2025-08-24 15:17:12The night was quiet—but it wasn’t still.
Inside the depths of Facility 9, silence had a pulse. The walls seemed to breathe, the floor vibrated with low, calculated hums. Shayne stood barefoot in the corridor outside his cell, dressed in gray institutional fabric that felt more like memory suppression than clothing. The door behind him had slid open as if summoned by thought alone. There was no alarm, no light flicker, no announcement—just a passageway left ajar, like an invitation written in silence.
He didn’t know if it was a test. He didn’t care.
Every step he took felt like walking into a prophecy he hadn’t written but somehow knew by heart.
The corridor led to a stairwell—spiral, metallic, unmarked. As he climbed, flashes of pain pierced his temples, and visions flickered in front of him like ghost overlays: a burning tree; hands holding a flame that didn’t burn; a voice whispering his name from the dark.
Shayne.
He stopped cold.
It wasn’t the voice from his dreams, nor the voice of the woman who called herself Rae from the shadows. This was deeper—like thunder wrapped in light. And it hadn’t come from the stairwell.
It had come from inside him.
⸻
At the top of the stairs, a biometric scanner blinked red—then green. It shouldn’t have recognized him, but it did. A quiet click followed, and the door opened into a room bathed in white light, humming with soft machinery.
Shayne stepped inside and froze.
Rows of monitors lined the circular chamber. On the largest screen, surveillance feeds flickered across a hundred locations: underground tunnels, city streets, prayer chambers, memory reprogramming labs. And in the center of it all was a control node—a floating interface without physical structure, projected from air and code.
And standing before it was a woman.
She turned.
Tall. Ebony-skinned. Eyes like the night before lightning. Her presence wasn’t commanding—it was terrifyingly calm.
“You’re early,” she said.
Shayne’s voice cracked. “Who are you?”
“I’m the one they assigned to erase you.”
She said it so plainly it made his stomach turn.
“But…” she added, “I didn’t.”
⸻
Her name was Sariah, and she had been an Accord Memory Engineer for seventeen years.
“I’m what they call a Calibrator,” she said, pacing slowly around the room. “I adjust truth. Memory, language, timeline distortion. I rebuild broken minds so they say what the Accord wants them to say. I’ve rewritten the memories of priests, rebels, even senators.”
She stopped in front of Shayne.
“But not you.”
“Why?” Shayne asked. “Why not me?”
“Because yours were not broken. They were… sealed.”
That word again.
Sealed.
Like something ancient, locked beneath thought. Like something holy.
“You weren’t erased,” she said. “You were encrypted. And the code isn’t Accord—it’s something older. Something the machines can’t read.”
She walked to the interface and waved her hand. A symbol emerged from the light. Shayne’s knees almost gave out.
It was the same symbol from his dreams. The one carved into the tree in the vision. The one he had drawn, unknowingly, with his blood in the cell two nights ago.
A perfect circle, broken only by a vertical line down the center, intersected by a flame.
Sariah looked back at him. “Do you know what this is?”
Shayne swallowed. “No. But I’ve seen it.”
She nodded slowly.
“We call it the Algorithm of Heaven.”
⸻
The Accord had many secrets. But the Algorithm of Heaven was the deepest.
A spiritual code. A divine frequency. A set of symbols hidden in ancient scriptures, buried beneath centuries of digital distortion and retranslation. The Algorithm was said to contain instructions—not just for living, but for waking up.
Not everyone could see it. Fewer could interpret it. And only one man had ever successfully activated it.
“Your father,” Sariah said quietly.
Shayne went still.
“I don’t know if that name means anything to you yet, but yes—he was the first to break the Accord’s cognitive firewall. He found a way to implant faith into the very neural network of his mind.”
Sariah turned to the screen and tapped a file. A grainy video began to play.
A man stood before a massive crowd, hands lifted. His voice shook the air: “Truth is not a variable. It is eternal. And we are not algorithms. We are image-bearers of something higher.”
Shayne’s breath caught.
That face. That voice.
He didn’t remember the man—but something in his soul did.
“His name was Elijah Marrow,” Sariah said. “And before they burned the archives, they called him the Last Prophet.”
⸻
The footage ended in static.
Sariah closed the feed. “They erased him. Burned every record. Scrambled the DNA files. But not before he left something behind.”
Shayne stared at the symbol again. “The Algorithm.”
“No,” she corrected him. “You.”
Shayne felt the weight of those words settle on him like judgment. Like inheritance.
“You’re not just his son,” she said. “You’re his contingency plan.”
Everything twisted in his stomach—grief, rage, confusion.
“I don’t remember any of it,” Shayne said. “I don’t even know who I am.”
“You will,” Sariah whispered. “But memory isn’t the point anymore. Mission is.”
She turned and handed him a metallic band. Thin. Circular. It glowed faintly as he touched it.
“A neural bridge,” she said. “It’ll unlock what your mind is ready to receive—but only when your spirit catches up. You’ll see fragments first. Then faces. Then fire.”
Shayne looked up at her. “Why are you helping me?”
Sariah paused. Her answer came softly:
“Because I saw what the Accord did to my brother. He believed. And they killed him for it.”
⸻
They moved quickly after that.
Sariah gave him access codes, escape routes, cloaking tags that would scramble his ID signature for forty-eight hours. There was a location he had to reach—a place called The Crossing, hidden under the ruins of the old Metro Line.
“There’s someone there who’s been waiting for you,” Sariah said. “She knows more than I do.”
Shayne nodded, heart pounding.
“Be careful,” she said. “If you’re caught outside this zone without Accord clearance, they’ll label you a Feral.”
He turned to leave, then stopped. “Sariah?”
“Yes?”
“What happens if I fail?”
She stared at him a long moment.
“Then the Vault remains sealed… and the world keeps sleeping.”
⸻
He moved like a shadow through the infrastructure.
Facility 9 stretched deeper than he’d imagined. Beneath the upper labs were corridors without signs, doors without hinges, entire libraries of digital memory never meant to see daylight.
As he ran, the neural band hummed against his wrist—and with each step, fragments began to bleed into his thoughts.
A melody.
A fire.
A woman’s voice praying in the dark.
He reached the maintenance hatch that opened into the underground transit shaft. He leapt down, boots hitting rusted rails.
He wasn’t alone.
A figure stepped out from the shadows at the far end of the tunnel.
Female.
Slim.
Eyes glowing with infrared light.
Rae.
The woman who had whispered his name in the cell, who had vanished into smoke, was now real. Solid. Breathing.
“You came,” she said softly.
“I don’t even know where I’m going,” he replied.
She smiled. “That’s why I’m here.”
Behind her, the tunnel split in two directions. One led deeper into the dead zone—unmapped territory. The other, back to the Accord’s reach.
Shayne stepped forward.
“Lead the way,” he said.
⸻
But before they could take the first step, the tunnel lights snapped on.
Alarms screamed.
And from the vents above, mechanical hounds—black, armored, and sentient—dropped like spiders from the ceiling, surrounding them in seconds.
A voice echoed through the intercom.
“Subject 973 identified. Elimination protocol engaged.”
Rae drew two metallic rods from her belt. Electricity danced across them.
Shayne clenched his fists, but before he could move, one of the hounds lunged—
And time fractured.
A blinding flash of light erupted from his chest, throwing every machine back as if blasted by a sonic force. Rae shielded her face, stumbling.
When she looked up, her eyes were wide.
“Shayne…”
He stood in the center of the tunnel, eyes glowing white.
The Algorithm had activated.
And far above the city—deep in the Accord tower—a red warning symbol blinked into existence on the Grand Archive.
ALGORITHM OF HEAVEN: INITIATED
CONTINGENCY-ONE: AWAKENED
The Chancellor turned to the Board.
“He’s not supposed to be alive.”
Another turned to him. “Then make sure he doesn’t stay that way.”
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Chapter Chapter one Hundred and Eighty-Two : Threads of Awakening
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