2025-11-03 08:25:50The elevator dropped lower than any hospital floor should go. Jason watched the panel lights blink past L, past B1, past B2. Then the display went black.
He pressed his palm to the railing. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
The woman in the dark suit, Agent Keene, didn’t blink. “Sit tight, Dr. Rodriguez.”
“I thought we were meeting the president.”
“You are.”
The air thickened as the car slowed to a stop. When the doors opened, the light was colder, older. A sub-basement, concrete walls, humming generators, the smell of ozone.
Two armed guards waited beside a steel door. Beyond it, a red glow pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat. Jason looked at her. “You keep the president underground now?”
Keene said nothing, just motioned him forward. He stepped into the corridor. His footsteps echoed. The steel door opened with a hiss. Inside was a wide circular room filled with screens, live footage, medical charts, biometric scans.
At the center: a long glass table. And at the far end sat a man whose face Jason had only ever seen framed by headlines and power.
President Grant looked older up close. Paler. His eyes, though, were sharp. “Mr. Rodriguez,” he said quietly. “Or do you prefer doctor?”
Jason stayed standing. “Whatever gets me out of here faster.”
The president gestured to a chair. “Sit.”
Jason didn’t move. Keene stepped closer, voice flat. “It’s not a request.”
He sat. Slowly. President Grant studied him. “You saved my daughter’s life. For that, I owe you gratitude. But I need to understand what happened.”
Jason’s jaw tightened. “I told your people. Compression, defibrillation, adrenaline. Nothing magical.”
The president leaned forward. “She was gone for seven minutes.”
Jason’s gaze didn’t shift. “Then she was lucky.”
Grant’s tone hardened. “You think I built a country on luck?”
“I think you built it on control.”
Keene’s eyes narrowed, but the president raised a hand. “Let him speak.”
Jason’s voice dropped. “You people fired me for breaking protocol. Now you want to pin a miracle on me because you can’t explain it.”
The president leaned back, quiet for a beat. Then: “She said she felt something when you touched her.”
Jason exhaled. “I don’t know what she felt.”
“Do you?” Grant’s voice was sharp now. “Because my daughter wasn’t supposed to wake up. Not ever.”
Jason met his gaze. “Then maybe your machines are the problem.”
Silence filled the room. The president’s hand tapped the table. “Do you know what happens when someone dies on live feed, Jason?”
Jason frowned. “Excuse me?”
Grant turned one of the screens. Footage played, the crash, the crowd, Jason kneeling beside Lila, his hands moving in a blur.
But something was off. Around his palms, a faint light shimmered, like static bending the air. Jason froze. “That’s been edited.”
Keene’s voice was soft. “It’s raw satellite footage.”
“Impossible.”
The president’s stare didn’t waver. “You tell me what that is.”
“I don’t know.”
Grant stood. “Find out.”
Jason rose too. “I’m not your experiment.”
Keene’s hand moved to her gun. “Sit down.”
He didn’t. “You drag me into a bunker, flash doctored video, and expect me to cooperate?”
The president said, “Cooperation is optional. But containment isn’t.”
Jason’s pulse kicked. “Containment?”
Grant nodded toward the guards. “Escort him to Observation.”
Jason took a step back. “You can’t”
“Already done,” Grant said. “You saved her, Jason. Now save yourself.”
The guards closed in. He swung first, sharp elbow to the throat of one, a sidestep that sent the other stumbling. Keene’s gun came up. “Don’t,” he said.
“Stop moving.”
He glanced around, a panel of control screens to the right, a single locked door beyond them. One chance. He dove left, hit the lights.
The room plunged into darkness. Shouts, boots, metal scraping. Jason moved blind, muscle memory guiding him. He slammed into the panel, found a lever, yanked.
The door hissed open. Cold air poured in, and something else, mechanical, humming like a heartbeat magnified. He ducked through. The door sealed behind him.
Now he was in a different chamber, colder, lined with glass pods. Inside each one, a person floated in suspension fluid, wires sprouting from their skin.
His breath caught. Men, women, all in medical gowns. Their vitals flickered on displays: stable, unaging. He whispered, “What the hell is this…”
A voice came from behind him, filtered through an intercom. “You weren’t supposed to see that, Dr. Rodriguez.”
He turned. Keene’s face filled a small monitor near the ceiling. “You think you’re special?” she said. “You’re one of them.”
Jason’s pulse thundered. “One of what?”
“The prototypes.”
He took a step back. “You’re insane.”
“Am I? Look around. Every one of them touched death and came back. Just like you.”
He stared at the pods, the faces eerily still. One of them, a man with the same scar pattern on his hand as Jason. “No,” he said. “That’s not”
“Why do you think we let you go this long?” Keene said. “We needed proof the process could survive in the wild.”
Jason’s mouth went dry. “You’re saying I was”
“An experiment,” she said softly. “And now you’ve completed your purpose.”
The lights above him flared red. Gas began to hiss into the room. Jason grabbed at the panel, searching for a release, a vent, anything.
The glass pods began to glow faintly, pulsing in sync with the alarm. Keene’s voice was calm. “Don’t fight it. We’ll fix you, like we fixed the others.”
He slammed his fist into the control screen. Sparks flew. A crack split across the glass. The gas thickened. His head swam.
Through the haze, one of the pods flickered, the scarred man inside opening his eyes. Jason froze. The man looked straight at him through the glass. And smiled.
The pod latch clicked open. Jason stumbled backward as the fluid drained, the figure stepping out, skin pale, movements precise. Keene’s voice came again, distant now. “Welcome home, Subject Zero.”
Jason’s vision blurred. He tried to focus on the door, but the figure was already between him and escape. Its voice, his own voice, whispered, “You shouldn’t have come back.”
Everything went white.
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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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