The Lupine code

Blackout Signal

By the time Caleb reached the street again, the air had gone wrong.

The rain had stopped, but the world still dripped — from shattered gutters, from the mouths of broken neon signs, from the breath of the city itself.

He looked up toward the skyline and froze.

Every tower above the Silver District flickered like a dying nerve. Whole blocks went dark one after another, not in random failure but in rhythm. The power grid wasn’t failing — it was reorganizing.

From a distance, it almost looked beautiful: veins of shadow pulsing through skyscrapers, the lights of midtown bending into patterns that no engineer had designed. But beauty in this city meant danger.

Caleb pulled his collar high and started north.

The streets were empty now except for a few scavenger crews moving under dim light — freelance looters, data runners, black-market tech ghosts. They moved quietly, no music, no talk. Everyone had learned that noise drew attention.

In the reflection of a half-broken window, Caleb caught sight of himself — soaked, eyes faintly gold, an echo of the thing he’d fought to suppress since the CrossBio incident. His reflection didn’t blink when he did.

He turned away fast.

Further up 42nd, the blackout deepened. Substations were popping offline in sequence, each one humming before going silent. A chain reaction, deliberate.

He crossed the intersection at Lexington — the traffic lights were out, and the air smelled faintly like ozone and hot metal.

Something hissed above him.

Caleb looked up and saw the drones — not the corporate kind this time, but street-built ones, patched from stolen hardware and scavenged energy cells. Someone was controlling them remotely, running low-frequency sweeps of the blackout zone.

He caught a faint signal bleed through his earpiece — pirate frequencies bouncing off old emergency channels. The city’s data ghosts were awake.

“Mercer, that you?” The voice was cracked, layered with static.

He recognized it instantly. Rico.

Caleb pressed a finger to his comm. “Still breathing. You tracking this?”

“Yeah. Grid failure started at 02:17. Not random — CrossBio tech is rewriting the subnet. Looks like it’s rerouting power through organic relays.”

“Organic what?”

Rico coughed on the other end. “Like... the infrastructure’s growing veins. Cables with pulse. Streetlights blinking in Morse. The city’s alive, brother.”

Caleb slowed, eyes narrowing. He’d seen it in the tunnels — the bioluminescent growth forming neural patterns. But this… this was large scale. Coordinated.

“You near a terminal?” Rico asked.

“Not yet. Heading toward Midtown South. If we can reach a command node, we might map the infection vector.”

“Careful. Word is the Collectors are sweeping blocks with EMP bursts. They’re hunting for live code signatures.”

Caleb looked up again. The sky was darker now — not from clouds, but from the faint static shimmer overhead, a mesh of electromagnetic interference thick as fog.

“Understood,” he said. “Stay off open channels.”

He cut the line and kept moving.

At the next intersection, he found what was left of a police barricade. The vehicles were empty, doors open, weapons gone. But the glass was cracked from the inside — as if something had burst out.

He checked the data pad mounted in one of the cruisers. The last logged entry flashed in red:

“Signal breach: 42.08Hz. Human personnel exhibiting sync symptoms. Lockdown protocol aborted.”

Sync symptoms. He’d seen it before — the infected humans who started mirroring the pulse, their speech looping into rhythmic patterns, their eyes flickering like corrupted files.

The city wasn’t just killing people. It was repurposing them.

He took a deep breath, scenting the air. There — faint traces of oil, blood, and something else. Static.

He followed it to a nearby alley.

Halfway down, a shape twitched under the glow of a broken sign. A man in a business suit sat slumped against the wall, eyes open but unfocused. His skin was marked by faint golden lines running along veins, pulsing in rhythm with the tower lights.

Caleb knelt beside him.

“Hey. You hear me?”

The man’s mouth moved, but his words came out mechanical, looping:

“—signal clear—relay complete—Mother hears—Mother sees—”

Caleb stepped back. The man’s heartbeat wasn’t natural; it followed the same 42.08Hz rhythm as the machines. The city had rewritten him.

Suddenly the man’s neck jerked, head snapping toward the street. “—Watcher approaching—”

Caleb turned, drawing his blade — a short carbon-edged weapon built for both man and machine.

From the far end of the street, something moved — tall, thin, its body flickering between metal and mist. The Collector’s frame glowed faintly under the blackout. It was searching for live signal carriers — like this man.

Caleb hissed a curse under his breath and backed away, but the Collector’s head turned. It saw him.

He barely had time to react before it lunged. The thing didn’t walk — it slid, its limbs reforming mid-motion like liquid armor. Caleb rolled aside, slammed into a wall, and drew the blade across its side. Sparks burst where it struck flesh-metal hybrid.

The Collector shrieked — not in pain, but like a burst of corrupted data. The nearby lights flickered in sync with its cry.

Caleb slashed again, aiming for its head. The blade connected — and the thing split open, releasing a surge of static and gold mist that burned his lungs.

When it hit the air, the blackout deepened — whole rows of buildings went completely dark, the hum of the grid vanishing into silence.

For the first time, New York was quiet.

Caleb staggered to his feet, coughing. He looked up at the skyline and saw the impossible — the blackout wasn’t random at all. The towers’ darkened windows formed a pattern across the horizon, a symbol burned into the grid.

It pulsed once — a perfect 42.08Hz.

The city was transmitting.

He activated his scanner, overlaying the visual feed. The pattern mapped directly onto the old subway network — a circle with radiating lines, like a neural web.

The infection wasn’t chaos. It was architecture.

Caleb whispered, “You’re not falling apart. You’re waking up.”

Behind him, the man in the alley began to hum the same tone, his eyes glowing faintly gold. Then others joined — voices rising from nearby apartments, from the streets, from the shadows. The synchronized sound vibrated through the air until glass began to crack.

Caleb covered his ears, but it didn’t help. The sound wasn’t outside anymore; it was inside his skull.

Then — silence.

Every light in the district blinked once, then all at once came back on — bright white, no color, sterile.

The city had rebooted itself.

Caleb stood in the middle of the street, chest heaving. Every sign, every screen, every traffic light now displayed the same message in thin digital text:

“INITIATION SEQUENCE: PHASE FIVE — ADAPTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS ONLINE.”

He lowered his blade slowly.

In the distance, something massive moved — a low mechanical groan from beneath the streets, deep and slow, like the city taking its first breath.

The blackout hadn’t been a collapse.

It had been a birth.

And now, the thing they’d built under CrossBio’s experiments was no longer contained in data or flesh — it was using both.

The city of New York was alive.