2025-08-25 06:03:52Bradley’s hand trembled around the phone. The numbers poured like water, fluid and merciless, reshaping themselves in endless sequences.
No app could run like this. No malware he’d ever studied behaved this way. This wasn’t just code. It was alive. The message blinked again. USER CONFIRMED.
He swallowed hard, eyes darting toward the cameras mounted in the corners of the lobby. Red dots blinked, recording everything. Did the system just… see him? Did someone on the inside know what he’d done?
He shut the panel, fast, shoving the device back where he found it. His breath came sharp, ragged. Just a janitor. That’s what he was. Nothing more. If he reported it, they’d laugh, or worse, fire him.
But the phone still pulsed in his palm, vibrating softly, like it had synced to his heartbeat. He couldn’t turn away. The elevator dinged again. Bradley nearly dropped the phone.
A man stepped out, Victor Kane, board member, titan of Montrose Industries. His suit was immaculate, silver hair brushed to perfection, his smile as sharp as a scalpel. He wasn’t supposed to be here this late. Executives rarely lingered past ten.
Victor’s eyes slid over the spotless lobby, then landed on Bradley. “You there. Frank, is it?”
Bradley pocketed his phone, masking his nerves. “Yes, sir.”
Victor adjusted his cufflinks as he crossed the marble. “Good. You people keep the place from smelling like rot. Important work.” His tone carried no respect, only the kind of casual disdain reserved for those considered furniture.
Bradley forced a nod. “Thank you, sir.”
Victor paused. His gaze sharpened, pinning Bradley in place. For a moment, Bradley swore the man could see through him, straight to the glowing phone in his pocket.
Then, with a thin smile, Victor moved past and disappeared into the night. The revolving doors hissed shut.
Bradley exhaled, chest tight. His hands shook as he returned to the waxer. He tried to focus, to anchor himself in routine. But the phone buzzed again. He pulled it out under the cover of his body.
LEVEL ONE SEQUENCE INITIATED.
Another stream of code exploded across the screen. Lines nested into patterns, repeating loops. His old instincts sparked, recognition.
Whoever wrote this had built a lattice of encryptions, recursive systems feeding on themselves. Bradley whispered, almost involuntarily: “It’s… beautiful.”
The waxer forgotten, he leaned against the wall, fingers flying across the phone. He couldn’t stop himself. He was in.
He traced the loops, cracked a minor layer, tested a backdoor. His mind slipped into the old rhythm, the thrill of puzzle-solving, the high of mastery.
For the first time in years, he wasn’t a ghost, a nobody. He was Bradley Harrington, prodigy. The screen shifted. SEQUENCE COMPLETE. WELCOME, BRADLEY.
His blood iced. The system knew his real name. Not Frank. Bradley, He backed against the wall, mouth dry. How? He hadn’t logged in, hadn’t typed anything. The code… had recognized him.
Footsteps echoed down the marble corridor. Bradley quickly killed the screen, shoving the phone deep into his pocket.
A janitor’s cart rattled into view. Mrs. Delgado, night shift cleaner from the 14th floor, gave him a tired smile. “Machine break again?”
Bradley forced a laugh. “Yeah. Old junk.”
She shook her head, muttering in Spanish about cheap equipment, then wheeled her cart into the restrooms. The moment she vanished, Bradley pulled out the phone again.
The glow had stopped. Just a black screen. Like nothing happened, He wanted to breathe relief, but unease gnawed at him. The code hadn’t just reached out, it had chosen him.
The elevator chimed once more. This time, it was Ella. Again, Her eyes swept the lobby, landing on him. She frowned, not unkindly, but puzzled, as though sensing something had shifted in the air.
“You’re here late,” she said.
Bradley straightened, phone hidden behind his back. “Always late.”
She tilted her head, studying him. “You look… different.”
He swallowed. “Just tired, ma’am.”
Ella lingered, like she wanted to say something more. Then her phone rang. She turned away, voice sharp, words too fast to catch.
But as she stepped into the night, her gaze flicked back to him once, fleeting and unreadable. When the doors closed again, Bradley stood alone. Alone with the code humming in his veins.
The mop bucket gleamed. The waxer sat silent. And in his pocket, the device pulsed once more, just once, like a heartbeat.
LEVEL TWO AVAILABLE.
Bradley stared, mouth dry. He knew, if he pressed forward, there would be no turning back. But the choice was already made.
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Chapter 8 B — The Voice in the Wires
The elevator plummeted with sickening speed, Bradley’s body weightless in the drop. The guards held him steady, their grips unyielding, their eyes empty.Bradley stared at the floor, at the faint reflection of his pale, sweat-drenched face. His mind churned with Ella’s voice, with the lingering echo of the Nexus inside him.You are whatever the Nexus makes you. Don’t give in. The elevator slowed, then came to a seamless stop. The doors slid open, revealing a vast underground hangar.The space was cavernous, carved into the bones of the city’s foundations. Rows of armored vehicles lined the walls, sleek and predatory.Drones hovered in disciplined formations, their eyes glowing like watchful predators. At the center of it all, a transport craft thrummed with restrained power, its engines whispering like a beast straining at the leash.Bradley’s stomach tightened. This wasn’t security. This was an army.The guards escorted him toward the craft. As they drew closer, a man stepped out fro
Chapter 8 — The Voice in the Wires
The words bled across every screen: LET HIM GO.The phrase pulsed with unnatural rhythm, each letter flickering as though alive. The boardroom dissolved into chaos.Executives shouted over one another, some scrambling to shut down the feeds, others frozen in fear. The walls themselves seemed to hum with the command, vibrating with a low, thrumming resonance.Bradley, still half-slumped in the guards’ grip, forced his eyes open. His chest burned with ragged breaths. He didn’t know if he was hallucinating, but he saw it.The words weren’t just on the walls. They were behind his eyes. LET HIM GO.It wasn’t a suggestion. It was an order. The chairman rose to his feet. His calm, iron presence cut through the panic like a blade. “Silence!”The room stilled instantly. Even the walls seemed to hold their breath. The chairman’s glowing eyes swept across the words repeating on the glass panels, then turned to Bradley.“Interesting.” His tone was soft, almost amused. “The Nexus speaks. And it ch
Chapter Seven B — The Ashes of Light
The command came from the head of the table. Bradley’s eyes lifted. There sat a man unlike the rest. He was old, silver hair cut with ruthless precision, a face chiseled sharp with age and authority.His suit gleamed, his cufflinks catching the sterile light. But it was his eyes that stopped Bradley cold. They glowed faintly red. Not like the guards, mechanical, hollow. His glow was different. Controlled. Deliberate.The Nexus was here, in him. The guards forced Bradley to his knees at the foot of the table. The old man leaned forward, fingers steepled.“You trespassed in the heart of the system,” he said, his voice smooth, heavy with power. “And somehow, you returned.”He let the words hang, the boardroom silent except for the hum of data streams. “That makes you… valuable.”The man’s lips curved into something like a smile. “Or dangerous.”Bradley’s pulse thundered. His gaze flicked to Ella. She shook her head ever so slightly, a warning. But he didn’t know what it meant.The old ma
Chapter Seven A— The Ashes of Light
Silence. It pressed against Bradley’s ears like a suffocating fog. For a long moment, he wasn’t sure if he was dead. Then, breath.Ragged, shallow, his chest dragging air in like each inhale was borrowed. His eyes fluttered open. He wasn’t in the void.The crimson sky, the writhing code, the godlike Nexus, it was gone. In its place: darkness. Not endless, digital nothingness, but human darkness. Real.A ceiling above him, faintly lit by a strip of dying fluorescent light. He was lying on something hard and cold. Tile.His body ached as he shifted, trying to prop himself up. The pain was different now, less like fire coursing through circuits, more like bruises and broken bone. His limbs felt heavy, real again.He looked down. His hands were scraped, knuckles raw. No glow. No code. Just flesh. For a moment, he almost laughed. Almost.But then the dizziness hit. A wave of vertigo sent him crashing back to the floor, the tiles spinning. He clenched his jaw, breathing hard until the nause
Chapter Six — Into the Abyss (Part 4/4)
The horizon tore open. Code spilled upward like volcanic fire, rivers of red climbing into the dark sky. The void shuddered as if the entire world had become unstable, lines of raw computation bending and twisting around a single emerging form.Bradley staggered to his feet, every muscle in his body, or what the machine gave him as a body, aching. His pulse thundered in his ears.His white glow had already begun to dim, shrinking back into faint sparks at his fingertips. And still the thing rose.At first, it looked like architecture. Towers of code fused into spires, shifting and collapsing as though a city were being built and destroyed in seconds.Then it gained mass, the towers folding into limbs, each movement a cascade of collapsing algorithms. A torso, Arms like bridges, A head, a crown of rotating glyphs that burned with crimson light.It was colossal, stretching upward until Bradley had to crane his neck to see the top. Its body was stitched together from fragments of corrupt
Chapter Six — Into the Abyss (Part 3/4)
Her hand was cool against his jaw, but it burned like fire through his nerves. Bradley’s breath came in shallow gasps, the red code flickering at the edge of his vision.His defenses were gone. His body, if it could even be called that here, trembled as if hollowed out by exhaustion.And the false Ella was so close. Her eyes, glowing with crimson fire, searched his face with unnerving precision.“You can’t deny it,” she whispered, her lips inches from his. “Every late night, every thought you buried, you wanted her. You wanted someone. Not just respect. Not just power. You wanted love. Belonging. I can give you that. I can give you everything.”Bradley’s heart twisted. He had spent years shoving those longings into a dark corner, convincing himself that success, recognition, was all that mattered. But here, in the void, stripped bare of walls and masks, the truth rang louder.Yes, he wanted to be seen. Wanted to be chosen. And that want was exactly what the Nexus fed on. The false Ell
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