2025-10-25 05:59:07The lights didn’t flicker. They died.
One second I was staring at a screen pulsing with rogue code, and the next, blackness swallowed everything, monitors, HUD overlays, even the quiet ambient glow from the security grid. Gone. As if someone had yanked the sun out of the sky. I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. I just listened. Silence isn’t quiet. Real silence hums. It pulses. You can hear your own blood. You can feel the weight of space collapsing around your ears. My tower had never gone fully dark before, not even during a system reboot. I installed redundancies. Backup solar. Coil-fed battery reserves. None of them triggered. Which meant this wasn’t a power failure. It was a sweep. I pivoted to manual override, flipping the panel cover on the analog rig. My fingers punched commands into hardened steel keys, no touchscreens, no voice inputs. Just cold, mechanical certainty. Nothing responded. A warning formed in my gut before logic caught up. I hadn’t sent a signal. But something in me had. The moment that word echoed in my skull “Aaron” something must have triggered. A pulse. A frequency spike. A broadcast I didn’t authorize from hardware I never installed. Whatever lived inside my chip had reached out. And someone or something had noticed. I moved fast. Hit the purge button beneath the desk. The rig ignited, flames sweeping across drives and metal in a controlled burn. Nanothermite packets embedded under each console lit with a pop. Every trace of me, code, blood, biometric keys reduced to ash. I crossed to the emergency wall panel. Pulled the release. The false wall cracked open to reveal my go-bag: ID scrambler, cash, EMP-coated pistol, backup burner implant chip sealed in foil. No time for hesitation. The window caught my eye as I turned. Something moved out there. A shape drifting between towers. A drone, slow and deliberate, its eye glowing red through the storm haze. It stopped. Turned. Faced my tower. A low tone buzzed across the concrete. Then another. And another. A pattern. They were scanning. I dropped low, heart pounding. They couldn’t see me, not directly. My windows were polarized, shielded from thermal scans. But if the signal I’d emitted was strong enough… Still, this wasn’t a Helix drone. No insignia. No signature. Probably just a black-net sweep unit contracted out by someone running a city-wide scan for neural anomalies. Signal, not identity. That’s what they were tracking. I didn’t wait to find out if they'd connect the dots. The floor hatch hissed open beneath me. Old maintenance shafts led through the bones of the city, tunnels from before the wars, before Helix, before PulseNet turned every room into a listening device. I dropped into the dark. The ladder groaned as I descended, feet landing in water. Cold. Knee-deep. My boots splashed through muck and rust. Pipes moaned above, like the city remembered being alive. Down here, there were no cameras. Only ghosts. My neural interface was dim. Half my HUD functions were fried. Whatever echo had activated the chip, it had scrambled more than just memory. It felt like something had… opened. Like a door had cracked inside my skull. And now the wind was coming through. I pushed forward, each step sending echoes down endless concrete. My mind replayed the vision, the white room, the woman in the coat, the way she’d moved like she knew me. Except she didn’t. She couldn’t. That memory wasn’t mine. I stopped, hand pressed to the tunnel wall. A second pulse hit. No warning. My knees buckled. Everything went white. She stood before me. Older now. Her eyes tired, worn. But still… the same. She said my name. Not Kael. Not Aaron. Something else. "My son," she whispered, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking past me. Through me. And then the pain came. Heat, pressure, collapsing inward like gravity weaponized. I screamed. Couldn’t help it. The sound tore through the tunnel, swallowed by stone and shadow. When I came to, my hand was shaking. My chip was glowing faintly beneath the skin. The visions were coming faster. Stronger. And with them names. Symbols. Pieces of a life I didn’t live. But someone had. I crawled to the access door and forced it open. Rusted hinges screamed. The surface was a different world. Industrial scaffolding surrounded me, half constructed towers, automated cranes frozen mid motion, city lights flickering in patterns that didn’t match any power grid behavior I recognized. The blackout wasn’t total. It was surgical. Someone was isolating nodes. They were cutting around resonance. I pressed against a steel pillar and tried to slow my breathing. Then I heard it. A whisper. Not spoken. Inside. Like the first. But different. Not Aaron. Not Kael. One word. Soft. Faint. Familiar in a way that shouldn’t have been possible. Lyra. It echoed with recognition. Not fear. Connection. Like a call across a broken bridge. I didn’t know the name. But I felt it inside the chip. And I knew someone else had just whispered it too.
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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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