2025-10-25 04:37:35I hadn’t moved in over an hour.
The scan matrix blinked across the display in an endless loop, rows of diagnostic data cascading like rain against glass. I’d written the software myself years ago, a private OS with entropy layer shielding and recursive logic traps meant to detect even the faintest anomaly in real-time neural transmissions. Nothing commercial. Nothing borrowed. Every line of code, mine. But nothing it showed me made sense. No active signal. No traceable ping. No inbound comms. And yet… Something had called me. Aaron. Even thinking the name set my teeth on edge. Like a splinter buried under skin that ached when you said it aloud. The loop ended, reset, and began again. I canceled it manually and engaged the scrambler net. Blue coils spread across the walls in a humming grid, disrupting ambient frequencies inside the room. Anything listening would get nothing but static. It wasn't paranoia. Not anymore. With the safeties in place, I opened the deepest layer of my neural cache. This section wasn’t supposed to be accessible without Helix-grade admin protocols, but I’d bypassed those years ago. Military perks. Or maybe just desperation. Buried in the stream of hexadecimal memory packets, one file stood out. It didn’t have a name. No creation date. No system path. It wasn’t even recognized as data. Just a pattern. It pulsed once in the scan like it was breathing. My fingers hovered over the decrypt key. Then the air in the room changed. A pressure drop, a hum rising in pitch beyond hearing. My body froze, not physically, but perceptually, my brain lagging a half-second behind real time. A white flash. This just stretches the moment of transition for a fraction of a second longer, increasing the disorientation. A room. White walls. Clear partitions. A soft mechanical whir like lab machines cycling in the background. Someone was laughing. A woman. I saw her only in outline. A coat, long. Her hand moving across a transparent board etched with symbols. She turned slightly. I couldn’t see her face. But my chest burned like I had known her once. Like something in me recognized her laughter even as my conscious mind rejected it. Then the flash ended. I was back in my chair, lungs dragging air like I’d just run a mile. I blinked at the display. No time had passed. The system logs recorded no spike. No anomaly. The image hadn’t come from the scan. It came from me. My vitals were all over the place. Blood pressure rising. Skin temp elevated. Neural core heating beyond normal range. The implant buzzed softly in my skull like it was buffering something. I checked the hardware. There, at the base layer was code I didn’t recognize. Not Helix. Not military. Something older. Smoother. Designed to blend in. I isolated it and cracked open a diagnostic stream. My screen flickered. NEUROID SUBSTRUCTURE DETECTED. RESONANCE: INCOMPLETE. The words were faint. Not official system output. Not even a real program. Just… a ghost. The room spun. Neuroid. The project was supposed to be a myth. Something from early-century tech forums, urban legends among old biotech circles. Mind mapping. Full consciousness duplication. Rumors said it was shut down. Destroyed. Buried under fire and scandal. I should’ve laughed. Instead I felt cold. That chip in my neck, the one everyone thought was military grade, wasn’t just a tracker. It wasn’t just for combat reflexes or encrypted ID. It was Neuroid. And it had just woken up. I scrambled to boot up my analog rig, an old off-grid machine I’d rebuilt from junked parts and quantum boards. No network access. No sync. Just metal, wire, and cold math. The only system I trusted. Its operating system was etched onto a diamond-wafer ROM. Unhackable because it was unchanging. The rig hummed to life. I linked my implant with a hardline and started the transfer. Seconds later the schematic loaded. Not complete. Fragmented. Like a memory viewed through a broken mirror. Lines of code scrolled beneath the diagram. Not binary. Not hex. Something else. Organic. It was rewriting itself as I watched. Before I could trace the stream, a spike drove through my skull like lightning. My eyes slammed shut. Fire. A girl’s hand slipping out of mine. A voice, her voice, the girl from the fire screaming my name into the smoke. Then another, overlapping it: the woman from the lab, calm and clear. Speaking only one word. Aaron. I ripped the hardline free, gasping. The rig powered down. The signal was gone. But I knew now. This wasn’t a transmission. It wasn’t external. It was a trigger. And something inside me had been waiting for years to be activated. I stood, head spinning, heart racing, the word still echoing through my skull like a siren in a vacuum. Then the lights went out. Every screen. Every feed. Total blackout. Not just here. Outside, across the skyline, towers dimmed one by one like dying stars. And I realised that whatever had found me? It wasn’t done yet.
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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
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