2025-06-03 01:35:42The bracelet’s pulse syncs to my heartbeat, quick, rhythmic, urgent.
Each thud is a countdown, a drumbeat to war. Six hours. The number echoes through my skull like a chime in a bell tower just before it falls. Devon clutches his tablet like it’s a lifeline. Kira moves ahead, eyes scanning corners with surgical precision. She doesn’t say it, but she’s scared. We all are. “We need a blind spot,” she murmurs. “Somewhere they don’t watch.” “I know a place,” Devon answers, already veering off the path. We pass an access hatch I’ve never noticed, industrial, heavy, labeled with red-letter warnings. Devon bypasses the lock with a device pulled from his coat, the panel giving way with a sigh of released pressure. Inside, the air hums. Ozone. Copper. Overworked circuits. Screens cover the walls, some old, flickering, others streaming raw code, heat maps, internal schematics. This is no classroom lab. “How long have you been doing this?” I ask, watching a stream of data form a simulated top-down view of the facility. “Since I stopped sleeping.” Devon settles into a worn chair, back already curved toward the keyboard. “Kept dreaming about my sister. She was turning nine. I missed her birthday. Again.” He doesn’t look up, just types, rapid and precise. Screens ripple as he pulls up layered infrastructure maps, revealing the bones beneath the skin of our simulation. “See this?” He highlights areas in glowing red. “Simulation boundaries. Three-mile radius. Anything outside is blank space or fabricated. But these”, he circles blinking nodes, “these are real doors. Real paths out. Guarded like hell.” The layout locks in my brain, routes, blind zones, overlapping fields of surveillance. My thoughts rearrange themselves into a tactical overlay I didn’t know I could build. Like my mind is learning to think in layers. “How many others like us?” “Seventeen fully awakened.” Devon doesn’t pause typing. “But look at this.” A biometric screen unfurls, heart rates, neural spikes, metabolic anomalies. Dozens of Subject IDs pulse in synchronization, climbing together like something pulling us up from underneath. “Phase Two is underway. Integration rates are spiking across the board.” I step closer to the screen, watching numbers rise in unison. “How long?” Devon’s fingers freeze. “Four hours. Maybe less.” *** The medbay looks sterile, calm. A lie. Light pours in like sunlight, but I can feel the flicker behind it, artificial, calculated to feel real. Kira moves like she’s running on fumes, grabbing tools with practiced familiarity while her hands shake just beneath the surface. “Routine enhancement check,” she says aloud, a line for the cameras embedded in the walls. The scanner touches my skin. Cold metal, colder silence. Her breath stutters as results bloom across the display. “Fifteen percent increase in muscle density,” she whispers. “Ezren, that’s not evolution. That’s something being rewritten.” She turns the screen, jaw tight. Behind the official files is a buried report, encrypted, medical clearance required. Deterioration patterns. Skin thinning. Cellular collapse. Neuroplasticity failures. Organs degrading like overclocked machinery burning through the last of their fuel. I look at her. Her face is drawn tighter than I’ve ever seen it. “The older students…” Her voice catches. “The ones who’ve been under longer, they’re dying. Slowly. Quietly. The enhancements come with a timer.” I reach out, take her hand. The weight of it scares me. Too light. “Then we move fast,” I say. “We get them all out. Before the system finishes eating us alive.” *** Devon’s bunker smells of dust and dry metal, the stale breath of forgotten infrastructure. The storage unit stretches longer than it should, lined with cables, salvaged tech, and signal blockers rigged from whatever he could steal without raising alarms. Kira settles onto a cushion, her scanner flickering as she checks our vitals again. Devon’s screens glow like constellations in the dark. “The channels are working, for now,” he says, not looking away from the code. “But every burst we send makes them search harder. They’re catching on.” “I reached nine others,” Kira says. “Five are with us. Four more are hesitant.” “The rest?” “Too afraid. Marcus wouldn’t even let me finish a sentence. Elena ran.” Devon swears. “I encrypted the messages, but they must’ve flagged them anyway.” “They’re not just scared of the system,” Kira adds. “They’re scared of you.” That stings more than I expect. “Why?” “They can feel something cracking around you, Ezren. The simulation feels thinner when you’re nearby.” She’s right. And they’re not wrong to fear it. Devon’s voice is low. “They don’t know what you’ve seen. Or what you’re becoming.” Kira rises. “Then we move with those who haven’t forgotten how to choose.” I nod. “We coordinate. No more waiting.” Devon’s screens rearrange, names, dorms, tracking patterns. “Seventeen awakened. Nine active. Four maybes. Four out of reach.” “We form cells,” I say. “Devon, comm ops. Kira, medical. I take point on field actions and coordination.” The scanner crackles. Static. Then a voice, distorted, panicked. “Don’t… contact me again… they’re watching. If you resist… they’ll erase you.” Marcus. The message dies in static. Kira closes her eyes. Devon doesn’t move. The room is quiet enough to hear our own breathing. Then the world explodes. Sirens, real this time, blare through the underground space. Red lights flare like blood. Devon’s systems light up with alerts. “They’ve started,” he says, barely audible. “It’s now. Phase Two is online.” Through the concrete above, we hear it. Metal arms unfolding. Machines powering up. And the screaming. Students, our classmates, crying out as something happens to them that was never meant to be survived. Kira’s face goes white. “What do we do?” I swallow the fear and find my voice. “We fight.” Devon’s screens stutter. “Medical wing. It’s all starting there.” “That’s where they’ll take them,” Kira says, already grabbing supplies. “We don’t get another shot.” “I’ll reach out to the others,” Devon says. “Emergency frequencies only.” “You said we weren’t ready,” Kira tells me, voice hard with resolve. “But that was never the point, was it?” I look at the bracelet on my wrist. It pulses faster now, like it knows we’re on borrowed time. “We don’t wait,” I say. “We move.” Above us, the screaming doesn’t stop. The resistance we planned isn’t enough. Now it’s a rescue.
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Exactly This Mistake
The figure in the rain vanished before I could wake the others.By morning, I was almost convinced myself it was just exhaustion playing tricks on me.Almost.“New intel came in overnight,” Dr. Aveline announces over the comm. I straighten up. “Satellite scans spotted an abandoned research station forty klicks northeast. Pre-Devourer era. Could be where your beacon came from.”Could be. Everything’s ‘could be’ these days.Devon checks his ammunition quietly. “Why wasn’t this station on our original surveys?”“Under fake terrain mapping.” Aveline pauses. “Someone didn’t want it found.”“Someone. Always someone else pulling the strings.” I respondI rotate a holographic blueprint above my wrist, the labs, the central core, and the corridors. “Looks simple,” I tell the team.“Simple?” Kira slings her pack over one shoulder. “When has anything been simple since we found the beacon?”Never. But maybe that’s when we start trying.***The station squats in a dry valley, concrete cracked,
The Safehouse
The safe-house smells like dust and someone else’s life. Faded family photos line the mantel, and the couch sags in all the wrong places, but it’s real. Solid. After the sterile command hub and the failed launch, real feels like a gift.“Pass the salt,” Devon mutters, sawing at a bland MRE with a plastic knife that’s threatening to snap in half.Kira nudges the little packet toward him. “Beef stew, my ass. Tastes like cardboard.”“Cardboard with texture,” I say, poking at my meal. “Somehow worse.”Devon lets out a quiet laugh through his nose.And for a moment, just a breath, it’s like we’re somewhere else. Not fugitives. Not fractured. Just kids again, pretending the world isn’t cracked wide open.Kira leans back against the arm of the couch, her lips curled into a rare smile, the kind that touches her eyes. Devon’s posture softens too, like his muscles finally got permission to stop bracing for impact.Peace, real or not, feels like a foreign language. But we speak it anyway.“Re
The Broken Mirrors
Dr. Aveline's heels clicked against the polished floor as she led me down a corridor I hadn't seen before. The walls here were different—reinforced steel with observation windows every few feet, like viewing ports into aquarium tanks."I have three individuals I'd like you to meet," she said, her voice carrying that clinical detachment I'd grown to despise. "Think of them as... case studies."The common room beyond the reinforced door stretched wide and sterile, furnished with basic chairs and tables bolted to the floor. Three figures occupied the space, each isolated in their own invisible bubble of wrong.The first thing I noticed was the boy with winter-gray hair who couldn't have been older than nineteen. Marcus, according to the nameplate on his chair, sat perfectly still until he didn't. One moment he was motionless, the next he stood beside the far wall, fifteen feet away. The air itself seemed to catch up late, papers on nearby tables fluttering as displaced atmosphere rushed
The Price of Power
Maintenance corridors smell like bleach and copper pennies. During shift change, these passages empty—perfect for moving someone who makes electronics die by proximity. "The containment protocols were designed for standard neural interface complications," Dr. Aveline says as we descend three levels. "Nothing prepared us for this level of integration." Through reinforced observation windows, I glimpse medical pods filled with monitoring fluid. The third pod contains a figure suspended in red liquid that pulses with familiar light. Devon floats unconscious, arms spread wide, head tilted back like he's drowning in reverse. Tubes snake from his spine into monitoring systems displaying fractal neural patterns that shift when observed. "How long has he been like this?" "Since the simulation ended," Kira admits, her voice tight. "His neural pathways didn't rebuild like yours. They... opened. Like doorways we can't close." A shadow materializes from the corridor junction ahead—Garrett s
Fractured Awakening
The medical bay ceiling tiles swim into focus. Real tiles with water stains and hairline cracks, not the endless liquid-metal surface that had tried to kill me.Real fluorescent lights hum overhead, casting harsh white light that makes my eyes water.I lift my right arm and froze.Bio-metallic veins snake beneath my skin from fingertips to shoulder, pulsing green-silver like captured lightning. They branch and merge in geometric patterns that shift when I flex my fingers."Kira?""Here." Her chair scrapes against linoleum. "You've been out for six hours."I sit up. The movement flows too smoothly, as if the joint’s been lubricated by alien engineers.The hospital gown crinkles as I swing my legs over the bed's edge."This isn't the simulation.""No. You're back in the real world." She holds up a scanner, its LED display already flickering erratically."Sort of."The device starts smoking the moment she points it at me. Acrid plastic burns my nostrils as she drops it with a curse."T
Conduit of Chaos
They don’t fight like individuals. They fight like thoughts—coordinated, simultaneous, recursive. One moves, another adapts, the third calculates your next breath. Blades shift mid-swing into tendrils, fists, spears. Liquid metal reshapes before contact, cutting from angles I can’t track. I land hits, two, maybe three, but they heal before my sword finishes its arc. They’re learning faster than I can bleed. “Three of them,” I pant between clashes. “Sharing everything they learn.” “Integration is spiking beyond readable thresholds!” Kira’s voice, taut with panic. “Devon, his neural patterns are… they’re lighting up like a reactor core.” “Each hunter is compiling shared data,” Dr. Aveline says. “He’s not fighting three opponents. He’s fighting the sum of their species’ memory.” “Wonderful,” I mutter, rolling under a slash and swinging upward. The plasma blade carves a line through one torso, blue fire against molten black, but the alien recoheres in a blink. “He’s bleeding too
