2025-06-03 01:42:02The chamber hums with pressure before I even enter, like the walls are holding their breath.
At its center, suspended midair, floats the construct. Concentric rings of energy crackle around it, anchored by emitters embedded in the floor, the walls, the ceiling. They pulse like a heartbeat. I feel it in my ribs. The object is manta-shaped and massive, its black surface folding over itself like liquid armor. Purple light breathes from beneath the skin, casting shifting shadows that move like they’re alive. “This is what we recovered from the crash,” Dr. Aveline says quietly. “A warning, and a weapon. We just never figured out how to use it without dying.” Devon steps toward the holographic interface. His fingers hover, twitching. The streams of alien code shimmer like tangled music, impossible to follow. His face shifts from fascination to unease. “It’s not… logic,” he murmurs. “It’s thought.” I frown. “Thought?” “Yeah. It’s thinking in real time. Every symbol, every pattern, reacts to me. It’s not running code. It’s feeling me, thinking and adjusting.” “It’s learned,” Dr. Aveline confirms, sweeping her hand through the display. The interface blooms into fractal patterns that shift with impossible complexity. “Every time we engaged, it adapted. Reacted. Evolved.” Kira studies the pulses with narrowed eyes. “These aren’t just responses. These are synaptic. This thing’s building a mind.” “More than that,” Aveline says. “It’s building purpose. It’s immune to everything we’ve thrown at it, bullets, firewalls, even nanite intrusion protocols.” “So fighting it… makes it stronger,” I say. “Yes.” The construct ripples, phasing through forms like it’s not bound to this dimension. Something in it sees me. I feel it. My nervous system resonates with its signal, and suddenly, it orients. Limbs that were dormant unfold in midair, slow and precise. It recognizes me. Three rings of blue light pulse outward from its core, steady, symmetrical, rhythmic. Like sonar. Like invitation. Kira steps back, her scanner whining. “It’s reacting to Ezren. All enhanced subjects in the facility just lit up like flares.” Dr. Aveline turns to me. “Your integration is deeper than we thought. It sees you as kin.” “Kin how?” I ask. “Step forward. Find out.” Kira’s hand shoots out. “Are you insane? You saw what happened last time…” “We don’t have time for safe,” Aveline says. “This may be our only chance to understand it.” Every part of me screams to stay away, but something older in my bones leans forward. “Ezren, wait—” Devon starts. I ignore him. One step. Two. The containment field sizzles with static, but it doesn’t burn. It recognizes me. My silver-veined arms begin to glow in sync with the construct’s purple light. Our frequencies match. Three feet. Two. One. The barrier ripples like warm water and lets me through. “He’s not breaching,” Kira whispers. “He’s being invited in.” I touch the construct. And the universe explodes. *** It’s not a connection. It’s a conversion. My consciousness tears across stars in a blur of radiant data, slamming into a vast neural net that spans galaxies. I see the Devourer fleet not from orbit, but from inside its thoughts. I am a node in their collective intelligence. Worlds pass beneath me, stripped bare of life. Forests turned to ash. Oceans boiled into fog. Civilizations devoured, their screams flickering out like dying embers in the dark. The hive-mind doesn’t think. It remembers. Billions of memories overlap in grotesque harmony. A chorus of extinction. And in the middle of it, I lose myself. My sister’s piano notes echo over alien death chants. My father’s voice, soft, kind—dissolves into planetary harvest protocols. The boundary between me and them dissolves like sugar in fire. I don’t know who I am. But they do. Because I don’t just connect, I interfere. My neural pattern creates static inside their collective. Individuality becomes infection. My thoughts don’t sync. They clash. Their network reels. “What’s happening?” Kira’s voice echoes from miles away. “He’s disrupting their intelligence,” Dr. Aveline says, awestruck. “Human consciousness, uniqueness—it’s something they can’t process. He’s poisoning them.” Panic rips through the alien hive. I feel it. The construct starts broadcasting, massive pulses of data aimed directly into deep space. The facility shakes as systems overload, screens fry, and alarms scream. “Sever the connection!” Aveline shouts. “I can’t!” Devon’s voice cracks. “The system won’t obey. It’s gone around me!” Kira’s scanner is shrieking. I’m still inside. Inside something that knows me now. Their fleet stirs. Ships shift course. No longer drifting—they lunge. Slow predators turned rapid hunters. “They’re accelerating,” I whisper through clenched teeth. “They’re not coming for Earth anymore. They’re coming for me.” The moment fractures. I drop to the floor like a cut marionette, gasping. Cold. Disconnected. Devon grabs my shoulders, trying to stabilize me. Kira hovers, eyes wide with fear. “What did you see?” she asks. I look up. “Everything. They know me now. I’m in their memory. I’m… marked.” Aveline doesn’t blink. “The invasion timeline just moved. They’ll be here in six weeks. Maybe less.” “Six weeks?” Devon stares at her, voice brittle. “We can’t build planetary defenses in six months.” “You interfaced,” she tells me. “Seventeen others tried. They all died within minutes. You didn’t.” “Seventeen?” Kira snaps. “You experimented on children?” Aveline doesn’t flinch. “We prepared for war. They volunteered. We lost them. But we gained you.” “So I’m a weapon,” I say. “A tool.” “No,” she replies. “You’re a possibility.” Kira’s scanner chirps again. She glances at me. “The veins under your skin, they’re spreading.” I look down. Silver traceries glow across my arms, crawling toward my chest. “It’s accelerating,” she mutters. “You’re integrating with the construct’s frequency permanently.” “What does that mean?” I ask. “It means you’re becoming more like them,” Aveline says. “More compatible. Which makes you more dangerous, and more valuable.” The construct pulses again. Those same three rings of light. But faster now. Urgent. “It wants another interface,” I say. “No,” Kira says immediately. “That almost killed you.” “What if permanent is what we need?” Aveline asks. “You breached their mind. You hurt them.” “You’re talking about sacrificing him,” Kira says. “I’m talking about saving humanity.” “No,” I say. “That choice is mine. Only mine.” Aveline stares at me for a long moment. “We’ll talk soon. But the clock is ticking.” As the alarms wail around us and the lights flicker red, I finally understand… I’m not just humanity’s last hope. I’m its target. And the Devourers are no longer coming for Earth. They’re coming for me.
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
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
ZARA’S POVThe lights are too hot. Not metaphorically…actually hot. Zara can feel them baking the back of her neck as she adjusts the mic and nods to the moderator, whose tie is cinched so tight it looks like it’s strangling his better judgment.“Welcome back,” he says, smiling the way people do when they’re about to pretend neutrality. “Tonight, we’re discussing public trust, stabilization technologies, and…” he glances at his card “…the recent leaks.”Across from Zara sits the Authority’s representative, a man with soft eyes and a voice trained to sound like a pillow. He inclines his head to her, sympathetic already.“We all want the same thing,” he says when the camera light blinks red. “Safety. Dignity. Peace.”Zara leans forward. “Then say the names.”The audience murmurs. The moderator clears his throat. “Zara…”“Say the names,” she repeats, eyes on the man. “The people whose memories were adjusted without consent. The towns where ‘temporary buffering’ became permanent.”The rep
Self-Defense
SORA’S POVThe city wakes wrong.It isn’t noise first. It’s texture. A drag in the air, like fabric pulled against the grain. I step out of the transit and feel it in my calves, a hesitation that doesn’t belong to me. On the wall opposite, someone has sprayed REMEMBER WITHOUT ASKING = THEFT in hurried red. Two meters down, a careful hand has added OR MERCY beneath it.People move like weather fronts… gathering, splitting, reforming. A woman clutches her phone and says to no one, “My morning went missing.” A man laughs too easily and tells his friend he feels great, actually great, like the world finally turned the volume down. His friend doesn’t laugh back.I take the long way through the square, hands open, pace unthreatening. “Breathe,” I tell a father whose child is crying so hard the sound shakes her whole body. “Name five things you can see.” He stares at me like I’ve asked him to translate smoke.“Blue,” he says finally. “Her jacket. The fountain. The pigeon. Your shoes.”“Good,
Mercy’s Teacher
AVELINE’S POVThe ethics chamber smells like wax and paper, a deliberate choice. Candles along the walls soften the legal tomes stacked like witnesses. We sit in a circle, no podium, no dais. I wanted faces, not hierarchies.“Say your name if you want,” I tell them. “Say nothing if you don’t. This is being recorded for the public registry. You can stop the tape at any time.”A murmur. A nod. Someone clears their throat.A woman with silver hair speaks first. “I’m Mara.” Her hands rest on her knees, steady. “Palimpsest took the edge off my fear. I could leave my house again. I could breathe.” She looks at me. “If you dismantle it, you take that from people like me.”Across from her, a younger man shakes his head. “It took my mother,” he says. “She smiles. She cooks. But she can’t remember my father’s face. She says it’s like trying to remember a dream after waking.”Mara turns to him. “I’m sorry.”“So am I,” he says. “But sorry doesn’t put him back.”An ethicist beside me, Jonah, leans
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
MITCHELL’S POVThe emergency council chamber hums like a living thing. Translation earpieces murmur in Mitchell’s ears, cicadas layered over human breath. Polished wood reflects faces drawn too tight, eyes too alert. No one sits comfortably when history is about to be reread aloud.Mitchell stands without ceremony.“We need to talk about Palimpsest,” she says.A ripple moves through the room. Some delegates stiffen. Others glance sideways, checking who flinched.She gestures, and the wall display wakes. Diagrams bloom: memory layers, compression graphs, clinical annotations stripped of euphemism. Faces are labeled only by roles. Subject. Clinician. Authority.A historian clears his throat. “This council was informed that Palimpsest was decommissioned decades ago.”“It was,” Mitchell says evenly. “On paper.”A clinician from the southern bloc leans forward. “You’re alleging illegal continuation of a therapeutic tool?”“I’m stating a documented fact,” Mitchell replies. “Palimpsest nodes
You may also like
