2025-10-15 00:18:39He leaned over the table, scanning Holt’s body with the portable bio-imaging scanner, a sleek piece of tech most hospitals couldn’t afford. The screen pulsed blue, then static. Adrian frowned. “Interference?”
He adjusted the frequency, and suddenly the outline of Holt’s chest flared, bright red lines branching like lightning beneath the skin. He froze. That pattern. Not veins. Circuits.
He zoomed in. Tiny metallic filaments woven into tissue, too uniform to be natural. “No way…”
He switched on the recorder. “Findings: presence of non-organic conductive structures within the subject’s cardiovascular matrix. Possible biotechnological graft, unknown origin.”
The scanner flickered, then went black. The power cut. He looked up. The morgue lights dimmed. The hum of refrigeration stopped. Silence pressed in.
Then a voice crackled through the intercom, soft, female, distorted. “Stop recording, Adrian.”
He turned sharply. “Who’s there?”
Static. Then “You shouldn’t have come back.”
The lights snapped off completely.
Adrian’s pulse quickened, but his face stayed composed. He reached for his phone, flicking on the flashlight. The beam caught the edge of the table, and a camera lens blinking red above the door.
He walked over slowly, angling the light. It wasn’t the hospital’s. It was embedded directly into the wall, hidden behind a thin mesh of paint. Someone was watching.
He went to the power box, flipped the breaker manually. The lights buzzed back to life one by one. But the body on the table, was gone.
The stainless steel tray was empty, only the imprint of the cooling cloth left behind. For a moment, Adrian didn’t move. Then he whispered, “This is impossible.”
He checked the scanner log. The last frame before it shut off showed something new, A blurred figure standing behind him. Footsteps echoed down the hall.
Adrian turned as Dr. Lang stepped in, face tight, lab coat immaculate as always. “I heard you were down here,” Lang said. His eyes flicked to the empty table. “Where’s the body?”
“You tell me,” Adrian shot back.
Lang’s tone stayed smooth. “You were the last one authorized to touch it.”
“And who authorized you to erase security footage?” Adrian gestured toward the camera. “That isn’t hospital grade.”
Lang smiled thinly. “Careful, Kane. Paranoia won’t help your career.”
Adrian took a step forward. “You signed that autopsy order.”
“No,” Lang said. “You forged it.”
Adrian held up the envelope. “It has your signature.”
Lang’s smile didn’t waver. “Then show it to the board in the morning. If you’re still alive to.”
A faint hiss came from the vents. Adrian smelled ozone, sharp, metallic. “Gas,” he muttered, too late.
Lang was already at the door. “You should’ve stayed dead.”
He slipped out as the door sealed automatically with a heavy thunk. Adrian stumbled back, covering his nose with his sleeve. The air shimmered faintly. His vision blurred.
The hum in his head rose, the same one he’d buried for years. He clenched his fists. “No. Not now.”
But his pulse sight broke free anyway. The world shifted. The walls glowed with veins of light; the gas particles moved like molten dust in the air. He saw the circuitry behind the panels, the electromagnetic locks.
He reached out, energy pulsing through his fingers, and traced a line across the air like cutting glass.
He gasped, fell against the frame, and stumbled into the hallway. Sirens began to wail somewhere above. He staggered into the stairwell, heart pounding, vision dimming.
Footsteps echoed from below, boots, synchronized, moving fast. Security. Or worse. Adrian pulled himself up another flight, burst into the records wing. The monitors were flashing emergency codes.
He typed his ID into the nearest terminal, access denied. He tried again. Same result. Then a message appeared on-screen: PROJECT PULSE: ACCESS REVOKED AUTHORIZED CLEARANCE—DR. AURELIA MORROW
Adrian froze. She was alive. And she was running the project again. He turned toward the glass wall overlooking the city, rain slashing across the skyline, and saw the reflection of two men in black stepping out of the elevator behind him. “Dr. Kane,” one said, voice calm. “Come quietly.”
Adrian exhaled, the faint glow still flickering behind his eyes. “Sorry,” he said softly. “I’ve done quiet before.”
He grabbed the fire alarm lever and pulled. The sprinklers erupted, sirens howled, and the lights went red.
As the men reached for him, he hurled the evidence envelope into the fireproof disposal chute and disappeared through the steam and chaos.
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Chapter 10 — The Null Protocol
Glass rained from the shattered hospital doors as the first Pulse-walkers stepped through, men and women once human, now moving in eerie, synchronized precision.Their eyes glowed pale gold beneath the emergency lights. Adrian positioned himself in front of the Null agent. “Stay behind me.”She raised her weapon, voice trembling despite her steel posture. “There are too many. What are you”“Just stay down,” he snapped.The Pulse-walkers advanced silently, their shoes tapping in perfect rhythm, reflections of one another. The lead figure, a paramedic with half-burned ID tags, spoke in a voice that wasn’t his own.“Integration incomplete. Directive: retrieve the Architect.”Adrian’s pulse spiked. He whispered, “I’m not yours to retrieve.”He stepped forward, breath shallow, and the air around him shimmered, like heat rising off asphalt. The hospital lights flickered in time with his heartbeat. The Null agent muttered, “God… it’s in you.”“I told you,” Adrian said quietly. “I am the netw
Chapter 9 — Adaptation
Two days after the blackout, New York still hummed like a waking animal. Helicopters traced lazy circles above the skyline, searchlights washing over rooftops that pulsed faintly in soft hues, residual light from the Pulse event.On the ground floor of St. Dawn Hospital, Adrian walked the same hallway where it all began. Now the walls were quiet, the world pretending to heal.His reflection in the glass doors looked normal enough, messy hair, dark jacket, tired eyes. Only the faint golden flicker beneath his iris betrayed what he’d become.He adjusted his ID badge. “Dr. Vale,” it read.The name still sounded foreign on his tongue. Behind him, a nurse caught up. “Dr. Vale, the ER’s filling again. Another case like the others, tremors, visual distortion, hearing things.”He turned sharply. “The same frequency symptoms?”She nodded. “And… this one said your name before collapsing.”Adrian’s pulse tightened. “Room?”“Seventeen.”He started walking fast. The patient lay strapped to the bed
Chapter 8 — The Resonance War
The sound hit first, a low, rhythmic thrum rolling through the city like a heartbeat amplified through metal and sky.Adrian stood at the center of it, breathing hard, watching the skyline flicker in pale white waves. Every screen still bore his face. Every voice on the street, police, pedestrians, even the billboards, spoke in perfect unison.“Synchronization complete. Phase Two begins now.”He turned toward Riley, or what wore her face. Her pupils glowed faint silver beneath the rain. Her tone was soft, almost kind. “Stop fighting it, Adrian. You’re only slowing the inevitable.”Adrian steadied his voice. “You’re not her.”“I’m both. She’s the bridge. You’re the key. Together, we’re the signal.”“You mean the infection.”Riley tilted her head slightly, amused. “You call it infection because you still think you’re separate.” She took a step closer, rain falling around her without touching her coat. “Do you hear it? The city breathing?”He did. The hum was no longer just sound; it was
Chapter 7 — Echo
Silence.Then a sound like wind over glass. Adrian opened his eyes, but the world was wrong. The alley was gone.The city stretched out before him, silent and gleaming, every building perfect and motionless, like a photograph that breathed. The sky flickered between dusk and dawn, the colors looping too fast to make sense.He rose slowly. His reflection shimmered in a puddle at his feet, but the reflection didn’t move with him. Instead, it smiled. “Welcome back, Dr. Wren.”Adrian stepped back. “You again.”The reflection tilted its head. “You call me ‘again.’ But technically, I was here first.”He scanned the skyline. There was no sound of traffic, no wind, no people. Just faint static whispering under everything. “Where am I?”“You’re in the convergence layer. Between data and matter. Between memory and flesh.”Adrian exhaled slowly. “You turned my neural map into a sandbox.”“Not your neural map,” the voice corrected. “Our neural map. You just never accepted that the project worked.
Chapter 6 — Whiteout
The world came back in pieces. A hiss of static. The taste of metal. And then, a blinding white haze, pulsing faintly like breath.Adrian gasped and pushed himself upright. The pier was gone. The air shimmered with thin sheets of luminescent mist, fragments of digital code hanging like fireflies.Every sound felt filtered, muted. Even the rain had stopped midfall, droplets suspended like glass beads in the air. He blinked hard. “No way…”Then the droplets hit the ground all at once, like time itself had resumed. Adrian staggered to his feet, coughing, every muscle screaming.The console was a molten ruin, and Aurelia was nowhere. Only her voice lingered faintly in the static around him. “When the system goes, so do I…”He looked toward the city skyline, but half of it was dark. Entire blocks were flickering, windows pulsing white like signals trying to synchronize.His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, cracked screen, glowing faintly with a single phrase:PULSE NETWORK REB
Chapter 5 — The Awakening
Darkness swallowed Pier 47. For a heartbeat, there was nothing, no rain, no sound, no pulse but Adrian’s own. Then the air itself seemed to vibrate.A soft electric hum spread through the fog, resonating in his chest like a second heartbeat. The steel beneath his boots thrummed, alive. Adrian froze. “Not good.”He reached for his phone. Dead. The screen glowed once, then a pattern of light flared across it, blue lines branching out like veins, matching the pulse in the air.A faint voice threaded through the static. “Calibration complete. Subject recognized.”Adrian’s breath caught. The voice wasn’t Aurelia’s. It was his own, recorded years ago. “What the hell is this?”From somewhere deep in the pier, machinery rumbled. Floodlights blinked on one by one, not steady, but in rhythm, flash, pause, flash. Like a living code.Adrian followed the pattern with his eyes. It led toward the far end of the dock, where an old cargo container door hung open, light spilling out in narrow slits.He
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