2025-10-25 03:17:03The hum of the drone coil overhead fades before the rest of the world catches up. For a moment, everything is still, just that mechanical silence that hangs in the air like dust. Then the city exhales.
Outside my window, arc lights flicker across the skyline. Vertical highways buzz with convoys of magnetic transports. Towering spires blink red and blue against a sky choked with haze. And beneath it all, the deep electronic thrum of infrastructure keeps breathing: train lines underfoot, wind turbines embedded in old glass, the subtle vibration of the PulseNet feeding every device on the grid. New Vega never truly sleeps. It dreams with its eyes open. I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Floors cold. Reinforced polymer. Cheap, utilitarian. Nothing in here is ornamental. No clutter, no decor, just function. A small cot, a folding table, and a wall of equipment racks glowing faintly under layered firewalls. I rent the top unit of an abandoned observation tower repurposed as a ghost address, off-grid, no government tags, and most importantly, no Helix data feeds. They call these places "cold towers." Places where people disappear. My morning ritual is muscle memory. One hand brushes the side of my neck, over the faint circular pattern at the base of my skull. The world calls it the “CoreTag” everyone’s got one. Standard issue since 2091. It tracks identity, licenses, biofeedback, employment chains. Most wear theirs embedded behind the right ear, visible as a thin line of pale light. Mine’s silent. Disabled. Spoofed. The real one, the one I don’t talk about, sits deeper, closer to the spine, disguised beneath what looks like a birthmark. It doesn’t respond to scans. It doesn’t ping satellites. And according to every registry on Earth, it doesn’t exist. Just like me. I sit at the interface panel mounted into the far wall. No voice commands. No gestures. Just hardwired lines. I don’t trust smart systems, never have. They’re too good at remembering. Too eager to share. I plug in directly and start the diagnostics. My HUD flickers to life, crisp overlays sweeping through neural stability charts, pulse variance, threat proximity alerts. > [K-VALE ID CONFIRMED.] > [STATUS: CLEAN.] > [CONTRACTS: 4 UNCLAIMED.] > [NETWORK: PRIVATE, ENCRYPTED, STATIC MASK APPLIED.] All clean. Of course it is. I built this rig myself. The firewall code is laced with recursive entropy layers, a language I invented just to keep other people out of my head. Still, something feels wrong. It’s in the air, maybe. Or the vibration under my skin. I pause, tapping my fingers against the desk. My stress levels spike by 0.3%. Barely a blip, but I see it. I feel it. Then… It happens. A static pulse, not a sound, not even a signal. Just… presence. Like a name whispered between two neurons. A subtle flicker of heat at the base of my skull. And then, clear as thought: > Aaron. I freeze. No one calls me that. Not on record. Not in the field. Not in my nightmares. That name is dead. That name belongs to a boy who vanished during a fire twenty-three years ago, along with a house, a family, and any trace of what came before. But I heard it. Felt it. Not in the room. Not in my ears. Inside. I stand slowly, activating the perimeter lockdown. The windows shutter with a hydraulic hiss. Doors seal with maglocks. Internal jammers engage. The lights shift to low red. > [LOCKDOWN MODE: ACTIVE.] > [ALL OUTGOING CONNECTIONS DISABLED.] The scan begins instantly, line by line diagnostics of my neural implant. I trace every registry, every output log, every passive feed to confirm what I already suspect. No breach. No transmission. No active signal. Nothing. But I heard it. The name still echoes, not like a memory, but like an identifier. Like the system recognized something before I did. And worse…. The waveform isn’t external. It’s local. Coming from within the chip. That shouldn't be possible. The standard CoreTag doesn’t support internal comms. It can transmit bio-data and receive basic interface commands, but anything approaching resonance frequency? Impossible. At least... officially. I check the logs again. Still clean. But I know better. I shut down the rig manually, fingers flying across physical keys. Every sequence is hardwired. No auto-complete. No ghost-hand AI. The room goes quiet again. But the silence feels wrong now. Too thick. Like it’s waiting. I walk to the mirror bolted over the sink, staring at the scar at the back of my neck. It’s faint. Circular. Too perfect to be natural, too subtle to raise suspicion. I was told it was a safety mod. A fallback. I was five. I believed them. > Aaron. This time the voice comes with heat. Pressure. Like a tuning fork striking the air inside my skull. I grip the sink hard, breathing slow, trying not to panic. Not because I’m afraid. Because I recognize it. Not the voice itself, there is no voice but the feeling. Like something familiar vibrating through the marrow of my bones. A memory I never had, reaching up from beneath the concrete layers of survival I’ve built over two decades. The name doesn’t just identify me. It believes I am still him. And worse? I believe it too. I back away, sitting heavily in the chair beside the sealed window. Outside, the sky shifts. Thunderclouds move like ink across the horizon, bleeding against the neon canopy. A train cuts the skyline in half, trailing sparks. And still the pressure lingers. Subtle now. Dormant. Waiting. I check my feed one last time. No messages. No external pings. But in the static layer, just before the encryption collapses into white one last signature flickers. Unclassified. Untagged. Dead bandwidth. But there all the same. > [UNKNOWN SOURCE: INBOUND IDENTIFIER - “AARON”] My name. Not the one I took. The one I buried. I lean back against the cold wall, staring at the pulse monitor as it flattens. I don’t know who or what found me. But it knows who I am. And that means the fire is coming for me again.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
14 - Frequency Match
An hour later, I was summoned to a part of the facility that didn’t officially exist. No directory panel pointed this way. No access lights blinked. Just a narrow corridor that seemed carved out of silence itself. The air was colder here, different. The usual antiseptic tang of the upper labs gave way to something faintly metallic, almost wet, like the smell of an empty gun barrel. My boots hit the floor in perfectly timed intervals. I counted every step until the corridor ended in a seamless slab of steel. No handle. No keypad. It opened anyway. The room beyond looked nothing like the Helix chambers I knew. No white surfaces. No hum of monitors. Just matte black walls, a single table, and a thin strip of light running across the ceiling like a surgical incision. Harlan Voss was already inside. He didn’t rise when I entered. Men like him never did. They made standing feel like a privilege you hadn’t earned yet. He sat at the far end of the table, hands folded, sleeves crisp enou
13 - Half of a Whole
I came back to the hum. Low. Pulsing. Artificial. A sterile room, the kind designed by people who never had to live in one. Pale grey walls. Steel floor with no echo. The kind of silence that didn’t let you feel alive, just monitored. My wrists weren’t bound. But my body wouldn’t move. Limbs like iron. Skin clammy. The chair beneath me was padded, but no part of me registered comfort. Above, a lattice of soft white lights flickered behind polarized glass. Somewhere beyond, a technician watched through a hundred biofeeds. My chip buzzed faintly under the skin, just enough to remind me I didn’t own it anymore. “Neural diagnostic complete. Subject stable. No breach detected.” Specter’s voice. Always detached. Genderless. A ghost in the grid. I kept my eyes closed. If they thought I was unconscious, good. Let them. But I bled. Not physically. Not the kind of bleeding you can see or stop. But memory, leaking sideways through the fracture lines they tried so hard to wall o
12 - Don’t Blink
The second room was colder. Not colder like temperature. Colder like intention. The walls here were grey instead of white, a matte steel finish that reflected no light. A calculated lack of warmth. The kind of place where you didn't just feel watched, you felt recorded. I stepped through the automatic seal at exactly 1600 hours. Five hours after the first meeting. Helix never deviated. Not by seconds. The chair across from mine was already occupied. Lyra. She looked up this time. Met my gaze the moment I entered. No hesitation. Just a single blink, as if verifying that I was real. I took my seat. Didn’t rush. Matched her posture. Calm. Calculated. My chip vibrated faintly as I sat, a soft background pulse, like the engine hum in a grounded shuttle. The lights above us strobed gently. Imperceptible to most. But I wasn’t most. They were testing blink rate. Disruption pulses. A standard Helix method to prevent sync coherence. Keep minds unsynced by cycling the brain’s visual
11 - Meeting Room 7
The hallways of the Helix had hundreds of contractor meeting rooms, all indistinguishable by design, no clocks, no windows, no screens unless they wanted one. The walls drank sound like dry earth drinks rain, everything vanished, even footsteps. That was by design.. I was led through three checkpoints, each requiring retinal confirmation and chip sync. The last door hissed open on a short corridor that terminated in a seamless black panel. Room 7 was colder than the others. Sterile and engineered. The glass beside the panel shimmered faintly, thin, translucent. Not a mirror. Surveillance screen. They were watching already. I stepped in with the same controlled gait I’d practiced in ops: shoulder aligned, arms loose, expression calculated. The name on the file was Dr. Lyra Thompson, assigned to neural field simulations and predictive resonance modeling. She sat already waiting. I’d seen a hundred flashes of her, through half-bleeds and neural flickers. But this was differen
10 - Double Blind
From the outside, the Helix Tier-2 logistics node looked like any other medtech relay center. Clean. Forgettable. No logos, no guards. Just a long, flat structure with seamless grey paneling and a biometric gate. Inside, it was a different story. I stepped through the access chamber as Kade Rowan. A contractor, neural tracker, cleared under Operation D7. A soft chime registered my chip. > “Welcome, Operator K. Rowan.” The voice was synthetic. Genderless. Helix liked it that way, no accents, no warmth. Just function. The corridor beyond was lined with embedded lights that shifted with motion. Surveillance drones hung silently in the corners like sleeping spiders. I kept my pace steady, my posture relaxed. There were no windows. Just the hum of power beneath the floor. The system guided me to a debriefing cell, plain white walls, one table, four chairs. Three other freelancers were already seated. One had a mechanical jaw. Another wore optic replacements tinted blood-red. No on
9 - Mirror Fragments
The Helix contract system granted me limited blackbox access, just enough to do what they thought a good hunter should. Review archives. Cross-check signals. Track anomalies. Everything sanitized, of course. Nothing personal. But the deeper I crawled into their network, the more familiar the shadows became. Under Specter’s liaison credentials, I embedded a ghost query, an algorithm designed to scrape for any residual mentions of “Aaron,” “Subject Alpha,” or “Echo Root.” Most entries were flagged Level 0 or redacted entirely. But one slipped through. A file buried beneath a batch of corrupted logs. Title: “Aaron-1B: Anchor Instability / Subject Beta Adjacent.” My heart stuttered. It wasn’t just text. There was a video fragment attached. Flickering. Damaged. Still partially playable. I launched it. The feed opened on a grainy room, white walls, metallic chairs, and a diagnostic ring suspended from the ceiling like a surgical halo. A child sat strapped beneath it. Bare ar
You may also like
The Extreme War Of Darkomega
Wyatt_Jaymes2.8K viewsLast man on earth when there is no earth?
Dmanga_lover 17.7K viewsNovember: I Might Be A Superhero
Wordsmith-H5.8K viewsThe Search for Xanar
Cybermage90093.3K viewsStarship Hellbent
Marissa1.3K viewsARMAGEDDON
Shofar 567 viewsEvolvers dawn of invasion
Oyeezarh 1.2K viewsECHOES FROM THE ABYSS
Gospel Wehere707 views