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 Bridge Network
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AVELINE’S POVThe archive vault feels endless, an indoor canyon of stacked memory. Towers of datasets climb into the dark like ribs of some buried creature, each cube pulsing faintly with preserved fragments of worlds long gone. Our desk lamps barely dent the shadows. It’s three in the morning. My eyes feel like they’ve been rubbed with grit, and the air carries that strange tang of dust and static…“Rerun the Kepler-442b rituals,” I tell Devon, knuckling my eyes until stars bloom behind my lids.His fingers flick across three keyboards at once, the clatter echoing up the vault walls. A moment later, the screens bloom with color: beings that might’ve been our cousins, moving with deliberate grace in concentric circles. Witnesses arranged like a living theorem. Voices rising in braided harmonies that twist numbers into sound, proofs into melody. Consent ceremonies, six thousand years old, captured before their world went silent.“Look at the verification layers,” Ezren murmurs from my
The Seal
EZREN’S POVThe relay station crouches in the Nevada dust like a thing that should have been buried a million years ago and somehow wasn’t—wind-carved metal, scars like old lightning strikes. The air tastes metallic… ozone and something like burnt sugar from distant salt flats… and makes the back of my teeth twitch. Mitchell’s convoy left tracks that blur in the heat, but the world here narrows to the humming tower and the small, human-shaped shadows we cast against it.“You sure about this?” Mitchell asks again, more habit than question. Her hand ghosts over the grip of her sidearm like it’s an old comfort she doesn’t expect to need.“No.” My boots crunch on salt and gravel as I walk. “But someone has to answer the door.”Heat comes off the housing before I reach it… clean heat, not the ragged, hungry warmth of the Devourer. It wants to tidy things, not consume them. When my palm meets metal, the world tilts.It isn’t the sound that touches me. It’s a tidy comprehension, a stack of
Safe Governance
MITCHELL’S POVThe summit smells like failure: stale coffee, suit laundry, the metallic tang of ozone from too many phones. The room has no windows, just a long table and forty-seven tired faces arranged like a jury waiting for bad news. Nobody slept. Nobody could have; since the primer leak, sleep had become an act of faith.I look at them—ambassadors with trembling hands, ministers whose smiles have been chewed down to practicality, a few military men whose eyes are haunted by metrics instead of nightmares. They’re all wearing the same thing now: the fatigue of people who’ve watched the rules that used to hold the world together get shredded in front of them.“We need a neutral governance framework,” I say. The language is precise because there’s no time for poetry. “An oversight board—scientists, ethicists, military observers. Binding protocols for preservation activities. If we don’t do this, private contractors will harvest humanity the way they harvest data: by contract and coll
Public Unrest
SORA’S POVFrom the roof of an abandoned hotel, I watch Times Square detonate with light. Screens flicker like nervous eyes, broadcasting the primer leak across every feed, every surface that still hums with power. The words crawl through the air like a sickness nobody can contain.“Preservation protocols ensure cultural continuity,” the leaked voice drones from every speaker, syrupy calm over the sound of breaking glass. “Subjects should be grateful for the opportunity to contribute to species survival through digitization.”The crowd’s answer is a roar that shakes the streetlamps.Thousands press through the avenues, some clutching signs with NO HARVEST slashed in blood-red paint, others holding candles for children they claim are “safe” in digital heaven. The two sides scream past each other, grief and fury bouncing off the towers like ricochet fire.My comm sputters in my ear.“Sora, we’ve got medical in sectors four and seven. Can you reroute?”“Copy,” I mutter, slinging my rifle
Echoes
AVELINE’S POVThe archive lab is a cave of humming racks and cold light… no windows, no sun, no clock but the little pulse of cooling fans and the slow blink of status LEDs. Data crystals sit like fossilized memories in racks, film reels in crates, everything stacked so tightly you can hear the past breathing. I’ve been here eighteen hours, one bloodshot eye pressed to afterimages of code, tearing apart scraps salvaged from the platform for something that’ll make sense of the harvest. Anything.The coffee at my elbow is a lukewarm apology in a thermos. I sip and try to convince myself the bitter helps me focus. Mostly it just tastes like the exact shade of dread I’ve been cataloging.This fragment is different. Older… buried in lower substrate layers, tagged with a header that reads Ethical Implementation Primer. The phrase should comfort; instead it crawls under my skin. I boot the playback and a voice, calm and almost lullaby–patient, fills the room.“Species-preservation protocols
