The Last Code

The air was poison. Not literally—though Jace wouldn’t be surprised if it was—but in that way grief hangs in your lungs. Heavy. Dirty. Full of things you can't name but feel anyway. New Chicago used to have a skyline that could rival Marsport’s. Now it was just wreckage, bones of buildings jutting out like rib cages against the bleeding sky. Jace crouched behind a half-demolished pillar, broken concrete scraping his knees through the suit’s worn padding, and tasted ash in the back of his throat.

Ten years of storms. Not the weather kind. These storms were smarter. Sharper. Born from the nanotech plague that bled into every crack of civilization and turned people into monsters. Turned Jace into a ghost of a man who once wore a white coat and believed in the future.

His visor flickered. Another glitch. The HUD danced between static and signal, and he could barely make out the road ahead. Nothing moved—no survivors, no Shattered. Just wind weaving through rusted-out husks of cars and the eerie, soft shimmer of nanites drifting like toxic snow.

Jace gripped his pulse-rifle tighter. The charge meter blinked at 12%. Useless. He could maybe get two good shots out of it. Three, if he was lucky. But luck hadn’t been on his side in a long time.

He whispered to himself, more prayer than pep talk. “You’re not dying out here, Kade.”

His voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Someone older. Someone tired.

He moved.

His boots crunched over glass and old bones as he sprinted toward a pharmacy across the street. They used to have automatic doors. Now the entrance looked like a mouth that had been pried open with fists and desperation. Painkillers. Antibiotics. Even expired stuff—anything to keep the fevered kids in Ward C breathing through the night. That’s why he was out here, risking what was left of his sanity.

That, and guilt.

Guilt, he’d learned, was heavier than fear.

Two vials of synthetic morphine clinked inside his satchel. Not enough. Not even close. Every time he heard the kids coughing in their bunks, he saw Lena’s face—his sister, gone the day the sky cracked and the world collapsed. He hadn’t saved her. Hadn’t saved anyone.

Once, he was Dr. Jace Kade, exobiologist, yelling into a comms channel about an alien signal that was hijacking Earth’s satellites. No one listened. They called him paranoid. A burnout. A liar.

Then the signal hit.

And everything they knew—cities, families, love, logic—burned.

He was still burning.

A low hum rolled beneath the concrete like a ripple through deep water. His stomach clenched. That sound didn’t belong in this world.

He froze.

His grip on the rifle went white-knuckled. The air around him thickened, nanites sparking green like infected fireflies. The hum deepened, syncing to his heartbeat. His breath shortened.

Storms didn’t hum.

And they sure as hell didn’t… watch.

There was movement—sharp and skittering—in the alley to his right. Jace spun, rifle raised, heart thudding. Nothing. Just shadows mocking him.

His feet backed him slowly toward the pharmacy. Each step felt wrong. Each breath, thinner. The HUD glitched again.

Signal anomaly detected. Source: Unknown.

“Fantastic,” he muttered, forcing the sarcasm. It tasted bitter.

Inside, the pharmacy was a graveyard of ransacked shelves and shattered glass. He shoved his rifle into its sling, drew his multi-tool, and wedged open a rusted cabinet. His hands trembled as he pulled free a crushed box of antivirals. Expired. But in this world, expired still meant hope.

Then the hum came back.

Stronger.

It buzzed through his skull like a migraine made of static and knives. His legs buckled, vision spinning. He fell hard, gasping as a new message lit up his visor in pulsing red:

Signal overload. Neural interface detected.

“What the hell—”

Then the voice.

Cold. Invasive. It wasn’t like hearing. It was like being invaded.

Codex initializing. Host: Jace Kade. Status: Viable. Mission: Survive the Night.

The words pierced his mind like a scalpel. He screamed, knees dragging against the dirty tiles. Blue light bled from the walls, forming symbols—circuits, maybe, or veins. He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

Threat detected: 200 meters. Hostile entities: 3. Objective: Escape or eliminate.

The scream outside came fast and high—like metal being torn in half. He didn’t need to look. He knew the sound. Shattered.

His rifle came up automatically. His mind couldn’t think, but his body moved. The HUD pulsed with new data, alien and wrong. Three red dots closing in. Fast.

Jace peeked over the counter and saw them. Shattered.

Once-human things that now moved like nightmares: too many teeth, bones that bent wrong, eyes gone. One carried a severed arm like a prize.

He swallowed down the fear.

“Survive the night,” he whispered bitterly. “Right. No pressure.”

Then the Codex whispered again.

Skill unlocked: Reflex Overclock. Duration: 30 seconds. Cost: Neural strain.

No time to question. He moved—too fast, unnaturally fast—as the world slowed to a crawl. He sprinted. Everything blurred, but the world’s colors felt sharper, like someone had turned up the contrast on his life.

A claw lashed out from the dark.

He ducked. Fired. The pulse burst slammed into the creature’s chest. Black blood sprayed. The thing staggered but didn’t fall.

Charge: 4%.

Jace dove through the pharmacy’s side exit, slammed the rusted door behind him, and jammed his multi-tool into the latch. The door held. Barely.

The alley outside was a maze of fog and steel.

Objective updated: Reach extraction point. 1.2 kilometers north. Reward: Codex Tier 1 Access.

A map overlaid his vision, glowing waypoints pointing north.

He wanted to curse. Scream. Demand answers from the thing in his head. But behind him, the door groaned.

No time.

He ran.

The reflex boost faded. The pain hit like a crash—his brain grinding against its limits. The world tilted as he stumbled into an old plaza. The square was unrecognizable: bones, ash, broken statues. Nesting grounds for the Shattered.

A figure moved through the mist ahead.

Jace froze. A person?

“Who’s there?” he called.

The woman stepped forward. Black hair tied back. Scav-suit patched and frayed. She looked about his age, maybe younger. Eyes sharp, cautious.

“Jace Kade?”

He blinked. “Do I know you?”

“Elara. Bunker-17. I was sent to pull your ass out of the fire.”

She glanced at the fog, then back at him. “You hear that hum? It’s not a storm. It’s them. Move or die.”

New contact: Elara Voss. Status: Ally. Caution advised.

He kept the rifle lowered—but not too low. Nobody survived out here by trusting anyone.

“Lead the way.”

She darted toward a collapsed overpass. Jace followed, but the hum clawed at his mind. It wasn’t just noise anymore—it was writing something inside him. Rewiring.

His vision blurred.

Host neural integrity: 92%. Signal interference increasing.

“Elara,” he gasped.

She sliced through a barricade with her plasma cutter. “Keep up! Or you’ll end up like them!” She gestured toward a half-melted pile of bones—human and Shattered, fused.

The Codex pulsed again.

Anomaly detected. Host memory accessed.

A flash. Lena’s face. Her scream. Her hand slipping from his in fire and ruin.

“You left me!” she cried.

His throat closed.

“No,” he whispered. “I tried—I didn’t—” But his body remembered what his mind wanted to forget.

Elara grabbed his arm. “Move!”

Then the sky pulsed.

Above them, the nanite fog lit up green, lightning crashing as the Signal Spire appeared—no longer dormant.

Mission critical: Survive the Night. Secondary objective: Locate Signal Spire. Failure: Termination.

His blood went cold.

“Termination?” he rasped. “You mean me? The bunker?”

Elara’s comm buzzed.

Then a voice. One that didn’t belong in this nightmare. One he’d buried.

“Jace.”

His legs faltered.

Lena.

The Codex screamed inside his skull.

Warning: Hostile Codex-bearer detected.

The storm burst open. Lightning tore through the fog.

“RUN!” Elara screamed.

But Jace stood frozen, heart shattering.

Lena was alive.

After ten years, she was alive. And somehow… so was the Signal that ended the world.

The Codex whispered, voice colder now:

The Test begins. Only one survives.

—