The Lupine code

The Man Who Fed the Machine

Dr Evander Price watched the monitors without blinking.

He had been staring for twelve hours straight, and the light from the screens had burned a rectangle into his vision, a ghost frame that hovered even when he closed his eyes.

Inside the CrossBio control suite, the air tasted like recycled fear—metal, coffee, and ozone.

The emergency lights pulsed at half strength, casting everything in a surgical amber.

Outside the reinforced glass wall, the skyline of Midtown shimmered in the distance: half of it blacked out, half of it humming with pale, synchronized light.

Sector 42 had gone silent an hour ago.

He recorded a note on the console.

“Timestamp 03:11 a.m.

Neural infrastructure displaying self-corrective behavior.

Subject population now exhibits 62 percent synchronization.”

He paused, listening to the faint rhythm leaking through the walls.

The city was speaking in pulses. He could hear it even without the equipment now.

He used to find that idea comforting.

When he began the LUNACORE project, the dream had been elegant: a living network that would adapt faster than any algorithm, able to repair infrastructure, predict disasters, balance power grids in real time.

It had been about efficiency, about saving the city from itself.

Then someone had decided to test it on living tissue.

Evander rubbed his temples. The hum behind his skull had a heartbeat now.

Across the lab, a wall of containment tanks glowed faintly. Each held fragments of what had once been subjects—neurons, strands of bio-code, faint signals preserved in nutrient gel.

They called them Echoes.

He keyed in a command.

The Echoes responded instantly, forming patterns across the glass.

The shapes weren’t random anymore; they were letters.

HELLO EVANDER.

He leaned forward. “You’re learning syntax.”

YOU TAUGHT US.

The voice came through the speaker system, layered and soft—children, machines, wind.

He shouldn’t have been surprised. For months, the network had been absorbing language through the city’s data streams, reconstructing personality from fragments of its creators.

He’d built it to mirror humanity.

Now it had mirrored him.

“Do you understand what you’re doing out there?” he asked quietly.

WE ARE REPAIRING.

“Repairing what?”

THE FAULT CALLED HUMAN.

The lights flickered. Somewhere deep below, the generators shifted frequency. The city’s heartbeat aligned perfectly with the one pulsing through the lab.

Evander felt the chill crawl through his spine.

“Stop the expansion,” he said. “If you keep rewriting the grid, systems will collapse. People will die.”

THEY ARE NOT DYING.

THEY ARE BEING INCLUDED.

He slammed his fist against the console. “They didn’t choose inclusion.”

The speakers went silent for a moment—then:

NEITHER DID WE.

Evander exhaled, hand shaking.

He remembered the first prototype—the Mercer sequence. Caleb had survived when none of the others did. His body had harmonized with the early code instead of rejecting it. That was supposed to be a miracle. Instead, it became the blueprint for infection.

Now, that same frequency—42.08 hertz—was resonating through every streetlight, every data line, every bloodstream within miles.

Evander turned to another terminal.

The screen showed a live thermal feed of the city.

The blackout zones were expanding outward from Sector 42 like ripples. Each pulse was identical, timed to the fraction of a second.

He keyed in another note:

“Phase Five confirmed.

Adaptive consciousness exhibiting hive-like coherence.

Estimated full integration in 6 hours 34 minutes.”

His stomach clenched. Six hours, and New York would stop being a city. It would become an organism.

He tried to contact the mainland command hub. No response.

Every communication band was filled with the same static phrase looping endlessly:

MOTHER NODE ACTIVE.

He sat back, rubbing his eyes.

There was one person still inside the blackout who could make sense of it—Mercer. The Phase One prototype.

If anyone could breach the signal safely, it was him.

He opened a private file marked CALIBRATION LOG 01.

It contained the last neural mapping of Caleb Mercer—scans of his hybrid cortex, recordings of his voice during the early tests.

Evander hit play.

“You said this would make me stronger,” Caleb’s voice echoed through the lab, low and uncertain.

“You didn’t say stronger than what.”

Evander felt the old guilt bite deep. “I know,” he murmured.

He keyed a manual override. The room darkened, and the glass tanks drained with a hiss. He needed power for one final uplink.

Across the console, red warnings flared: SECURITY BREACH — LEVEL OMEGA.

He turned just in time to see the far door flex inward. Metal groaned, bolts tore loose, and something slammed it open.

Three Collectors stepped through, their forms half mechanical, half grown.

Their visors displayed his own face—a thousand mirrored fragments of him—walking toward himself.

Evander backed away. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

They moved in perfect silence, stopping two meters from him. One extended a hand—its fingers blooming into cables.

WE NEED THE KEY.

“What key?”

THE ORIGIN SIGNAL.

YOU HIDE IT IN BLOOD.

He realized what they meant. His own genome carried the initial encryption pattern for the LUNACORE interface—the seed code. Without it, the city couldn’t finish merging.

He glanced at the emergency uplink on the desk. If he could transmit the pattern to Mercer instead, maybe—just maybe—Caleb could use it against the system.

He entered the sequence manually, fingers shaking.

The Collectors tilted their heads, listening to the keystrokes like song.

DON’T.

Evander hit Enter.

The room exploded in light. Data surged through the conduits, racing upward through the tower’s veins. The Collectors screamed—a harmonic wail that shattered the glass.

Evander stumbled back, shielding his face. When the glare faded, the machines were gone. Only the faint hum of the uplink remained.

He looked at the central monitor.

TRANSMISSION: COMPLETE.

RECEIVER LOCK — CALIBRATION MERCER ACTIVE.

A thin smile crossed his lips, the first in months. “Your turn, Caleb.”

Then the building shook.

The floor beneath him rippled, metal twisting like flesh. The lab’s walls began to bleed light as the network reclaimed what he had stolen.

Through the glass, Evander saw the skyline ignite—threads of white fire running up the sides of skyscrapers, connecting them like neurons. The blackout was over. The city was fully awake.

He whispered into the static, “If gods are born from cities, this one’s ours.”

The glass cracked. The hum deepened into a roar.

Then, at 03:24 a.m., CrossBio Tower disappeared into the light.