2025-08-01 17:04:36The pod door splits with a hiss that punches through my ribcage.
Gravity. Real gravity. My legs fold like paper. “Ezren?” Kira’s voice cuts through the fog. “You’re out. You did it.” Did it. Right. The Devourers are gone. We won. At least for now. I try to stand and my knees buckle. The infirmary floor rushes up, cold tile against my palms, that antiseptic smell burning my nose. “Easy.” Dr. Aveline’s hands find my shoulders. “Muscle atrophy is normal after extended immersion.” Normal. Nothing about this feels normal. Nothing about this life is normal. Devon appears beside me, offering his arm. “How do you feel?” “Like I got hit by a truck.” The words scrape out. My voice sounds wrong, too thin, like it’s coming from underwater. Marcus would’ve made some joke about trucks. Marcus would’ve… “The mission status?” I ask instead. “We held them back. For now at least.” Kira helps me to a chair. “We can consider that a small victory” Aveline adds. “Yes. The Devourers pulled back past Neptune’s rings. They’re… regrouping.” Kira continues Regrouping. Not retreating. There’s a difference and we all know it. This is just the calm before they figure out our next move. Through the infirmary window, helicopters drone overhead. The sound vibrates in my teeth. The sound muffled by reinforced glass. “And the other teams?” Silence. The kind that sits heavy in your lungs. “Some didn’t make it out of the simulation,” Dr. Aveline says. “Neural overload during the final sequence.” My hands start shaking. I press them against my thighs. Marcus. His stupid morning ritual of making coffee too strong. The way he’d hum off-key in the shower. “How many?” “Twelve students total.” Devon’s voice drops. “Including Marcus.” The chair suddenly feels too small. I stand up, ignoring the way the room tilts. “I need air.” *** The hangar doors part with a mechanical groan. Real sunset. Real wind hits my face, carrying smoke and dust. I stumbled into a folding chair at the balcony’s edge, and the city stretched below. Kira slides in beside me, silent. “The city looks…” Kira trails off. Burning. The city looks like it’s burning. Orange light flickers against the evening sky from somewhere downtown. “What’s happening out there?” “Some idiots hit a jewelry store on Fifth,” Devon says. “Turned into a whole thing. Looters, fire department, the works.” Just normal human chaos. At least that hasn’t changed. I force my mouth into something resembling a smile. “Well, at least we’re alive to see it.” Kira’s eyes narrow. She’s always been too good at reading me. “Ezren…It wasn’t your fault.” Maybe not. But they’re dead, and I’m not. That has to count for something. I push to my feet, too fast. The floor tilts. Kira grabs my elbow before I hit it again. “You’re stable,” she says after a glance at her tablet. “But you still need rest.” “I’m fine.” I snap “You’re not.” “I need to see the damage report,” I press. “I need to know…This can’t be!” Kira steps in front of me, jaw tight. “You need to breathe. Sit. Rest. The world’ll still be burning when you wake up.” But her eyes flick toward the city. That twitch says everything. She’s lying. Or trying to. And she’s not good at it. Silence thickens around us I glance at the comm console on a cart. Screen dark. I brush my fingers across it; it flickers to life. The interface boots up. Then something else, a red pulse. Steady. Insistent. Coordinates flash: 34.0522° N, 118.2437° W. “That’s Los Angeles,” Devon says, leaning over my shoulder. “Impossible.” Dr Aveline breathes, rushing in “All civilian networks are down.” The signal pulses again. Again. Someone’s out there. Someone’s trying to reach us. “Could be automated,” Kira suggests, but her voice lacks conviction. I stare at the coordinates. A cold knot tightens in my gut, familiar and unwelcome. I’ve fought Devourers. But nothing taught me how to answer the lonely call of the unknown. The screen waits for a response I don’t have.
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The Bridge Network
ZARA’S POVThe relay zone looks nothing like a battlefield, though that’s what it is. Not guns and armor… ritual and memory. A circle of canvas pitched in the middle of no man’s land, lanterns throwing warm light across low tables stacked with tea sets and worn manuscripts. The air smells of bergamot, paper ink, and bodies too tired to pretend they’re not desperate. Just beyond the fabric walls, the relay tower hums… patient, mechanical, listening. Always listening.Elder Okafor speaks first, her hands drawing invisible shapes in the air. “Every true promise requires three witnesses, seven rounds of deliberation, and a song to carry the choice into memory. Without that, the words drift. They have no anchor.”Dr. Tanaka, still gaunt from the riots in Tokyo, folds his hands over the rim of a porcelain cup. “In my country, we have tea ceremonies that last for days. Every motion counts. Every silence counts. Consent isn’t something you rush. It breathes.”I’m the one tasked with turning
Sifting
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
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