Prime stood in the center of the room, swaying slightly. Black fluid dripped from the burns on its chest. Not blood. Something thicker. Darker. It mixed with the red filaments and ran down its stomach in thin streams.
Eli stared at it. His mouth opened, closed, opened again.
"You're syncing faster near him," he said. His voice was a wet rasp. "The filaments. They're spreading."
I looked down at my chest. The red lines had reached my collarbone. When had that happened?
Behind us, the bulkhead vibrated. A heavy, rhythmic pounding. The Custodian. It wasn't trying to break through. It was trying to solve a problem. Each impact was measured. Precise. Machine patience.
I tried to flex my right hand. The fingers moved, but I couldn't feel them. Couldn't feel the air, the fabric of my pants, the cold. They just existed.
The smell was everywhere. Antiseptic and burned ceramic. It was in my clothes now. In my hair. In my lungs.
Prime watched me. Its pale eyes were calm. Empty.
"You're accelerating," it said.
"I noticed."
"It will kill you. Or complete you. Depends on what you choose."
The pounding continued. Steady. Unstoppable.
The chamber was small. Maybe ten meters across. Old maintenance equipment lined the walls. A single terminal glowed in the corner. And against the far wall, a trail.
I saw it when my eyes adjusted. A snapped restraint cable, its ends frayed where something had pulled until it broke. A sensor node on the wall, its light dead, its casing cracked. A maintenance hatch, its manual override lever snapped off, the door jammed open with a piece of broken conduit.
Prime didn't just survive down here. It cleared a route.
"You did this," I said. "Leading the Custodian. You weren't running. You were pathfinding."
Prime didn't answer. It didn't need to.
Marcus moved to the terminal. His eyes scanned the room, the trail, Prime, me. He was calculating. Asset or risk.
The woman stood by the sealed bulkhead, weapon raised, listening to the pounding. "That thing is going to get through eventually."
The Rival knelt by the snapped cable. Studied it. "This wasn't done by a machine. Too much force. Too direct." He looked at Prime. "You're strong."
Prime looked back. Said nothing.
Eli leaned against the wall, struggling to breathe. His fingers twitched randomly. His pupils kept unfocusing, then snapping back. A tremor ran through his legs. The black capillaries had reached his eyes, spiderwebbing across the whites. His breath was starting to foam at the corners of his mouth.
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He was dying. Right here. Right now.
"You're the template," he whispered. "The first one. The one they built the others from."
Prime nodded. Once.
"Why are you helping us?"
Prime's pale eyes moved to me. "Because he's the only one who can end it."
"End what?"
"The Incident." Prime's voice was flat. "Kaelen is going to run the test again. Sector 7-C. He needs a host. He needs a Deviation. He needs us."
The pounding stopped.
Silence. Three seconds. Five.
Then the lights changed. The emergency red shifted to a strobing, clinical white. The terminal screen flickered.
[TEMPLATE RETRIEVAL PROTOCOL: ACTIVE]
[AUTHORIZATION: VANCE, KAELEN]
[DIRECTIVE: CAPTURE OMEGA-NULL HOSTS. NON-LETHAL FORCE AUTHORIZED. ALL FACILITY SYSTEMS PRIORITIZE RETRIEVAL.]
The woman cursed. Marcus checked his magazine. Fourteen rounds. The Rival stood, detonator in hand.
Eli's body jerked. A small seizure. His eyes rolled back, then focused again. He looked at me.
"The plate. Can you—"
"It's dead." I held it up. Cold. Dark. "It's just scrap now."
But my chest. The filaments. They were warm. Pulsing.
I turned to the terminal. Pressed my chest against its reader. The filaments touched the cold metal.
[BIOMETRIC SIGNATURE: VARIABLE SEVEN]
[OMEGA-NULL HOST: CONFIRMED]
[INTEGRATION LEVEL: 82%]
[LOCAL GHOST TAGS DETECTED: MULTIPLE]
[DEPLOY SIGNAL CONFUSION? Y/N]
Ghost tags. Residual traces from all the other Deviations. The pods in the vault. Their signatures were still here, imprinted on the room. Dozens of them.
I selected Yes.
[SIGNAL CONFUSION ACTIVE]
[DURATION: 45 SECONDS]
[HOST BIOMETRIC STRESS: CRITICAL]
The warmth in my chest spiked. Turned to heat. Turned to pain. My vision doubled, then tripled. A thick line of warmth ran from my nose. I didn't wipe it.
The pounding resumed. But it was different now. Slower. Confused. The Custodian's sensors were flooded. Multiple Deviations. One room. It couldn't resolve.
Forty-five seconds.
Prime moved to the jammed hatch. It looked at me.
"This way."
I looked at Marcus. He nodded.
We moved.
The crawlway behind the hatch was narrow. Dark. I crawled with my numb hand tucked against my chest, the dead plate pressing into my ribs. Behind me, I heard the others. Eli's wet, foaming breathing. The woman's steady movements. The Rival's silence. Prime's soft, even pace.
Ahead, a junction. A terminal. And a Custodian.
It was smaller than the others. Different model. Its sensor head rotated toward me, paused, then swept left, then right, then back.
[AMBIGUOUS TAG SIGNATURE]
[MULTIPLE SOURCES DETECTED]
[RECALCULATING...]
I pressed my chest against the wall, pressed the filaments to the metal. The Custodian's head spun faster. A blur of white composite. Too many Critical Priority tags. All screaming for containment at once.
It wasn't confused. It was stuck. System-locked by a designed conflict it couldn't resolve.
We slipped past.
The next chamber was larger. Warmer. A maintenance hub, with terminals lining the walls. A map of the Archive glowed on the main screen.
Marcus studied it. "We're here." He pointed. "Foundation level. Below the Archive. Above the relay core."
Eli collapsed. The woman caught him, lowered him to the floor. His eyes were half-closed. The foam at his mouth was pink now. Blood.
"The core," he whispered. "If we could... if we could overload it..."
"You'd kill us all," the woman said.
"Would end the Incident."
Silence.
Prime stood by the map. Its eyes tracked the corridors, the vaults, the exits.
"There's a way out," it said. "Through the lower maintenance shafts. They lead to the surface. To the compliance node."
"Kaelen's people are there," I said.
"Yes."
"So it's a trap."
Prime looked at me. Its pale eyes held something I couldn't read.
"Everything is a trap. The question is which trap you choose."
It turned back to the map. Pointed to a different route.
"This one leads to the relay core. To your people's position. To Kaelen's test site."
I looked at the map. Two paths. One to the surface. One to Marcus's team. One to escape. One to fight.
Eli coughed. Blood sprayed across the floor.
Prime spoke again. Its voice was quiet. Clinical.
"If you want to live, you don't stabilize. You overwrite."
I looked at Eli. At the blood. At the dying.
The lights flickered. The terminal screen updated.
[OMEGA-NULL DEPLOYMENT WINDOW: 00:59:12]
Ask. The archive might answer back.
What to Expect:
- Slow-burn, sci-fi mystery
- Brothers on opposite sides
- Conspiracy that spans generations
- Character-driven plot
- Multi-POV cast
- Physics based powers
- Optional meta layers
- Emotional gut punches & sarcasm
Start now with these artifacts.
[Lev’s Note]: I didn’t go looking for trouble, but the universe disagreed with me. Twice.
And so did my sister. She deliberately ignored my good sense, ran headlong into the WRONG questions, and found the answers someone had buried for centuries:
Enigma.
The shadow behind every missing person, burned record, and altered history.
The reason no one leaves this planet.
That document above? Evidence of Enigma. The thing that put us on way too many hit lists.
The tabloid next to it? Evidence the universe hates me. A failure of journalism. The thing that makes me WAY too easy to find.
If you want to understand how I—a completely ordinary public figure who should not be in tabloids—ended up connected to alien archaeology…
Start solving the mystery for yourself.