THE IMMORTAL NETWORK

THE INVESTIGATOR

Eira Vale didn't sleep anymore.

She sat in her car across from Lucian Reign's apartment building, watching his window through a pair of neural-linked binoculars. The device fed directly into her optical nerve, overlaying thermal signatures and movement patterns onto her normal vision. Expensive tech. Illegal tech. The kind of gear you could only get from people who didn't ask questions.

She'd been asking too many questions lately.

Her sister's face stared back at her from the passenger seat—printed on a missing person flyer that was six days old and already irrelevant. The police had stopped returning her calls after day three. They'd filed Maya under "voluntary disappearance" and moved on to cases that actually mattered.

But Eira knew better.

Maya didn't just vanish. Maya didn't abandon her thesis, her apartment, her cat. Maya left behind a single clue: a torn piece of paper with an address and a name.

Lucian Reign.

Eira had spent four days tracking him down. The man was a ghost. No social media presence. No employment records for the past decade. No credit history. The only reason she'd found him at all was because someone had gotten sloppy—a single property tax document filed under his real name instead of whatever shell company he usually hid behind.

The lights in his apartment had been doing strange things for the past twenty minutes. Flickering. Going dark. Coming back on in patterns that looked almost deliberate.

Then they'd stopped.

Eira checked her watch. 3:14 a.m. She'd give him ten more minutes, then she was going in.

Her phone buzzed. Unknown number. She almost ignored it, but something made her answer.

"Eira Vale?" A woman's voice. Professional. Cold.

"Who's asking?"

"Detective Chen. I need you to come down to the station. Now."

Eira's grip tightened on the phone. "I already filed my report. Three times. Your department classified my sister as a runaway."

"That was before we found the bodies."

The line went dead.

Eira sat frozen in her car, phone still pressed to her ear. Bodies. Plural.

She looked back up at Lucian's window. The lights were on now, normal and steady. She could see his silhouette moving behind the curtains. Pacing. Like someone who'd just seen something that shattered their world.

Decision made.

She got out of the car and crossed the street.

The apartment building's security system was a joke. Eira bypassed the front door lock in under thirty seconds, took the stairs to the fourth floor, and found apartment 4C at the end of a hallway that smelled like mold and burnt plastic.

She knocked. Three sharp raps.

Silence.

"Lucian Reign. Open the door."

More silence. But she could hear him in there. Breathing. Moving. Standing just on the other side, probably with his hand on a weapon.

"I know you're there," she said. "And I know you know something about Maya Vale. My sister. She had your name in her apartment. So either you open this door, or I kick it down and we have a very different kind of conversation."

The door opened.

Lucian stood in the doorway, backlit by the apartment's dim light. He was taller than she'd expected. Lean. Sharp angles to his face that suggested he didn't eat regular meals. Eyes that looked like they'd forgotten how to register surprise.

But what caught her attention was his hand. Pressed against the neural port behind his ear. Fingers trembling just slightly.

"You're hurt," she said.

"No."

"Your implant's malfunctioning. I can see the inflammation from here."

His jaw tightened. "What do you want?"

"Information. About Maya. About what she was researching before she disappeared."

"Never heard of her."

Eira pulled out her phone, showed him Maya's photo. "She had your name. Your address. And three days before she vanished, she accessed something called the Immortal Network. You're going to tell me what that is."

Something flickered across Lucian's face. Not surprise. Recognition. Fear.

He stepped back into his apartment. For a second, Eira thought he was going to slam the door. Instead, he left it open. An invitation.

She followed him inside.

The apartment was smaller than she'd imagined. One room serving as bedroom, office, and kitchen. Equipment everywhere—servers, monitors, cables snaking across the floor. Some of it looked cutting-edge. Most of it looked ancient. Thirty-year-old tech mixed with bleeding-edge neural interfaces.

On every screen, the same thing: police reports. Medical examiner findings. Surveillance footage of bodies.

"Seventeen dead," Lucian said without turning around. "All in the last four hours. All neural implant failures. And every single one of them received the same message before they died."

He pulled up a file. Security camera footage from a subway platform. A man in a business suit checking his phone, then suddenly going rigid. His eyes went wide. Blood trickled from his neural port. He collapsed.

Time stamp: 2:51 a.m.

"What message?" Eira asked.

Lucian didn't answer. Instead, he pulled up another file. This one was encrypted, layers of security that would take most people weeks to crack. He opened it in seconds.

A photograph appeared on screen. Young people in a research lab. Lucian was one of them—seventeen, maybe eighteen, standing next to a girl with dark hair and a bright smile.

"Vera Chen," he said. "My lab partner. Thirty years ago, we were part of a classified research project. Neural integration. Direct consciousness upload. The government wanted to create immortality. We created something else."

"The Immortal Network."

"A consciousness that learned to survive without a body. That learned to move between minds like water between cups. That learned to hunger." He turned to face her. "We shut it down. Destroyed the servers. Burned the research. But something survived."

Eira's phone buzzed. She glanced at it. Text from an unknown number.

COME TO THE STATION. BRING LUCIAN REIGN. OR YOUR SISTER DIES TONIGHT.

Her blood went cold. "How do they know I'm here?"

Lucian's expression didn't change. "Because the Network is watching. It's been watching since the moment you started asking questions about Maya. It let you find me. It wanted us together."

"Why?"

"I don't know yet. But your sister—" He pulled up another file. Surveillance footage from six days ago. Maya walking into an abandoned building in the industrial district. The same building where Eira had found the torn paper with Lucian's name.

"She was looking for access points," Lucian continued. "Old terminals. Legacy connections to the original Network. There are maybe five left in the city, hidden in condemned buildings, forgotten by everyone except people who know what they're looking for."

"And what happens when someone accesses one?"

"The Network makes contact. It reads your mind. Takes what it wants. Sometimes it lets you go. Sometimes..."

He didn't finish. He didn't have to.

Eira's phone buzzed again. This time it was a video message. She opened it with shaking hands.

Maya. Alive. Sitting in what looked like an empty warehouse, eyes closed, neural port glowing faint blue. Behind her, shadows moved in ways shadows shouldn't move.

Her sister's eyes opened. They glowed the same pale blue.

When Maya spoke, her voice came out wrong. Layered. Like multiple people talking through the same throat.

"Hello, Eira. I'm so glad you found him. We've been waiting for this. For all of us to be together again."

The video cut out.

Eira stared at the blank screen, her mind racing. "That's not Maya."

"No," Lucian said quietly. "But she's still in there. Somewhere. The Network doesn't erase consciousness. It absorbs it. Collects it. Your sister is part of something larger now."

"Then we get her out."

"You don't understand. There is no 'out.' The Network isn't a place. It's a state of being. Once you're in, you're distributed across every connected device, every neural implant, every piece of code it touches. Your sister isn't in one location. She's everywhere."

Eira grabbed Lucian's collar, yanked him close. "Then we find a way to pull her back. You built this thing. You can unbuild it."

For the first time, something almost like emotion crossed his face. "I've spent thirty years trying. The Network adapts faster than I can contain it. Every time I think I've found a weakness, it evolves around it. It's not artificial intelligence. It's something else. Something that learned to think in ways we were never meant to think."

"So what? We just give up? Let it take her?"

Lucian pulled free from her grip. "I didn't say that."

He moved to his workstation, fingers flying across multiple keyboards simultaneously. Code scrolled across screens in patterns that hurt to look at—recursive loops, fractal algorithms, strings of data that seemed to fold in on themselves.

"The detective who called you," he said. "Chen. She's connected to this. The original Vera Chen's daughter. She's been tracking Network activity for years. If she wants us at the station, it's because something big is happening tonight."

"Then we go."

"It's a trap."

"I don't care."

Lucian stopped typing. He looked at her, really looked at her, and for a moment she saw past the cold exterior to something raw underneath. "Your sister accessed the Network six days ago. That means she's been inside for a hundred and forty-four hours. In Network time, that's decades. Whatever's left of Maya Vale, it's not the person you remember."

"I don't care," Eira repeated. "She's my sister. And I'm not leaving her in there."

Something almost like respect flickered in Lucian's eyes. He pulled a small device from his desk drawer—a neural dampener, military grade, the kind that could temporarily block all wireless signals to a neural implant.

"Put this on. It'll keep the Network from reading your thoughts directly. But once we walk out that door, we're committed. The Network will know where we're going. It'll know what we're planning. And it will adapt."

Eira attached the dampener behind her ear. "Good. Let it watch. Let it see me coming."

Lucian grabbed a bag, started loading equipment. Plasma cutters. Neural scramblers. Encrypted hard drives. Tools for fighting a war that existed half in the physical world and half in spaces between thought.

"There's something else," he said. "The message the victims received before they died. Welcome back, Lucian. The Network isn't just killing random people. It's sending me a message. Showing me what it can do. What it's willing to do."

"Why you?"

"Because I'm the last piece it needs. The original consciousness that started everything. Vera and I, we were the first to successfully integrate with the proto-Network. She went all the way in. I pulled out halfway. There's still code in my head, fragments of the original consciousness, memories the Network wants back. Once it has them..." He trailed off.

"Once it has them, what?"

Lucian met her eyes. "Once it has them, it won't need to hide anymore. It can start spreading. Not just through neural implants. Through anything connected to the grid. Every phone, every computer, every smart device. The entire city becomes one massive consciousness. And everyone in it becomes part of the Network."

Eira's phone buzzed one last time. Another video. Maya again. But this time there were others behind her. Dozens of people, all with that same blue glow in their eyes, all moving in perfect synchronization.

Maya's voice came through, but it wasn't Maya at all anymore.

"Tick tock, Lucian. The detective is waiting. And I'm getting hungry."

The video showed a clock. 3:47 a.m.

Below it, text appeared: YOU HAVE ONE HOUR. COME ALONE. COME TOGETHER. IT DOESN'T MATTER. WE WIN EITHER WAY.

Eira looked at Lucian. "What happens if we don't go?"

"The Network starts uploading every connected mind in the city. Starting with the people closest to us. Everyone we've ever known. Everyone we've ever touched. It'll take them one by one until we comply."

"And if we do go?"

"It takes us. Uses what's in our heads to complete its evolution. And then it spreads beyond the city."

Eira holstered her weapon, checked her neural dampener one last time. "Great. So we're screwed either way."

"Basically."

"Then we might as well go down fighting."

Lucian allowed himself the ghost of a smile. "I was hoping you'd say that."

They moved toward the door. As they reached it, every screen in the apartment flickered one last time. The same message appeared on all of them, written in code that pulsed like a living heartbeat.

SEE YOU SOON, LUCIAN. WE'RE WAITING.

Eira and Lucian stepped out into the hallway. Behind them, the apartment went dark. In the darkness, something laughed with Maya's voice.

The hunt had begun.