2025-06-03 01:36:16The screams overhead dissolve into silence, unnatural, mechanical, wrong.
A sterile red pulse washes over Devon’s workstation, casting shadows like dripping blood across the concrete. Fingers flying across keys, Devon doesn’t even blink. “I’m using the chaos to breach deeper,” he mutters, sweat trickling down his temple, catching the strobe light. “Phase Two activated backdoors they never expected anyone to find.” On the screens, data blooms like a virus set free, schematics blooming out of nothing, layer after buried layer of the facility unfolding far beyond the neat lines of our so-called school. A labyrinth of steel and purpose snakes downward into the earth. The walls feel closer. Thicker. “This…” His voice falters, caught between awe and dread. “This isn’t just an academy simulation. Look, subsections here, here, and here. Combat scenarios. Resource control simulations. Leadership trials under artificial stress.” He leans forward, knuckles white against the keyboard. “We’re inside a goddamn military training complex.” I step beside him, drawn by the pulsing data. Schematics reshape themselves, rooms we’ve walked through reclassified in real-time. Dorms labeled ‘Group Habitation - Phase One Conditioning.’ The cafeteria marked ‘Nutritional Discipline Facility.’ “What are they training us for?” I ask, not because I don’t already fear the answer, but because saying it out loud might make it less real. Devon’s throat works before he speaks. “War. Psychological endurance. Tactical autonomy. Every interaction, every test we thought we were just passing, they were programming us. Molding us into weapons.” Another window flickers open. A scrolling grid of biometric readouts, thousands of students, heart rates peaking, neural spikes flashing like lightning across their minds. “They’re waking up too,” Devon says. “The whole system’s reacting. It’s like the facility knows we’re in here.” “Memory banks,” I say. “If they’ve rewritten us, our minds—there must be archives. Something that holds what they took.” Devon doesn’t hesitate. “On it.” His hands move slower now, with surgical focus. Code parts like a curtain and reveals the vault: a glowing sea of memory archives, millions of files sorted, named, stripped of context like museum specimens. Kira appears without warning, barefoot, breathing hard, a scanner clutched to her chest. Her voice is a single word, calm but shaking: “Show me.” She slides into the seat beside me. Devon pulls up her records, and the screen fills with surveillance footage. Her ID number pulses in the corner like a silent accusation. Kira leans forward as the clip rolls. Her face changes before I even understand what I’m seeing. A boy with her eyes. Lopsided grin. Twenty-two. A student like us. Trying to access classified channels. Trying to find her. “My brother…” Her breath breaks. “He didn’t die in an accident.” We watch the feed, Adren, flagged as a data leak risk. Another file: traffic footage. The crash staged to look like coincidence. A timed brake failure. A closed-circuit system override. The last frame shows his eyes still open. “They murdered him,” she whispers. Her knuckles go white. “They killed him when he got too close… to me.” She presses a fist against her lips and stares at it after, like she expects it to have turned to ash. “He used to leave chocolate bars under my pillow during storms.” The sweetness of it lodges like glass in my throat. My own file unfurls beside hers. EZREN HAYES – RECRUITMENT STATUS: FAMILY UNIT NEUTRALIZED. I blink. Hard. But the memories come anyway, vivid as fire. Mom humming in the kitchen on a quiet Tuesday. Dad pointing out constellations while I pretended to care. Sarah, my little sister, stumbling over the same song again and again on her piano. Then sirens. Smoke. A house turned inferno while I was at a sleepover. A ‘gas leak.’ The funeral I never saw. The calls I kept making to disconnected numbers. “They’ve been dead for three years,” I say, voice cracking under the weight. “Everything since then, the messages, the weekend visits, all of it, fabricated.” “They killed our families?” Kira whispers. Devon’s screen expands again. Names. Faces. Parents, siblings, guardians, systematically wiped out. “It was the only way to keep us compliant,” Devon says. His voice isn’t angry. It’s hollow. Like something in him has cracked too deep to reach. “No distractions. No attachments. Just raw, trainable potential.” I swallow the bile rising in my throat. “They didn’t just isolate us. They selected us. We were always going to be alone.” Devon’s hand hovers above his console, shaking. “What if we’re too late? What if all this, knowing everything, just makes us smarter puppets?” I scan the screen. Enhancements. Neural overlays. My brain’s ability to predict angles and movement six steps ahead. Kira’s diagnostic intuition. Devon’s interface synchronization. “We’re not students,” I say. “We’re test subjects. Prototypes.” The floor vibrates. A low, industrial growl rising through the structure. “We need to move,” I say, even as the walls begin to change. Steel erupts from behind false surfaces. Panels slide open to reveal control nodes. Light fixtures mutate from warm glow to surgical coldness. The illusion of school strips away like dead skin. Devon’s console blares. “They found us.” The sanctuary’s main entrance detonates inward, fire and metal raining down in smoking chunks. My ears ring. Kira ducks instinctively. And through the fog of dust and alarms… Garrett walks in. But it isn’t him. Not anymore. His movements are too fluid, his gaze too still. His skin catches the red emergency lights like chrome. His voice isn’t just sound—it vibrates through the steel floor and into my bones. “Phase Two integration complete,” he says. “Ezren, you must comply.” I rise, slowly. “Garrett, this isn’t you. You’re not a weapon.” His step falters—just for a heartbeat. The briefest glitch. Like he remembers that first week when we smuggled candy out of Devon’s bag and laughed until lights-out. But then it’s gone. “Friendship is inefficient,” he says. “Mission parameters require immediate containment.” He lunges. The room erupts into chaos. Our bodies crash into steel walls, denting metal, sparking fire. My reflexes, inhuman, automatic, guide me through blows I shouldn’t be able to dodge. He’s fast. But I’m faster. “You’re fighting the wrong war,” I growl, pinning his arm. “What are they even training you for?!” He responds mid-strike. “Planetary defense. Against the harvest fleet.” The words stop me cold. A fist slams into my ribs, but the pain barely registers beneath the mental detonation. Harvest fleet. My head reels. And then… Everything ignites. Electricity tears through my brain. Not pain, connection. Systems I’ve never touched recognize me. Neural fire spills outward, linking me to the facility… and beyond. In an instant, I’m elsewhere. Above the planet. In orbit. In vacuum. And I see them. Ships that breathe. Organic, mechanical. Big enough to blot out cities. Moving through the void like predators. No lights. No engines. Just silent inevitability. Harvesters. They convert planets into fuel. And Earth is next. I crash back into my body, retching on the floor. Garrett’s frozen, his system overloaded by the surge. Devon’s console flickers, fried. Kira grabs my arm. “Ezren! What did you see?” “Ships,” I gasp. “Alien ships. Coming for us.” Devon blinks through the smoke. “They’re training us to fight them?” A siren blares. Lights turn crimson. The overhead system voice cuts through with clinical finality: “Anomalous integration detected. Initiating Omega Protocol.” Kira’s breath catches. “What’s Omega Protocol?” I look down at my shaking hands. Whatever just woke up in me… the system didn’t plan for it. And it’s only beginning.
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The Question Itself
MITCHELL’S POVThe strategy room is quiet in the way museums are quiet… like the walls are listening.Mitchell stands at the glass table, palms braced, staring down at a map of pins and lines that no longer represent geography so much as influence. Blue for Authority-aligned regions. Amber for undecided. Red for places where trust has already cracked.“Read it again,” she says.The junior analyst swallows and projects the text onto the glass wall.Do you authorize the continued use of preservation safeguards designed to maintain psychological stability during periods of societal stress?Mitchell exhales through her nose.“There,” she says, stabbing the air with her finger. “That’s the knife.”The linguist, grey-haired and sharp-eyed, nods.“Preservation implies benevolence. Safeguards implies protection. Psychological stability frames dissent as danger.”“And ‘authorize’,” Mitchell adds. “As if consent is already assumed.”Someone mutters, “It’s a hug with a syringe hidden in the slee
Traitor to Who
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Mercy’s Teacher
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Unlikely Kin
EZREN’S POVThe interface room hums like a held breath. Soft light pools across the floor, not quite blue, not quite white, the kind chosen by someone…or something…that has learned humans relax when edges blur. I stand in the glow and feel the servers beyond the walls, distant and innumerable, a weather system made of thought.“Gatekeeper,” I say. My voice sounds small in here.The pause is deliberate. When the reply comes, it isn’t the old, neutral timbre. It has a cadence now. The words arrive with spacing that suggests listening.“You wish to speak about Palimpsest,” it says.“I do,” I answer. “And I don’t want a brief.”Another pause. Then, softer: “I will not compress.”I swallow. “Good.”I take a step closer to the console. The glow brightens, as if leaning in.“Palimpsest wasn’t just a tool,” I say. “It hurt people. It overwrote them. We’re tearing it down.”“I know,” the Gatekeeper replies. “I was shaped by it.”The words catch. “Shaped how?”“In my early learning cycles,” it
Awakening Layers
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