2025-08-02 22:37:45The command hub buzzes with white noise and bad coffee.
I follow Devon and Kira past banks of monitors, each one showing the same thing, empty space where the Devourers used to be. Still out there. Just waiting. Dr. Aveline stands hunched over the central console, her fingers dancing across holographic displays. “Signal’s been cycling for over an hour,” she says without turning. “Same frequency. Same coordinates. No response.” The beacon pulses red against the black screen. Hypnotic. Urgent. Kira folds her arms. “What’s the source?” “That’s the problem.” Aveline enlarges a data stream. “The signal’s broadcasting from Los Angeles… but the encryption signature…” She hesitates. Her jaw tightens. “It matches our simulation protocols.” The room stills. The only sound is the soft whir of the hub’s ventilation. Our protocols. From inside the pod. Devon shifts beside me. “Could be an echo,” he mutters. “Residual bleed from the neural systems.” I watch his reflection in the monitor glass. The way his jaw tightens when he mentions the simulation. The twelve students who didn’t make it out. He must be thinking about that. “Or,” Kira steps closer to the screen, “someone else was in there with us and is alive.” The beacon flashes faster. Hope, or bait. “We need to investigate,” I say. Devon’s head snaps toward me. “Are you insane? After what just happened?” “What just happened proves we’re stronger than we thought.” “What just happened is twelve kids died while we played heroes.” His voice cracks on the last word. There it is. The guilt he’s been swallowing since the debriefing. “This is different,” I say. “This could be a survivor. Someone is trying to reach us.” “Or someone trying to lure us out.” His voice rises. “We don’t even know what this is. How many more people have to die before you’re satisfied, Ezren?” The slap is invisible but lands all the same. I flinch. Kira steps between us, palm up. “Enough. Both of you!” The room breathes again. Devon thinks I’m being reckless. Maybe I am. Maybe that’s what’s needed. Dr. Aveline clears her throat. “The signal isn’t stationary. It’s moving. Whoever’s sending this is on foot, street-level, heading east through downtown.” “Moving how?” I ask. “On foot. The transmission range keeps shifting, but it’s following surface streets.” Someone is walking through LA with our encryption codes. Someone who was in the simulation. “We can triangulate,” Kira says. “Send a drone. Keep it safe.” “Or we could ignore it,” Devon says. “Focus on the real threat. The Devourers are still out there. We’re just in the eye of the storm and we have no idea when…” “When they’re coming back.” I finish his sentence. “Which is exactly why we need to investigate this signal. What if it’s connected?” Devon stares at me like I’ve grown a second head. “Connected how?” I don’t have an answer. Only a gut-deep certainty that sitting here means missing something critical. “I’ll go,” I say. “Like hell you will.” Kira’s voice goes sharp. “You just spent three days wired to an alien mainframe. Your nervous system’s still recalibrating.” “I’m fine.” “You could barely walk an hour ago.” She’s right. The ache in my limbs confirms it. But this isn’t about being ready. It’s about being the one who has to do it. “Someone has to check it out. And I’m the only one here who’s been through the full simulation sequence.” Devon laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Right. Because that worked out so well for Marcus.” The name hangs in the air like smoke. I feel my hands start to shake again. Marcus would’ve volunteered too. Marcus would’ve said it was worth the risk. “I’m going,” I repeat. Dr. Aveline inputs commands into the console. “Coordinates are locked. Signal source is currently at the intersection of Wilshire and…” She stops. The beacon vanishes. For a moment, the entire console goes dark. Then new numbers cascade down the display. Different coordinates. Much different. Kira leans in. “That’s not Los Angeles.” I read the altitude. Once. Twice. The numbers don’t change. My voice comes out low. “It’s in orbit.” A breathless silence follows. Devon shakes his head. “What the hell does that even mean?” I don’t answer. I can’t. Dr. Aveline checks her telemetry. Her lips go pale. “We’ve got nothing in that zone. No satellites. No probes. That coordinate… It’s in free space.” Kira steps back. “Between us and…” “Neptune,” I whisper. “Between us and the last known Devourer position.” The screen pulses once. Then again. Then nothing. Stillness. We stare, waiting for it to return. Whatever was walking through L.A. just launched itself into the void. And we have no idea if it was running from something, or toward it.
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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
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
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