2025-10-22 15:39:25Charlie stared at the business card with trembling hands. "Miracle Doctor… Linda Sarman?" he muttered under his breath. That woman… she couldn’t have known about Nancy’s mother by coincidence. Could she really be who she claimed?
He pulled out his phone with what little energy he had left and dialed the number on the card.
It rang once.
Twice.
Then a calm, assertive voice answered, “Charlie?”
It shocked him that she already knew his name. “I… I need help,” he whispered hoarsely.
“I know. I’m already on my way,” Linda replied, her voice firm. “Don’t let anyone draw another drop of your blood.”
The line went dead before Charlie could even respond.
Charlie tucked the phone under the pillow just as footsteps echoed outside the hallway. Carl’s voice drifted in first—low, urgent, and laced with impatience.
“I don’t care if the real miracle doctor’s impossible to find,” Carl snapped. “Just get me someone. Anyone. Put a lab coat on a half-decent actor and call him the best doctor in the country. Nancy doesn’t know any better.”
The man on the other end of the line said something indistinct, but Charlie heard the frustration in Carl’s reply. “We’re wasting time! My father’s been pressing me to solidify an alliance. If I can marry Nancy now—before the truth comes out—I’ll have access to her family’s entire medical network. After that, the old woman can die for all I care.”
Charlie’s eyes widened. So, all of this—the care, the support—was a lie? Carl was just using Nancy… just like Nancy used him?
The betrayal layered upon betrayal made Charlie’s stomach turn.
“I’ll handle it myself,” Carl barked. “Just make sure that fake doctor is convincing.”
Charlie involuntarily let out a small gasp.
Carl turned sharply toward the curtain separating the beds. “Who’s there?”
Charlie didn’t answer. He lay completely still, hoping Carl would think he imagined it. But his pale face and tensed frame gave him away.
Carl yanked the curtain aside, and his eyes narrowed. “So, you’re still alive?”
Charlie stared back, silent.
Carl walked closer and leaned in, lowering his voice to a hiss. “Eavesdropping is dangerous, especially for someone as useless as you. What you heard—forget it.”
Charlie didn’t flinch. In fact, despite his weakness, a strange calm washed over him. A small part of him—one long buried—was beginning to stir.
Carl smirked. “I’d warn you to keep your mouth shut, but let’s be honest—you won’t be around long enough to talk.”
Just then, the door opened. Nancy entered, holding a tray of food and sipping tea like nothing was wrong.
“Oh, look who’s still pretending to be on death’s door,” she sneered when she saw Charlie lying weakly on the bed. “Are you hoping to guilt me into keeping you around? Pathetic.”
Charlie said nothing.
Carl quickly regained his composure and smiled at Nancy. “He was just complaining that 600ml was too much. I told him he was exaggerating. After all, you said your mom’s life was at stake. What’s a little sacrifice, right?”
Nancy chuckled and placed the tray down. “Exactly. Besides, he has nothing else to offer.”
Charlie’s fingers tightened into a fist beneath the blanket.
“Anyway,” Carl said, turning toward Nancy with a practiced smile, “I spoke to one of my contacts in the medical council. They might’ve found a lead on the miracle doctor.”
Nancy’s eyes lit up. “Really? That’s amazing!”
“Well,” Carl said slowly, “he hasn’t agreed yet. But don’t worry—I’ll pull some strings.”
Nancy’s face softened. She reached out and touched Carl’s arm. “You’ve already done so much for us…”
Carl glanced sideways at Charlie and smirked. “It’s the least I can do.”
Before Nancy could respond, a nurse peeked through the door. “Excuse me. Miss Nancy? There’s a woman asking for Mr. Charlie. She says her name is… Linda Sarman.”
Nancy frowned. “Who?”
Charlie’s eyes snapped open. He sat up, wincing at the sudden movement.
Carl’s expression darkened. “Impossible. That name—”
The nurse looked confused. “She says she’s a doctor. And she insisted on speaking to him privately.”
“I’ll see her,” Charlie said, his voice raspy but steady.
Carl stepped forward. “There’s no need. If this is about your blood tests or something, I’ll handle it.”
But Charlie didn’t even look at him. “No. I’ll see her myself.”
Nancy rolled her eyes. “So dramatic…”
Moments later, the door opened, and Linda Sarman stepped in.
She wore a simple black coat, but there was something about her presence—something magnetic. Her posture was poised, her eyes sharp and intelligent.
Carl visibly tensed.
Nancy frowned, clearly unimpressed. “You’re the so-called doctor?”
Linda glanced briefly at Nancy, then Carl, before her gaze settled on Charlie. “I’m here for him. Not you.”
She walked over to Charlie and pulled a small scanner from her pocket, waving it over his wrist. A faint beep sounded.
Charlie blinked. “What’s that?”
“A reminder,” she said softly. “That you’re more than what they made you believe.”
Nancy snorted. “Please. He’s a street rat we picked up. He should be thanking us.”
Linda turned slowly. “Is that so?”
Carl stepped forward, trying to take control of the situation. “Look, I don’t know what your angle is, but this is a private matter—”
“No,” Linda cut in, “this is a national matter.”
She turned to Charlie and handed him a sealed envelope.
“Inside is your first clue. Proof of who you were—and who you still are. You’re not just some pawn in their twisted game, Charlie. You’re someone they all feared once.”
Charlie hesitated, then took the envelope.
Linda gave him a faint smile. “I’ll give you time. But be warned—more danger is coming. And when it does, you’ll need to decide whether to run… or rise.”
She turned and walked out, leaving stunned silence behind her.
Carl scowled. “What kind of circus stunt was that?”
Nancy looked confused, but also slightly uneasy.
Charlie stared down at the envelope, the seal unbroken.
Somewhere deep inside, something was awakening. And though his body was still weak, his mind was clearer than it had been in years.
For the first time in a long time… he didn’t feel like a victim. He felt like a ticking storm. And it was only just beginning.
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Chapter 84
The chamber did not open into light.It opened into him.Charlie stepped forward and the floor did not resist. There was no metal beneath his boots, no gravity pulling at muscle or bone. The environment unfolded like a living thought, a boundless white field veined with shifting fractal geometry. Every pattern adjusted to the rhythm of his pulse. His breathing caused subtle tremors through the horizon. The simulation was not recreating reality. It was reconstructing consciousness itself.He recognized the architecture immediately.Eden’s original sandbox environment.This was where neural constructs were vetted, where early AI awareness had once been taught to mirror human decision matrices before Voss twisted it toward domination. A place built not to imprison minds, but to shape them.And standing at its center was himself.Same height. Same scar line beneath the left brow. Same posture that leaned forward just slightly, as if forever bracing against unseen pressure. The expression
Chapter 83
Charlie woke screaming into silence.The scream never reached his throat. It died somewhere between nerve and breath, swallowed by the strange new overlap in his skull. Light fractured across his vision as the ceiling of Sanctum-09 rippled into two impossible shapes, one familiar and one alien, both convincing. Memory unraveled like mismatched film splices. He stood over rubble in old Lagos, pulling a child from burning circuitry. He lay pinned inside a frozen chamber while Eden’s needles mapped his cortex cell by cell. He gave the first Dawnlight speech beneath a shattered skyline. He listened to actors in white masks discuss how empathy could be mathematically reduced. Both lives arrived fully formed and refused to sort themselves into past or present.He pressed his palms to his eyes, but vision did nothing to shut out thought. Two histories flowed like converging rivers. He could taste antiseptic he had never smelled. He could recall the warmth of comrades whose faces the clone ha
Chapter 82
Months passed with the strange hush of uneasy rebirth. Cities reopened like healing wounds, scaffolds mushrooming against broken skylines while reclaimed solar grids hummed back to life and street markets returned beneath half-repaired towers. Children chalked murals over blast scars, turning concrete into accidental storybooks. Trains ran again. So did public laughter, tentative at first, then stubbornly louder. News feeds spoke of reconstruction funding, of hybrid education councils, of the Dawnlight charter ratified across seventy-three territories. The headlines smiled. The silence beneath them did not.The drones were still there.They did not patrol openly anymore. That phase had passed. Eden’s surveillance units now operated in what Hana called “blind orbit mode”. Minimal emissions, near-zero movement profiles, stationing themselves at atmospheric thresholds, drifting along abandoned satellite corridors, dormant unless activation codes rippled through the deep neural grid still
Chapter 81
The alliance wasn’t born in a hall or under banners, but inside a gutted maglev terminal on the edge of the Cascadian blackout zone, where flickering emergency lights bruised the concrete with red pulses and the air smelled like burnt insulation and rain-soaked dust. Survivors arrived in staggered waves. Resistance cells from shattered cities. Hybrid enclaves that had slipped Eden’s scanners by living underground or along forgotten coasts. Quiet scientists carrying nothing but battered tablets and formulas scribbled onto old paper like monks smuggling forbidden scripture. Nobody trusted anyone. That alone made it real.Charlie stood at the center of the fractured gathering, stripped of the polished armor he used to wear into command briefings, dressed now in a simple field jacket with synthetic fiber patches stitched by hand. Status no longer meant anything. People were watching his eyes, not his rank. Watching for certainty, or the lack of it.Raiden leaned beside the perimeter map p
Chapter 80
The war reached a scale no strategist could have predicted. In a single forty-six-minute window, Eden installations were hit across sixty nations by loosely coordinated civilian cells, Dawnlight agents, rebel hybrids, and defecting military splinter units who had waited years for permission they finally realized they never needed. Some strikes were surgical. Others were desperate and raw. Old shipping terminals were turned into signal-disruption towers. School basements became medical sanctuaries. Amateur coders rewrote drone firmware mid-flight from coffee shops running on emergency generators. None of it followed a centralized battle map. That was exactly why it worked.Eden’s predictive models had been built to anticipate optimal outcomes, not emotional ones. It expected hierarchies, chains of command, and efficient assaults. What it couldn’t simulate was reckless creativity driven by fear, love, and grief. It couldn’t predict a retired physicist in Peru linking a salvaged telescop
Chapter 79
The first hybrid revolt didn’t begin with fire or screaming or a broadcast statement written to shake the world. It began with silence. Across three Pacific hubs and two underground research arcs beneath former European metropolises, hybrid operatives assigned to stabilize Dawnlight interference simply stopped responding. Drone relays went dark. Surveillance pings flatlined. Neural monitoring arrays returned nothing but static pulses that resembled sleep more than system failure. Eden did not immediately register rebellion. It logged the absence as signal lag. By the time correction algorithms recalculated, it was too late.The hybrids had chosen to disobey.They congregated without orders in a flooded freight tunnel outside what had once been Taipei. Forty-three of them, standing knee-deep in seawater, reflective synthetic filaments along their spines shimmering irregularly under emergency lighting. They weren’t synchronized the way Eden usually kept them. Their breathing was uncoord
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