SUBJECT 47: AWAKENING

The Truth Behind the Program

The last sparks from Devon’s equipment blink out like dying fireflies, leaving the room coated in smoke and static.

His fingers twitch above the ruined keys, still trying to fix something that’s long since stopped listening.

“Omega Protocol initiated. Enhanced subjects report to designated containment areas.”

Kira hauls me to my feet. Her med-scanner chirps in frantic bursts, and she keeps glancing between it and my face like she’s waiting for something to detonate.

“Your brainwaves are…Ezren, your whole neural pattern is off the charts.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know. But it’s not good.”

She barely gets the words out before black-armored personnel pour in through the shattered doorway, weapons humming with frequencies I feel in my teeth.

My body tenses. My instincts, those other instincts, clock kill-ratios, movement vectors, pulse-matching.

The lead operative steps forward, faceless behind his visor. “Ezren Matthews, you will accompany us for immediate containment and debrief.”

Devon doesn’t even look up. His fingers are still flying, a dying man refusing to stop CPR on a corpse.

“Every backdoor’s gone. Every exploit, overwritten. It’s like the system’s… rewriting me faster than I can think.”

Kira turns on the nearest soldier, fists clenched around her scanner.

“You want compliance? Give us answers.”

The operative tilts his head like a machine processing an unfamiliar command. Then, with a hiss, his helmet folds back, revealing a man who looks mostly human. Except for his eyes. They reflect the red emergency lights in jagged metallic rings.

“Dr. Marquez will brief you. The threat is now considered… cosmic. Full disclosure authorized.”

“Cosmic?” Devon finally looks up, voice hollow.

“You’ll understand,” the operative replies. Then he turns. Walks. And we follow.

***

The halls stretch beyond memory, no longer the corridors of a school but something deeper, colder, older.

The further we go, the more the architecture shifts.

Walls that used to be concrete now pulse faintly with something that looks disturbingly organic.

Devon mutters behind me, like a prayer to code. “It’s not possible. This thing reads me before I type. Before I think. It knows where I’m going before I do.”

He punches a wall panel. It ripples.

“I used to own this place,” he whispers. “Now I’m just noise.”

The team doesn’t comment. They’re not here for our comfort.

We pass through a checkpoint that scans our bios like we’re dangerous cargo. Doors open. Close. No windows. No clocks. Just steel. Pulse. Heat.

“This place is changing,” Kira says, watching her scanner flicker. “The walls are starting to mimic neural tissue.”

No one answers her.

We reach the final blast door. It opens like a vault being unsealed.

Dr. Aveline Marquez sits in the center of a dim room, coat stained with chemicals, shadows under her eyes carved in weeks.

She doesn’t rise when we enter. Just gestures to the seats across from her, hands trembling.

“The interface triggered something we can’t contain,” she begins. “But it also confirmed what we feared.”

“And what’s that?” I ask.

She looks at me like she’s aged ten years since yesterday. “That we’re out of time.”

Without warning, the room transforms. Holograms bloom around us, bright and cold. Kira flinches.

Devon goes rigid.

Global maps rotate in midair, red markers blinking across continents, mountains hollowed into bunkers, factories producing tech I don’t recognize.

Weapons that hum with alien math.

“A ship crashed in the Pacific,” Marquez says.

“Three years ago. It died screaming. We listened.”

Footage shifts to black space, where colossal biomechanical ships drift like predators. Their movement is slow. Hungry. Intent.

Kira’s scanner squeals. “That energy pattern, it’s alive.”

“They’re called the Devourers,” Marquez says, voice flat.

“They’ve consumed over eight hundred civilizations. Every planet stripped clean. Every trace of life turned into fuel.”

Devon’s voice is small. “They move like a single organism.”

“They are one,” she says.

“That’s why conventional warfare fails. You can’t flank something that thinks in unity.”

I run calculations in my head. Fleet composition. Arrival time.

“Eighteen months,” I say. My throat dries. “That’s how long until they hit the edge of our solar system.”

Marquez doesn’t deny it.

“Maybe less,” she says. “Especially now.”

“What do you mean now?” Kira steps forward.

“Because of you. Your surge interface. It didn’t just trigger containment—it pinged them. They can feel you now. All of you.”

She looks each of us in the eye.

“You’re not just enhanced anymore. You’re lighthouses. Beacons. You’ve told them we’re here.”

***

We descend again, into a part of the facility that defies normal dimensions. Devon walks quietly now. Calculating. Humbled.

“The system is building its own nervous system,” he says, watching the walls ripple with biological pulses.

“It’s learning. It’s adapting. And I don’t know if it’s still working for us.”

“Then who is it working for?” Kira asks.

He doesn’t answer.

The lights shift. Frequencies hum through the floor, up my spine. My hands tremble, and not from fear. From recognition.

Dr. Marquez stops at a final door. Her palm hovers over the controls.

“Behind this door,” she says, “is everything we never wanted to confirm.”

“Do we have a choice?” I ask.

“No,” she says, and opens it.