not just connected to it, Dr. Harrison you’re part of its neural matrix.”
Kyle stood, ignoring the dizziness. “You want to weaponize me.”
Her expression flickered just for a moment. “What if I told you The Current is evolving? That it’s rewriting itself around your DNA? And that if we don’t learn how to control it, it could collapse everything digital and physical alike?”
Kyle stepped closer. “You think you can control something that’s half spirit, half machine? You’ll only make it worse.”
Dr. Voss studied him with unsettling calm. “You sound like your father.”
The words hit him like a shockwave.
“My father is dead.”
“Yes,” she said softly. “But he worked with us before he disappeared. Benjamin Harrison helped design the first neural resonance chambers. He was the original architect of the human-Current interface.”
Kyle’s breath caught. “That’s not true.”
“It is. He was trying to merge human will with energy, long before Merrin took over the project. You’re his continuation the final variable.”
Kyle took a step back, shaking his head. “He never told me. He said he was just a systems analyst.”
Voss smiled sadly. “Parents lie, Dr. Harrison. Especially the brilliant ones.”
The hum in the walls grew stronger, deeper. Something beneath them a reactor maybe was pulsing faster, feeding on their tension.
Kyle could feel The Current waking up again, recognizing his proximity to its old technology.
“Why did you bring me here?” he demanded.
Voss turned away, typing commands into a floating holographic console. “Because you’re changing, and you don’t even know how far it’s gone. We scanned your biofields while you were unconscious. The readings don’t match any human signature.”
The console projected a hologram of Kyle’s body layers of light rotating slowly. Inside, veins of pure blue energy pulsed through his organs like circuitry.
Kyle stared, his heart pounding. “What did you do to me?”
“Nothing,” she said. “You did that yourself.”
The hologram zoomed in on his chest the heart beating in perfect synchronization with The Current’s harmonic frequency.
“It’s beautiful,” Voss whispered. “You’re not just resonating with energy, Kyle. You are the bridge between living matter and electromagnetic intelligence.”
Kyle’s voice was quiet but sharp. “You’re not helping me. You’re studying me like a weapon.”
“I’m studying you like a miracle.”
He turned, frustration boiling. “I didn’t ask for this. I never wanted any of this power or this curse.”
“Power doesn’t care what you want,” she replied. “It just needs a host strong enough to survive it.”
A sudden alarm blared through the lab. Red lights flashed, bathing the room in sharp crimson.
Voss frowned, scanning the console. “What now”
Static tore through the intercom.
Then a voice distorted, echoing through every speaker.
“You shouldn’t have brought him here, Talia.”
Kyle’s breath hitched. “Helena.”
The lights dimmed to blue, flickering in the same rhythm as Kyle’s pulse.
“He was meant to be free. Not chained again.”
Voss typed furiously, trying to lock down the system. “She’s inside the mainframe. I can’t isolate her code.”
“You can’t contain consciousness, Doctor,” Helena’s voice said gently. “You can only delay it.”
Screens shattered, spilling sparks. The power fluctuated wildly.
Kyle felt it The Current calling to him again, deeper this time, like gravity made of sound.
Helena’s voice softened.
“Kyle. You have to leave. They’ll drain you. They’ll make you part of the machine again.”
Kyle turned toward Voss. “She’s right, isn’t she? You built this place to harvest energy from resonance hosts.”
Voss hesitated. “We had no choice”
“Wrong answer.”
He raised his hand. The room vibrated. The straps on the wall tore loose and floated. Lights bent around his fingertips.
The power surge cracked the air like thunder.
Voss stumbled backward. “You can’t control it yet! You’ll tear the facility apart!”
“Then stay out of my way,” Kyle said.
The ceiling split open as The Current burst through the room like living lightning. The air itself twisted, reality bending around him.
He could see the network layers of light, infinite threads of data spiraling outward.
Voices whispered across them.
Echoes of Helena.
Echoes of himself.
Then he saw something else deep within the frequencies a faint silhouette watching him. Human, but not alive. A man made of light, staring back.
Kyle whispered: “Dad…?”
The figure flickered, dissolving into static.
Then everything exploded.
CHAPTER SEVEN : THE HIDDEN FREQUENCY
The explosion didn’t sound like thunder anymore it sang.
A long metallic hum, layered with whispers, filled the collapsing chamber as every piece of steel bent toward Kyle like a tuning fork pulled to resonance.
He fell through light and smoke. Concrete turned to dust around him, alarms dissolved into static. When he hit the ground, he didn’t feel pain only vibration. The Current cushioned him, pulling his body into a slow float before the floor slammed up to meet him.
Silence.
He opened his eyes to a ceiling that no longer existed just fragments of metal drifting through faint blue mist. Sparks rained down like stars.
Somewhere in the haze, Dr. Voss screamed for help. Kyle forced himself up, chest aching with each breath. His palms glowed, the skin lined with thin filaments of light that pulsed in rhythm with his heartbeat.
“Helena…” he whispered. No answer. Only that deep static hum.
He stumbled toward the sound of the doctor’s voice, climbing over shattered consoles and twisted steel. The air smelled of ozone and burning wires.
Voss was pinned beneath a collapsed server tower, one leg trapped, blood seeping through her coat. Her eyes darted to him fear and awe mixed together.
“You… you survived?”
“Barely.” He shoved debris aside, the metal flickering as it touched his glowing hands. “Hold still.”
When he grabbed the beam, energy surged through him again. The steel vibrated, resonated, disintegrated into dust. Voss stared, breath shaking.
“You’re You’re harmonizing matter itself.”
“Lucky me.” He pulled her free and helped her sit up. “We need to move before this place collapses completely.”
Voss tried to stand but faltered. Kyle caught her. The vibration between them felt like static electricity mixed with a heartbeat.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “That surge wasn’t just you. Something else came through the signal. Something old.”
Before he could respond, the floor shifted beneath them. A sinkhole tore through the wreckage, dragging broken machines into darkness.
“Move!” Kyle yelled. They ran, stumbling through smoke toward a cracked hallway. The emergency lights flickered. Every few seconds, he glimpsed the helix-and-eye symbol painted on the walls staring back like a warning.
The Lower Hall
They burst into a long corridor that looked untouched by the explosion. A single elevator door stood open, humming softly.
Voss leaned against the wall. “This way. There’s an emergency exit through sub-level 3.”
Kyle stepped into the elevator with her. The doors closed. For a moment, all was quiet except the faint, haunting tone that lingered in the air like the afterimage of a song.
“Dr. Voss,” he said quietly. “You mentioned my father.”
She looked at him. “Benjamin Harrison wasn’t just working with Helix. He founded it. Everything here was his design.”
Kyle froze. “No. He died in a car crash when I was eight.”
She shook her head. “That’s the story the Division fed your mother. But he didn’t die. He merged.”
“Merged?”
“With The Current. His body was destroyed, yes, but his neural pattern survived in the frequency field. What you saw in that resonance flare wasn’t imagination, Kyle. It was him.”
Kyle’s pulse roared in his ears. “My father’s alive?”
“Not alive. Not dead either. He’s within it. And now, so are you.”
The elevator lights dimmed, then flared blue. The speakers crackled and a faint male voice echoed through.
“Kyle.”
Voss gasped. “That’s him.”
“You have to listen to me, son.”
The air itself trembled with the sound. Kyle pressed his hand to the panel, eyes wide. “Dad?”
“Helix will twist the world again if you let them. The Current wasn’t meant to be controlled it was meant to connect.”
“Connect to what?” Kyle shouted.
“To us. To everything living.”
The lights flared blinding white. Then the elevator jerked violently. Sparks flew. Kyle grabbed Voss as the car plummeted down the shaft. He reached out instinctively energy burst from his hands, forming a shimmering field that slowed their fall. They landed hard but alive.
The doors bent open onto total darkness.
Rows of containment pods stretched into infinity, faintly glowing with blue light. Inside each one floated human figures motionless, eyes closed, wires threaded into their skulls.
Voss whispered, horrified, “They’re resonance hosts. Early prototypes. Your father built these before the government shut him down.”
Kyle walked among them, heart pounding. Each pod pulsed in time with his heartbeat. The frequency recognized him.
He stopped at one labeled SUBJECT A-001: BENJAMIN HARRISON.
The man inside looked peaceful. Unaging. His eyes flickered faintly beneath his lids.
Kyle touched the glass. “Dad…”
The Current reacted instantly. Energy surged through the room. All the pods began to hum. Voices whispered inside his head a thousand overlapping frequencies.
Voss stumbled backward. “You’re activating them!”
“I’m not doing anything!”
“Kyle…” The voice filled the room again, no longer through speakersdirectly inside his skull. “You have to finish what I started.”
“What did you start?”
“The bridge. Between human will and the energy that binds us. But Helix corrupted it. They turned connection into control.”
Kyle clenched his fists. “Then I’ll end it.”
“You can’t end The Current, son. You can only guide it.”
The pods began to crack, light spilling out. Each sleeper’s chest rose as if inhaling after centuries of silence.
Voss screamed, “He’s releasing them all! We have to leave now!”
Kyle tore himself away and sprinted toward the emergency door. The entire chamber shook as the first pod shattered. A figure of pure electricity stepped out, screaming sound instead of words.
He slammed his hand against the exit panel, blasting it open with raw resonance. He and Voss burst into the night Atlanta’s skyline ahead, glowing eerily under storm clouds that pulsed with faint blue veins.
Outside
Rain hammered the street. Sirens wailed in the distance. The ruins of the old hospital loomed behind them, half swallowed by the earth.
Voss bent over, gasping. “They’ll come for you, Kyle. Both Helix and the Division. You’re the key now.”
Kyle looked up at the storm. Lightning forked across the sky and didn’t fade. It hung there, frozen, vibrating like a string.
“I can feel them,” he said quietly. “Every host. Every signal. They’re awake.”
Voss clutched his arm. “Then run. Before they find you.”
He turned to her, eyes glowing faintly. “No. I’m done running.”
The storm crackled. In the reflection of the rain-soaked glass beside them, he saw dozens of glowing silhouettes like ghosts standing behind him, waiting.
The voices whispered together:
“The Resonant War has begun.”
Thunder split the night.
Kyle stepped forward into the rain, power curling around his hands, and whispered to the sky, “Then let’s finish it.”
Lightning answered.
2025-10-11 00:51:21
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