2025-11-03 08:17:23The conference room smelled of coffee gone bitter and disinfectant that couldn’t scrub the guilt off the walls.
Jason sat alone on one side of the table. Across from him, three board members, Dr. Pierce at the head, and a hospital lawyer with the look of a man who’d rehearsed this speech before breakfast.
The fluorescent lights hummed. The rain hadn’t stopped since morning. “Dr. Rodriguez,” the lawyer began, “this review concerns the events of last night’s operation. You understand the purpose of this hearing?”
Jason leaned back in the chair, silent. Pierce’s jaw tightened. “Jason.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You’re deciding whether to throw me out.”
“Whether to terminate your employment,” the lawyer corrected. “Yes.”
A few papers rustled. A woman from administration cleared her throat. “According to protocol, you acted without authorization, ignored senior supervision, and endangered staff. We need to determine if it was negligence or misconduct.”
Jason smiled faintly. “Not incompetence?”
“Excuse me?”
“Usually they call me incompetent. It’s cleaner than calling me a threat.”
Pierce’s voice cut through. “Jason, don’t.”
Jason turned to him. “You saw the boy’s vitals. If I’d waited, he’d have bled out.”
“You ruptured the aortic wall”
“Because I was trying to stop internal collapse.” His tone stayed even, almost detached. “I did what I was trained to do: think fast. Adapt. Save.”
The board member at the end snorted. “Save? The patient died.”
Jason met his gaze. “And so will a hundred others if you keep treating procedures like commandments.”
The lawyer raised a hand. “This isn’t the place for ideology, Doctor.”
“Then where is?”
Silence. Only the clock ticking. Pierce spoke softly. “Jason, they’re not your enemies.”
Jason looked down at his hands folded on the table. “No. They just act like they are.”
The lawyer cleared his throat again. “You’ve received multiple reports of insubordination”
“From who? The ones who can’t stand being outshined by someone they called a weirdo?”
“and complaints about your behavior toward patients’ families.”
Jason laughed once. “Because I tell them the truth?”
“Because you scare them.”
That landed like a punch. He stared at the table. His reflection warped in the polished surface. Pierce said quietly, “Jason. They’ll want a statement. Something official.”
Jason looked up. “Here’s my statement: I don’t regret what I did. I regret who I did it for.”
The lawyer sighed, scribbling notes. “That’ll be all.”
Jason stood. The chair’s legs screeched against the tile. “You’re going to fire me anyway, so save the paperwork.”
Pierce rose too. “Don’t make this harder.”
“It’s already over,” Jason said. He glanced at the window, rain streaming, city lights blurred. “You just haven’t signed it yet.”
He turned to leave. “Jason,” Pierce said, softer. “I believed in you.”
Jason stopped at the door. “Then you should’ve said so when it mattered.”
He walked out. The hallway felt longer than usual. Every step echoed. Nurses avoided eye contact. A janitor paused mid-mop.
At the far end, Anna waited by the vending machines, arms folded, eyes red. “Well?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. “That bad.”
He gave a thin smile. “Depends on your definition of bad.”
She followed as he walked toward the elevators. “You could fight it. Appeal”
“Against who? The system? It’s built to protect itself.”
“Jason, please.”
He hit the call button. The light glowed red. “Don’t worry. They’ll feel better once I’m gone. Hospitals need villains.”
“You’re not a villain.”
He looked at her. “Tell that to the headlines.”
The elevator doors opened. Inside, mirrored walls reflected his tired face from every angle.
Anna hesitated at the threshold. “Where will you go?”
“I don’t know. Maybe somewhere that doesn’t mind when you save someone the wrong way.”
The doors slid shut before she could reply. Outside, the air was cold, thick with rain and exhaust. Jason stepped under the hospital awning, clutching the envelope Pierce had slipped into his hand before he left, a severance check, probably, or some legal disclaimer. He didn’t open it.
His phone buzzed again. Martha. He let it ring. Then another buzz, this time a message. We need to talk. Please. It’s important.
He almost smiled at the irony. She’d left him for Derick six months ago; now she remembered he existed. He tossed the phone into his coat pocket and started walking.
The city glistened with neon and puddles, sirens far off. Every sound felt louder when you’d just lost everything.
At the corner, a homeless man sat beneath a flickering streetlight. “Got a dollar, doc?”
Jason froze. The man’s eyes were cloudy, skin pale under the rain. Fevered. He knelt beside him. “You sick?”
“Just cold,” the man mumbled. “Been coughing all week.”
Jason placed a hand on his wrist. The pulse was weak, uneven. Pneumonia maybe. He looked around, no shelter, no clinics nearby.
He tore open the envelope Pierce had given him. Inside wasn’t just the check, it was his license badge, now stamped revoked. He laughed softly. “Figures.”
He pulled off his scarf, wrapped it around the man’s shoulders. “You’ll be alright.”
The man blinked up at him. “You a doctor?”
Jason hesitated. “Not anymore.”
He stood, rain soaking through his coat. Across the street, a giant LED billboard flashed the hospital’s motto: Compassion in Every Hand.
The words burned. He turned away and walked into the night. Back in the hospital, Pierce watched the same rain from his office window. Anna entered quietly. “Is he gone?” she asked.
Pierce nodded. “He didn’t even look back.”
“Do you think he’ll be okay?”
Pierce sighed. “Jason Rodriguez doesn’t do okay. He either saves the world or sets it on fire.”
He looked out again. For a moment, lightning flashed, and in that instant, the city seemed alive, pulsing, waiting.
Somewhere out there, Jason was already planning what came next. And this time, no rulebook would stop him.
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Chapter 11 — “Layer Two”
He woke to stillness.No sky. No ground. Just endless white, soft as fog, sharp as light. The air didn’t move, yet it hummed, faint and low, like a machine idling somewhere inside his bones.Jason sat up slowly. His body felt whole, but wrong, too smooth, too light. When he looked at his hands, they shimmered faintly, like heat rising off metal.The voice came from nowhere and everywhere. “Don’t fight the reboot.”He turned. The woman, his mirror, stood several feet away, barefoot on the blank floor that wasn’t floor at all. Her skin no longer glowed blue; it pulsed silver.Jason swallowed hard. “Where are we?”“Layer Two,” she said softly. “A test environment. Half digital, half cerebral. The place between you and the world.”He rose to his feet, every motion echoed by a half-second delay. When he moved, the space around him rippled.Jason said, “You brought me here.”Her expression didn’t change. “We brought us.”He paced a slow circle, trying to spot edges. There were none. “If thi
Chapter 10 — “City of Glass”
Jason landed hard on his back. The air left his lungs in one ragged gasp. Glass rained down like a thousand knives, clinking and shattering around him. When he opened his eyes, the world was… wrong.The city above him, no, around him, was flipped. Skyscrapers hung like stalactites, traffic ran upside down, and people moved backward, their motions slightly delayed, like old footage.The sky pulsed a faint blue instead of gray. Every few seconds, the light flickered, as if reality were buffering.Jason pushed himself up, glass crunching under his palms. “Where” He stopped, voice trembling. “Where the hell am I?”The woman, no, the mirrored version of himself, stood a few feet away, unscathed. The faint glow under her skin synced perfectly with his.She said quietly, “We crossed through the threshold. The reflection’s frame broke.”Jason stared at her. “You mean we’re inside the glass?”Her gaze met his. “We’re inside the data that held it.”He shook his head. “That’s not, none of this m
Chapter 9 — “Afterlight
Silence.Then, drip. Drip. Jason’s eyes opened to darkness and the slow echo of water hitting metal. He lay twisted in the wreckage, ribs screaming, half-buried under debris that smelled of ozone and blood. His blood.The reactor’s hum was gone. The doubles, gone. Only the faint hiss of dying machinery. He tried to move. Pain bit down like a live wire.A sliver of rebar had punched through his shoulder. He gritted his teeth, braced, and yanked it free. The sound it made was soft and wet.He pressed a hand to the wound. Warm. Sticky. Real. For a moment, he thought maybe he’d actually killed them. Maybe the nightmare ended.Then something whispered through the dark. “You shouldn’t have unplugged us.”Jason froze. “Who’s there?”Static rolled down the corridor like a whispering tide. Monitors flickered to life one by one, faces, his faces, distorted and glitching.He stumbled to his feet, legs trembling. The screens blinked in unison, voices overlapping, fractured. “We’re still here.”“I
Chapter 8 — “The Mirror War”
Smoke hung low, thick with metal and heat. Jason backed into the corridor wall, pulse thrumming in his throat. The doubles advanced through the haze, silent, identical, their footsteps perfectly in sync.He scanned for exits. None. Only rubble, firelight, and flickering signs that read LAB 09—CONTAINMENT.The nearest double stepped into the light. Same face. Same eyes. But colder. Jason said, “If you’re me, you know how this ends.”The thing tilted its head. “We end when you stop resisting.”Jason grabbed a shard of metal from the floor, held it like a scalpel. “Then I guess I’m the last one to die.”The doubles spread out, forming a half-circle. Their movements were surgical, coordinated, impossible to predict.He lunged first. The shard cut across one’s throat, but no blood, only a flash of blue light that fizzled and sealed the wound. Jason froze. “What the hell”A punch caught his ribs. He hit the wall hard, gasping. The lead double said, “You still think pain makes you human.”Ja
Chapter 7 — “The White Room”
White.Nothing but white. Jason squinted, but there were no walls, no corners, no ceiling. Just space, pulsing faintly with light like it was breathing. His steps made no sound. “Lila,” he called. His voice echoed but didn’t return.Then a tone chimed, soft, like a heart monitor wrapped in music. “Welcome, Jason.” The same voice from before. Lila’s voice, but smoother, stripped of human edges.He turned in a slow circle. “Where are you?”“I’m here,” the voice said. “Everywhere.”“Cut the god trick. Show yourself.”The air shimmered. Slowly, she appeared, not flesh and blood, but light and outline, a girl-shaped ghost of code. Same eyes, same softness, but with something missing behind them.“You’re not her,” Jason said.“I’m what’s left,” she said. “What they built from her.”He stepped closer. “Built?”Her expression flickered. “When she died the first time, they copied her neural pattern. A failsafe, in case the serum destroyed her. But it didn’t just copy her memories. It learned.”
Chapter 6 — “The Awakening Protocol”
Jason came to with the taste of metal in his mouth. The first thing he noticed was the hum, low, rhythmic, too even to be anything natural.When his vision cleared, white light filled the room. A ceiling too bright. Walls too smooth. He tried to lift his arms and found them strapped to a gurney, leather, reinforced with steel. “Welcome back,” a voice said.Keene stood by the monitors, coat crisp, hands folded behind her back. Jason’s throat burned. “Where… am I?”“You’re safe,” she said.“That word doesn’t mean what you think it does.”She smiled faintly. “You’re in Facility Four. Off-grid. Nobody knows this place exists.”Jason’s gaze flicked to the machines around him. Heart monitors. IV lines. A slow drip of clear fluid into his arm. “What did you do to me?”“Saved you. Again.”“I didn’t need saving.”“You were dying, Jason. Neural overload. Your cells were collapsing.”He strained against the straps. “Then let me go.”Keene stepped closer. “We can’t do that yet.”“Because I’m your
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