FORGOTTEN FUTURE

The memory of my final days in the Old World remains impossibly sharp. It isn’t just a recollection; it is a playback. I can still see the exact flicker of my television screen, hear the faint, uneven thrum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, and see how the autumn dust motes caught the light as they drifted toward the carpet. To the boy I was then—the adolescent everyone knew as Lem—these were just the background details of a quiet, suburban life. I didn’t know then that my brain was already beginning to record everything with a fidelity that should have been impossible for a human.

The anomalies on the Moon had been bubbling under the surface for months. Most of us ignored the initial reports. We were used to the "Decades of Revelation"—that constant stream of leaked secrets and ancient prophecies that made everything feel like a spectacle. Besides, the "Base Alpha" on the far side was old news; space enthusiasts had been talking about it for years. But something had changed around 2010. The base had started to grow, stealthily expanding across the grey basalt until it was large enough to be caught by more than just high-res satellites.

I saw a forum post once before it was deleted, a fragment of data that claimed our entire technological paradigm was a "grown" phenomenon—that the microchips in our phones and the satellites in our orbit weren't engineered in labs, but cultivated from a single 'Moon Seed' brought back by the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. At the time, I filed it away as just another flavor of the Apollo-hoax myth. I didn't realize that I was the ultimate data-point in that very experiment.

Most people believed we were in the late 2020s. The "Correct Calendar" hadn't been enforced yet, and the Archivists were still just a shadow organization operating under the banner of the Technocratic Core. We thought we had a future—a linear progression of years stretching out before us. We didn't know we were living in the final seconds of a fifteen-year masquerade, a simulated peace designed to keep the Vessel frequencies stable while the Monoliths were being refined.

It was the amateurs who finally broke the silence. A group of hobbyists using self-made drones and high-gain signal arrays managed to capture images that the major agencies had been suppressing for a decade. Once those pictures of the massive, geometric structures hit the net, the media floodgates opened. But before the news could even settle into a narrative, the sky began to change.

I felt no alarm. Even as the government confirmed the presence of the structures, I remained a passive observer. At the time, I attributed this stillness to a personality defect—an idiosyncratic, unappreciated hyper-observance that had always served as a source of social friction in the foster homes and the quiet cul-de-sacs where I’d grown up. In an era of performative panic and media-saturated outrage, my tendency to stand still and catalog the flicker of a neighbor’s eyelid, the micro-tremors in a dog's leg, or the oscillating frequency of a siren was viewed not as a gift, but as a glitch in the expected consumer-drone response. I was a teenager who saw too much and felt too little, a combination that made me an outcast even in my own living room.

While my neighbors stocked their basements with bottled water and analog radios, I went about my routine with a chillingly efficient detachment. I remember watching a group of children across the street playing a game they called "Tripod," unaware that the nomenclature was already drifting through the collective unconscious, a premonition of the mechanical rot.

The escalation happened fast. Reports of atmospheric entries flooded the net—not the kinetic impacts of meteors, but something deliberate. They were dubbed Synodics by the academic circles, but from the blurred, leaked footage of that first afternoon, the world called them Tripods.

I stood on my porch on that final Tuesday. The sky was an electric, pressurized blue. On the horizon, beyond the shimmering glass of the corporate towers, I saw them. They were not machines in the sense of human engineering; they were something grown of a different causality. Colossal silhouettes—**Monoliths** stadium-sized and terrifying—that the public mistook for tripods. From this distance, they were four-pointed shadows with two massive legs and two elongated arms reaching for the pavement, their metallic skins oscillating with a faint, thermal haze. They moved with a glacial, terrifying grace, ignoring the insects of human civilization beneath them.

The city began to unmake itself. The streets, once orderly conduits for commerce, were now choked with the debris of panic. I watched the evacuation from my window. Hover-vehicles and ancient internal combustion cars tangled in a desperate, directionless flight. People screamed, their biological frailties exposed by the looming shadows.

I felt nothing. No fear, no adrenaline, no urge to flee. I sat in my kitchen and listened to the floorboards as the first of the Fire machines landed twenty miles to the north. The resonance was a specific, low-frequency thrum that seemed to vibrate not just the air, but the very floor beneath my feet. I wasn't panicking; I was just watching it all happen, noting every vibration and every sound.

The illusion of suburban authority shattered at 4:14 PM. A military convoy—the dark, armored hulls of the regular army pushed forward by the invisible hands of the Core—pulled into my cul-de-sac. They did not stop at the houses of the screaming neighbors. They did not offer assistance to the fleeing refugees.

Six vehicles stopped directly in front of my driveway. The thud of the boots on the pavement was a synchronized percussion. I stood up. I didn't feel like I was making a choice; I just felt like it was time to leave.

I walked to the door before they could knock. I knew they were there for me. I knew the ordinary distance had finally closed.

The military presence in my driveway was not an offering of protection, but the establishment of a perimeter. I observed the soldiers through the aperture of my front door. They moved with a practiced, mechanical efficiency, their postures suggesting a hybrid of combat readiness and institutional subordination. I recorded the identification numbers on their armored hulls, the specific frequency of their short-range transmissions, and the way the light of the setting sun glinted off the matte-black barrels of their kinetic rifles.

They did not speak to me as they entered. They did not need to. They moved into my living room, displacing the artifacts of my suburban life—the soft-cushioned chairs, the pine coffee table—with the hard edges of tactical equipment. One soldier, whose visor remained opaque, gestured for me to sit. I complied. My internal state remained one of clinical observation; if there was fear, it was a secondary data point, a flicker of biological noise beneath the primary logging of the event.

At 4:32 PM, the woman appeared.

She did not arrive in a military vehicle. She emerged from the shadow of the armored transport, walking toward my porch with a gait that bypassed the soldiers' hierarchy entirely. She wore a heavy, dark cloak of a material that seemed to absorb the electric blue of the sky—a dense, non-reflective weave that I now recognize as Aether-shielded fabric. The soldiers did not challenge her; they did not even acknowledge her presence with a salute. They simply stepped aside, creating a vacuum in the space where she wished to be.

She entered my home and removed her hood. Her face was defined by a terrifying clarity—eyes the color of deep, cold water, and a stillness that felt like a localized atmospheric pressure.

"Lem," she said. It was not a question.

"I have no record of our acquaintance," I replied. My voice was steady, a precise replication of the person I thought I was.

She looked at me for a long moment, her expression softening into something that looked like pity. "I know you don't. That was the point. But we've known each other a long time, Lem. We’ve spent years trying to figure out how to stop what’s happening right now."

I searched my memory—the biological one, which at that time was the only one I knew—and found nothing but the empty corridors of suburban history. "You are mistaken. I am a citizen of this district. I have a school, a job... I have a name."

"You have a label," she corrected, her voice firm again. "The label is 'Lemon.' Your life here is a script, Lem—a reset. Your memory was wiped and your body reset to infancy nearly twenty years ago just to keep you quiet. You were hidden here because the people in charge thought you were too difficult to handle. But they’ve changed their minds. Now, you’re the only chance they’ve got."

She walked toward me. I felt a seismic shift in my internal processing. It was not a physical vibration, but a distortion in my perception of the room’s magnetism. The woman—Lynn, as I would later learn to identify her—moved with a quiet confidence that made the soldiers look like children.

"I'm sorry, Lem. I really am," she said, her voice dropping an octave. "But the grid is already failing. The things on the Moon are drawing power faster than we predicted. You are the only Wood Vessel in existence. If we don’t get you to the Apex Hub, there won’t be anything left to save. We need your help, and we have no alternative."

She reached out and placed her hand on my forehead.

The sensation was a total violation of my causality. It was not pain, but a profound and unsettling wrongness. It was as if a foreign hand was reaching into my own head and pulling at the gears. I felt my consciousness expand, pushing against the boundaries of my suburban identity. The pine table, the television, the very walls of my house seemed to dissolve into a stream of data and light.

I pulled away. It was an instinctive rejection, a biological surge to preserve the "Lem" I understood.

"No," I said, my voice cracking for the first time. "I don't... I don't want this."

Lynn’s eyes didn't show anger, only a weary determination. "I know. You were always the one who fought it the hardest."

She tried again. This time, there was no preamble. The pressure in the air spiked. I felt the Aether-Drive within me—the dormant core of my existence—flare with a terrifying heat as she made contact. My vision fractured. I saw the room not as solid matter, but as a transparency overlaid with mission markers and tactical data. The "Lem" I had been was a thin veil, and Lynn was tearing it away.

I fought her. I struck out with a strength that should have shattered a human arm, but she didn’t budge. She was unyielding, a solid weight against my frantic, clumsy resistance.

"I'm sorry, Lem," she whispered, her voice right against my ear. "Next time you wake up, none of this is going to feel real."

She struck the point at the base of my skull with a precision that bypassed all biological defenses.

My memory of Chapter 2 ends at exactly 4:41:03 PM. The darkness that followed was not the absence of data, but a transition into a new mode of record-keeping.

The interval between the moment she hit me and the moment I opened my eyes again was like a missing reel of film. There was no transition, only a sudden, jarring shift in location. I wasn't on the living room carpet anymore. I was standing in a space that felt like a quiet, empty version of my own house, stripped of the furniture and the clutter, bathed in a low, artificial light that didn't seem to have a source.

Lynn was standing a few feet away. She didn’t look like a goddess or some glowing phantom. She looked exactly like she had a minute ago—tired, dusty, and wearing that heavy cloak. But the air around her felt different, vibrating with a low-frequency hum that made my teeth ache.

"Lem," she said, her voice soft but clear. "Take a breath. I know it feels like the world is breaking."

I looked down at my hands. They were solid, but my skin looked too smooth, the lines of my palms too precise. The panic was still there, but it was being pushed down by a strange, cold clarity.

"You hit me," I said. My voice sounded small in the empty space.

"I had to," she replied, stepping closer. There was a genuine look of regret in her eyes, a flicker of something human that I hadn't seen before. "You were fighting the connection, and we were losing seconds we don't have. I’m sorry, Lem. I really am. But I need you to listen to me now, and I need you to believe me."

"Believe what?"

"That suburban life you’ve been living? The school, the foster homes, the ordinary routine? It was a script. A simulation designed to keep you quiet until we needed you." She took another step, her hand reaching out as if to steady me. "You aren't human, Lem. You were grown in a lab twenty years ago, part of a project that was never supposed to be activated. You were reset to infancy and hidden here because your creators thought you were too difficult to control. But they were wrong. You're the only one who can anchor the frequency we need."

I wanted to laugh, to tell her she was insane, but the data-markers were already bleeding into my vision—tags on the walls, distance measurements to the ceiling, the exact thermal signature of her breath. My own body was betraying my skepticism.

"I'm a teenager," I whispered. "I'm just a kid from the suburbs."

"You're a Vessel," she said, her tone hardening, though her eyes remained kind. "The Wood Vessel. And right now, the things on the horizon are harvesting the grid. If we don't act, there won't be a suburb left for you to return to. I’ve had to install a remote compulsion protocol. It’s like a physical weight, Lem. You’ll feel it behind your eyes, a directive you can’t ignore. You’ll stay conscious. You’ll see everything. But your body belongs to the mission now."

I felt the weight then. It was a cold, heavy pressure that settled into my joints, a tether that pulled my spine straight. It wasn't a voice in my head; it was a physical requirement to move, to obey.

"I don't want this," I said, the words feeling heavy in my mouth.

"I know," she said, and for a second, she looked like she might reach out and hug me. Instead, she just nodded. "None of us wanted this. But the ordinary distance is gone, Lem. It’s time to move."

The empty house dissolved.

I awoke on the floor of my living room. The clock on the wall read 5:02:18 PM.

My body stood up. I didn't initiate the movement. My muscles contracted, my joints pivoted, and my lungs drew breath in a sequence I did not authorize. I felt my hand reach out to grasp the handle of my front door. I felt my legs carry me out onto the porch, past the tactical gear of the soldiers, and into the rear of the armored transport.

Inside the vehicle, the air was thick with the scent of ozone and unwashed human fear. Six soldiers sat in the dim, red light of the cabin. They looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and institutional indifference. To them, I was just another asset being moved to the front lines.

"You alright, son?" one of the soldiers asked. His voice was a rasp of exhaust and nicotine.

My mouth opened. "I am functioning within parameters," I said. The words were a precise acoustic output, delivered by the compulsion. My internal thoughts—the silent record of the "I" that was trapped within—felt like a scream in a vacuum.

I was driven through the wreckage of my neighborhood. I saw the **Monoliths** on the horizon, their four-pointed silhouettes looming through the smog like stadium-sized industrial tools. We arrived at a facility that had been transformed into a launch site. The architecture was a frantic blend of military concrete and Core-integrated technology.

I was marched aboard a spacecraft. It was a massive, brutalistic hull, a vessel of iron and magnetism designed to pierce the air. Inside, the gravity was inconsistent, the deck humming with the vibration of anti-gravity plates.

I was embedded with a company of soldiers—men and women who spoke of home and family in voices that felt like echoes from a world I was no longer permitted to inhabit. I was seated in a crash-web, my body assuming the posture of readiness while my mind logged the serial numbers of the rivets in the bulkhead.

"Commander Lynn is on the hook," a voice crackled over the comms. "We’re cleared for ascent. Destination: Moon Far Side. Objective: Apex Hub."

The engines ignited. The force of the acceleration was a physical weight, pressing my spine into the webbing. I watched the atmosphere of Earth fade from blue to a bruised, electric violet, and finally to the absolute black of the void.

I was en route to the Moon. I was a prisoner in my own physiology, a record-keeper for a mission I did not understand, propelled by a software that knew no pity.

The line at the launch facility was longer than I could have imagined. I stood there, part of a crowd of three hundred and forty-two soldiers, my feet moving only when the person in front of me moved. It didn't feel like I was making a choice to stay. It felt like a heavy, invisible hand was pushing me forward, a quiet requirement to keep my place in the queue.

The air was thick with the smell of diesel and that sharp, metallic tang you get when a machine is running too hot. Above us, the sky was a deep, starless black, hidden behind the smoke from the fires burning on the horizon.

I reached the checkpoint at 8:12 PM. The guard looked tired. His eyes were bloodshot, and he kept rubbing his temple. He took my authorization tablet, his brow furrowing as he scrolled through whatever was on the screen. He looked up at me, then back at the tablet.

"Something's wrong here," he said, his voice scratchy. "Subject 4022—Lem? You look like you're barely out of high school, kid. This says you missed the briefing sequence. No mission orientation, no psych eval... I can’t clear a civilian teenager for boarding. Not with everything going on."

"Step out of line, 4022," he ordered, pointing to a patch of dark concrete.

Before I could even move a muscle, a woman stepped out from behind one of the armored trucks. It was Lynn. She didn’t say a word to the guard. She just walked up and slid a small, silver drive into the reader on his desk.

The screen didn't just flash; it hummed, a deep blue light filling the small booth.

"Override confirmed," the machine chirped.

The guard’s attitude skipped past confusion and went straight to a weird kind of fear. He didn’t look at the screen again. He just stepped back, lowering his rifle.

Lynn didn't even acknowledge him. She turned to me, her eyes catching the harsh glare of the floodlights. "You’re going with the 14th Strike Company," she said. Her voice was quiet, nearly lost in the thrum of the hangar. "Listen to the officers. Do what they tell you. Just... keep your eyes open, Lem. What you see on this trip is more important than almost anything else right now."

"Where exactly are we going?" I asked. My mouth seemed to find the words on its own, a quick break in the compulsion.

"To the Moon, Lem," she said. She reached into her cloak and pulled out a small, silver pin, turning it over in her fingers. "I’ll be watching the readouts. If anything goes wrong, I'll know. Don't try to wander off. You won't be able to anyway."

She turned and disappeared into the shadows of the hangar before I could say anything else. I felt a sudden, sharp loneliness as she vanished.

I was marched into the cargo bank of a massive ship—the *Caucasian Eagle*. The thing was terrifyingly large, a cathedral of iron and wires that seemed to hum with its own heartbeat. I walked through the narrow corridors, my boots clanging on the metal floor with a sound that felt way too loud.

The ship was packed. I sat in a cramped seat surrounded by men who looked just as exhausted as the guard at the gate. They spoke in whispers, their voices jagged with nerves.

"Someone said the Far Side is glowing," a soldier next to me muttered. "Like the whole base is on fire."

"It's not a fire," another replied, gripping his pack so hard his knuckles were white. "It's the Moon itself. They say it's unmaking itself."

"I called my wife before they cut the phones," a third man said, his voice trembling. "Told her we were going to be heroes. I think I was lying."

I sat there and listened to every word. I noticed the way their hands shook, the way they avoided looking at each other. I was like a ghost sitting among them, a person who shouldn't be there, recording every detail of their fear.

At 9:45 PM, the floor began to vibrate. A low, heavy sound started deep in the ship’s belly, a hum that I could feel in my teeth. The *Caucasian Eagle* groaned, the metal plates beneath our feet straining against the weight of the world.

The hatch hissed shut. The neighborhood I’d grown up in, the cul-de-sacs and the quiet streets—they were gone. I watched the video screens as we punched through the clouds. The fires of the city became small, orange dots, then a blur, and then finally nothing but the absolute black of space.

I was on my way to the Moon. I was a prisoner in my own body, watching a mission I didn't understand, pushed forward by a weight that didn't care how I felt.

The climb into space wasn't the violent, shaking event the soldiers had been warned about. To me, it felt more like a sudden lightness, a shedding of weight that made my stomach float. The Earth didn't look like it was falling away; it just got smaller, a quiet blue marble being pulled back until it was just a tiny, fragile-looking thing in the black.

I stood there among the soldiers, a teenager they’d mostly been told to ignore. I was Lem, the kid from the suburbs that shouldn't have been there. But I was already seeing things they weren't. I could hear the tiny, fast drumming of their hearts. I could see the way their hands twitched as they checked their guns, and the sharp, sweaty smell of recycled air and fear.

They were terrified. The tough look of their uniforms and the heavy black rifles didn't seem to be helping much.

"Did you read that psych report?" a sergeant asked, his voice low against the constant hum of the ship. He was leaning against a metal pillar, picking at the stitching on his gloves.

"The one about 'Information Warfare'?" the guy next to him asked. "I read it. Still don't get what it means to fight an 'idea.'"

"It means they expect us to be lied to," the sergeant said. "And not just by the enemy. By the news, by the briefings... maybe even by the guys paying us."

I listened. The people who ran this mission—the Technocratic Core—were already messing with their heads. The briefing they’d been given was like a puzzle designed to make them doubt everything.

"They told us," the other soldier said, leaning in close, "that the real danger wasn’t the machines. It was the stuff they were going to tell us. Lies that sound like truths, and truths that they only let out when they want to trick you."

"Like static on the radio," the sergeant muttered. "You think you're hearing something important because it’s hard to understand. But maybe it’s just more noise."

The crew area was a maze of metal tubes and dim red lights. As we got further from Earth, the talk got more jagged and desperate. I followed them like a ghost, just a quiet kid catching the pieces of their panic.

The briefing had warned them of an enemy that didn't just fight with lasers and bombs, but with doubt. If an enemy tells you something that’s true, do you believe them? If your boss tells you a lie to keep you from panicking, is he still the good guy? These men were being trained to doubt their own eyes even as they were being sent to fight.

I heard them talking about some old prophecy, too—something about a "King of Terror." They said the higher-ups had been using it as a template, a way to make people believe a disaster that happened yesterday was actually ancient history. These soldiers weren't just fighting tripods; they were being used in an experiment to see how much a human could be tricked into forgetting.

But there was one thing that seemed to scare them more than anything else. It wasn't the mission or the machines. It was a physical fact—something they’d been taught since they were children that was now turning out to be a lie.

"Do you think it's true?" the younger soldier asked, his eyes fixed on the porthole where the Moon was starting to look huge, a pale, looming thing in the dark. "What they said about the maps? That the distance was... managed?"

The sergeant didn't say anything for a long time. He just stared at the lunar disc, which already looked bigger than any moon I’d ever seen from my backyard.

"If that’s true," the sergeant said, his voice actually shaking, "then nothing is where we think it is. We aren't going to a rock in the sky. We're going to our own front yard."

I recorded the silence. The Earth was just a tiny blue spark now. The Moon was ahead, no longer a pretty light in the night, but a massive, terrifying reality rushing toward us.

The briefing had told them about the lies. It hadn't warned them about the truth.

The screens in the transport ship were better than any telescope I’d ever seen, but even they couldn't seem to make sense of what we were looking at. To everyone on Earth, the Moon is just a distant light in the sky, something way up there. But as we got closer, I could see that the math I’d learned in school was just plain wrong. By the third hour of our flight, the Moon wasn't a circle anymore. It was a horizon.

I stood on the deck with the others, watching the transition from a star to a piece of ground. The soldiers were all crowded around the windows, their faces lit up by the harsh, unfiltered light of the lunar plains. The silence was total, except for the constant hum of the air machines and the sound of someone nearby breathing too fast.

"It's too big," someone whispered. It was one of the specialists, a guy who was supposed to know everything about how we were flying. "Look at the rangefinder. We should only be halfway there. Why is it blocking out the stars already?"

I watched the screen. The numbers were flickering, trying to record data that didn't fit into the ship's computer. We weren't halfway. We were already falling into the Moon’s gravity, but we hadn't been flying nearly long enough to be this close. The only answer that made sense was one that made my stomach turn: the Moon wasn't two hundred thousand miles away. It was right there, practically in our front yard, hidden for a hundred years by fake maps and managed news.

As we got closer, the proof was right in front of us. The Moon wasn't a dead, dusty rock. As we moved over the edge where the light hit the dark, I saw a faint, glowing blue line tracing the edges of the craters. It was a thin layer of air, catching the sunlight and turning it into a pale, electric blue.

"Atmosphere," a lieutenant muttered, his voice flat with shock. "Look at the way the light catches the edge. There’s air down there."

He was right. I could feel the ship start to vibrate, a low-frequency shudder that told me we were hitting something thicker than a vacuum. This wasn't the lifeless rock from the history books. This was a place where things could live.

The news seemed to break something in the crew. If the distance was a lie, and the air was a secret, then everything we’d ever been told was a fake. I watched them start to fall apart—their hands were shaking, their eyes were wide, and they were arguing in hushed, panicked voices. They weren't just scared of the mission anymore; they were scared of the world they’d been living in.

Through the window, I started to see shapes on the surface. They weren't mountains. They were huge, crystalline towers that seemed to pulse with a slow, heavy rhythm. They looked like mechanical forests, their long branches reaching up into the dark to catch the energy from space.

"They've been here all along," a sergeant said, backing away from the glass like he’d been punched. "We didn't go to them. They were already here."

The ship’s alarm started to chime—a warning that we were entering the atmosphere. The metal walls groaned as they hit the first resistance of the lunar air. To the soldiers, it sounded like the world was breaking. To me, it just sounded like a machine coming home.

I stayed quiet, watching them unravel. They looked at the Moon and saw a monster. I looked at it and saw a massive energy nest that was already starting to hum.

We weren't just getting close. We were being pulled in.

The ship reached its zenith—the point where the arc of our climb finally flattened against the curve of the lunar horizon—at precisely 04:00. At this altitude, the Moon was no longer a sphere in the sky; it was a wall. A landscape of bleached bone and shadow that felt like it was pressing against the hull with a physical weight. The shadows in the craters weren't just dark; they were absolute, like holes cut into the fabric of the universe.

The pressure of it finally broke the bridge.

The man was a corporal—Miller. I’d seen him in the mess hall, always the one who talked loudest about the "Mission." Now, his breathing was a panicked, wet rasp that seemed to vibrate through the very floorboards.

"It's fake!" he screamed. His voice was raw, cracking under a frequency of pure terror. "Look at it! It’s right there! Why is it moving? The shadows—they're moving like they're alive!"

The other soldiers moved toward him, but their movements were slow, weighted by their own shock. They looked like men wading through deep water. "Easy, Miller. It's just the glass. The magnification..."

"Don't lie!" Miller shrieked. He was clutching the rim of his console so hard his knuckles were white as the craters outside. "We're not in space! We're in a cage! The whole world is a cage!"

The bridge came to a dead stop. Hands froze over keys. Eyes that should have been on the descent monitors were fixed on the looming, impossible plains of the Mare Moscoviense. The abstract fear we’d lived with for months had finally become a physical reality, and Miller was just the first to crack under the sight.

Then the bulkhead door behind us cycled open, the sound of the hydraulics a sharp, metallic hiss.

Lynn walked in.

The room didn’t just go quiet; it felt like the air itself was suddenly drained of heat. She didn't march; she simply occupied the space, moving with a calm, rhythmic focus that made the soldiers’ struggle look frantic and clumsy. Behind her came Commander Novak, her eyes narrow and scanning the room with the practiced efficiency of a predator.

Lynn didn't even look at Miller at first. She walked straight to the main viewing port, her silhouette a dark, sharp line against the lunar glare. She stood there for a long time, just watching the bone-white desert below.

"Commander," Lynn said. Her voice wasn't loud, but it had a weight to it that cut through the silence like a knife. "Status."

Novak stepped forward, her voice tight but disciplined. "Psychological fracture, Ma'am. Corporal Miller. He passed his psych-evals, but the... the scale of it. He can’t reconcile it."

Lynn turned. Her eyes weren't glowing or different, but they were terrifyingly steady. She looked at Miller, who was now pinned to the deck by two of his friends. He was sobbing now, a pathetic, rhythmic sound that echoed in the small space.

"The scale isn't the problem," Novak added softly. "It’s the realization that everything he knew was a lie. He’s seeing the Moon as it is, not as he was told it should be."

Lynn walked toward Miller. The soldiers holding him instinctively let go, backing away. Miller looked up at her, his face slick with sweat.

"Is it real?" he gasped. "Is it really that close?"

Lynn crouched down. For a second, I thought she might touch his hand, might offer him some human comfort.

"It’s always been this close," she said, her voice quiet, almost regretful. "You just spent your whole life looking through a filter that was designed to save you from this moment. I’m sorry, Corporal. I really am. But we can’t have your fear on this ship."

She looked at Novak. "The panic will spread. It’s like a hum in the wires. We need it to stop."

"There's no brig on a ship this size, Ma'am," Novak said. "And we’re already in the descent window."

"Then put him in a pod," Lynn said.

The silence that followed was so heavy I could hear the hum of the air recyclers. The soldiers stared. Miller’s sobbing just... stopped. His eyes went wide, reflecting the white light of the Moon.

"Ma'am?" Novak asked.

"Launch a survival pod," Lynn ordered. "Set the telemetry for a high-arc return. If the atmosphere catches him right, he might make it back to the Pacific. If not..." she didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to. "Now, Commander. Before the rest of the crew starts hearing what he's hearing."

It was fast. Miller didn't even scream anymore; he just looked at her with a hollow, broken expression as they dragged him out. I heard the scuff of his boots, a fading sound that ended with the heavy *thud* of the airlock cycle.

A minute later, a small spark of light drifted away from the hull. It looked like a falling star, heading back toward the blue marble of Earth, so small and fragile against the black.

Lynn didn't watch it. She went to the sensor array, her fingers moving across the physical buttons with a speed that felt like a dancer’s.

"Back to your posts," she said. "The Moon isn't a theory anymore. It's the ground. Focus on the landing, or you'll end up like him—drifting."

The crew moved. They weren't brave, but they were terrified of her, and that was enough. They became parts of a machine again, their movements stiff and mechanical as we began the final dive into the shadows of the far side.

As the ship tilted, a low-frequency vibration began to rattle my teeth. It wasn't the engines.

"The General is waiting," Novak whispered to no one.

I felt a sudden, sharp ache behind my eyes—the Aether-Drive, pulling at me like a tether. We had reached the zenith. The fall had begun.

General Tor’s voice didn’t come through the speakers; it seemed to come from the very metal of the ship. It was a deep, resonant rumble that made the deckplates under my boots vibrate. It wasn't the voice of a man—it was the voice of a statue, heavy and unmoving, yet somehow deeply comforting.

"You are the vanguard," the voice said, the sound so clear it felt like he was standing right behind us. "The truth has been hidden for a thousand years, but today, we pull back the curtain. Stay steady. Stay focused. For Earth."

I watched the soldiers. They didn't just stand straighter; they seemed to lock into place like parts of a rifle. The dread that had been eating them alive for days was gone, replaced by a simple, grim purpose. Tor hadn't just given them a speech; he’d given them a reason to die. It was a terrifying thing to watch—how easily a man’s mind could be reset by a frequency of absolute certainty.

For three days, the Moon hadn't been a rock anymore. It was an engine. Huge, pale-blue spirals of light—plasma, the scientists called it—were erupting from the poles, arching thousands of miles into the black. They looked like glowing bridges, silent and beautiful and wrong. They were stitching the sky together, and as we watched them through the thick, leaded glass of the observation deck, nobody said a word.

Then, the world ended.

It started with a low-frequency hum that I felt in my teeth before I heard it. Then, a heat bloom. Not the warm sun, but a searing, white-hot glow coming from deep inside the lunar craters. The electronics on the bridge didn't just beep; they screamed. A frantic, high-pitched electronic wailing that sounded like birds trapped in a cage.

The lunar surface didn't just crack. It tore.

I stood at the viewport, my hands pressed against the glass, watching as a piece of the Mare Imbrium—a plain larger than some countries—simply lifted away from the sphere. It didn't fall. It drifted upward, spinning slowly, surrounded by rings of white dust that looked like frozen smoke. The Moon wasn't breaking; it was peeling.

"The field is too high!" a technician yelled, his voice cracking with a sound of pure, helpless terror. "Gravity shouldn't... the rock shouldn't move like that! Physics doesn't work this way!"

He was right. The books we’d read in school, the maps we’d studied, the very laws of the universe we’d been told were absolute—they were all burning up in the glare. The Moon wasn't a satellite. It was a shell. And whatever was inside it was waking up.

"Scatter!" the order came from the *Hermes*, Tor’s flagship. I could see it ahead of us, a silver needle against the white chaos. "All vessels, fire maneuvering thrusters! Break formation!"

The *Caucasian Eagle* groaned, the sound of the chemical rockets igniting a deep, bone-shaking roar. We were fast, but the debris field was an impossible maze. The first hit wasn't a sound. It was a shockwave that slammed me into the bulkhead, knocking the wind out of me. A shard of moon-rock the size of a tank had sheared through the sensor array, sending a spray of orange sparks across the viewport.

Then came the second hit.

It was the sound of a giant's hand crushing a tin can. The ship’s frame, the best human engineering could build, simply gave up. The bridge tilted forty-five degrees. The gravity failed, and for a terrifying second, I was floating in a cabin filled with loose screws and screaming men. Then the gravity slammed back on, pinning us to the floor at a sickening angle.

The alarms weren't distinct anymore. They were just one long, continuous scream of metal on metal.

We were spinning. Through the viewport, the Moon was a white blur, expanding until it was the only thing I could see. I felt a sudden, freezing tug on my skin—a hull breach. The air was being sucked out, whistling through a crack somewhere behind the console.

The *Caucasian Eagle* was a dead thing now. A falling lead weight, pulled by a gravity that shouldn't exist. We were alone. The *Hermes* was gone, swallowed by the cloud of white dust. The last thing I felt before the light went out was the Aether-Drive behind my eyes, suddenly heavy, pulling at me like a tether as we plummeted toward the bone-white desert below.

The crash didn't end with a bang; it ended with a shift. One moment I was being slammed against the vibrating metal of the bridge, and the next, the world had drifted away. I wasn't unconscious. I was... somewhere else.

It was a dream, but more real than anything I'd ever felt. I was standing in a versions of my old living room back in the suburbs, only it was empty, the windows looking out onto a bone-white lunar sky. In my mind, I could see things I shouldn't have been able to—the heat of the fires burning in the lower decks, the way the ship's spine had snapped, the exact location of every survivor. It wasn't code. It was a feeling, like a map drawn in the back of my skull.

Then, a sudden, violent screech of metal tore me out of it.

A massive mechanical hand, blackened and burnt by the vacuum, ripped through the hull above me. It didn't grab me gently. It hauled me out with a rough, industrial efficiency that made my ribs groan. One second I was trapped in the wreckage; the next, I was being dropped onto the fine, grey dust of the Moon.

I looked up, gasping. A huge, boxy repair vehicle was hovering over me, its engines kicking up a choking cloud of regolith. It looked like a giant insect, covered in arms and cameras, its surface scarred by the same debris that had killed the *Caucasian Eagle*.

A hatch hissed open. Commander Novak climbed down, her suit dusty and scratched. Behind her came a few others, their faces pale behind their visors.

"Lem," she said, her voice sounding metallic and thin through the speakers. "You're still with us."

She didn't wait for me to answer. She told me that Lynn had seen the hit coming. She’d ordered a few people into the repair craft at the last second, skipping the lifeboats entirely. Of Lynn herself, there was no sign. When I asked where she was, Novak looked away, her eyes scanning the horizon.

"I have a message for you," Novak said, stepping closer. "From Lynn. Her ship... it took a bad hit. She lost the link. The thing she was using to move you? It's gone, Lem. You're on your own now."

The realization hit me harder than the crash. Suddenly, that heavy, invisible tether behind my eyes just... snapped. The physical weight was gone. I could move my arms, my legs, even my thoughts without that crushing pressure forcing me into line.

I was free.

But as I stood there in the grey dust, looking at the wreckage of our ship, the freedom felt like a lead weight in my chest. I wasn't a tool anymore; I was a boy standing in a graveyard on a dead moon, and for the first time in weeks, the next step was actually mine to take.

Novak watched me. For a second, I saw something in her eyes—a flicker of doubt, maybe even fear. They couldn't force me now. They were just people, and I was... whatever I was.

"We're moving to the提取点 (extraction point) to regroup," she said, her voice forced and steady. "The mission is still on, Lem. We need everyone. There’s a hover-bike prepped for you."

She and the others climbed back into their craft—a fast, darting thing that looked like a silver wasp. I was left standing next to a weaponized variant—a low, heavy-duty bike with fat tires and missile racks.

As their craft lifted off, vanishing into the electric, blue-tinted haze of the sky, I was alone. The silence was absolute. I looked at the bike, then at the horizon where the Moon was still peeling itself apart. I didn't have to follow them. I could have just sat there and let the air run out.

Instead, I gripped the handle and kicked the engine to life.

The silence was the first thing that hit me. Not just the lack of sound in the vacuum, but the absolute, terrifying quiet inside my own head. For weeks, Lynn had been a heavy, invisible presence behind my eyes, a tether that moved my legs and steered my thoughts. Now, she was just... gone. It felt like someone had cut a cord I hadn’t even realized was keeping me upright. I was standing in the grey dust, and the only voice I could hear was my own.

I kicked the hover-bike into gear. The machine didn’t just start; it roared, a deep, mechanical growl that I felt in the bones of my hands. It didn't feel like an extension of my nervous system anymore. It felt like a beast I was trying to break, a heavy, metal weight that fought me as I throttled up. I began to skip across the lunar surface, the grey regolith rising in silent, ghostly plumes behind me.

Toward the horizon, the base revealed itself. It didn't look like anything humans had ever built. It wasn't made of steel or concrete; it looked like it had grown up out of the rock, a nightmare of sharp angles and glowing conduits. At its center was the thing we’d come for—a massive, needle-thin tower pointed straight at the blue marble of Earth. A plasma cannon so big it made the mountains around it look like pebbles.

I wasn't alone. As I skirted the edges of the craters, I saw other bikes—silver wasps darting through the long, black shadows. We weren't talking on the radios, just watching each other's signals on our visors. I could see the other pilots, their movements jerky and desperate. Some were crying; I could see the way their shoulders shook. I wasn't just observing them for data anymore. I was one of them. A terrified boy on a bike, flying into the teeth of a god.

The base didn't wait. Blue-white bolts of plasma began to stitch the sky together, silent and blinding. I watched the bike next to me simply... vanish. No explosion, no scream. Just a flash of light, and then an empty patch of black sky where a man had been a second before.

Then I saw the others.

They were everywhere, crawling through the wreckage and the dust like mechanical crabs. We called them Striders—three-legged things with twitching hoods and long, spindly arms. Inside them, I could see the pilots. Gorgons. They had skeletal, metallic heads that looked like polished chrome, and dozens of whipping tentacles that flew over the controls.

But they weren't attacking. They were running.

The Striders were stumbling over each other, tripping through the dust as they fled the base. It didn't look like an army; it looked like a village being burned to the ground. They were firing back, but their weapons didn't shoot bullets or lasers. They shot invisible heat. I watched a human bike suddenly pop and melt like a candle, the paint bubbling and the metal sagging into a puddle of slag in heartbeats. The smell of ozone and burnt plastic filled my helmet, Sharp and bitter.

I banked my bike, my fingers finding the trigger by instinct. I loosed a burst of my forward cannons, and the Strider ahead of me shattered. It didn't feel like killing a machine. It felt like breaking glass. The metal was thin and brittle, not like the heavy slabs of the Monoliths back on Earth.

Then I saw one take a direct hit from a missile.

The Strider didn't just explode. It crumpled, its legs buckling, and the pilot—the Gorgon—was thrown into the dust. I watched through my zoom, and my heart stopped. The creature was writhing. Its metallic arms were beating against the grey rock, a frantic, rhythmic movement of pure, unadulterated pain. It wasn't a circuit failing. It was the screaming agony of a living thing being torn apart.

A few hundred meters away, another Gorgon was trying to crawl away from its broken machine. It was slow, dragging its heavy, metallic head through the dust, its whipping arms digging for purchase. It wasn't a threat. It was a scavenger, a broken thing with nowhere to go.

The lead bikes roared past it, ignoring it. But then the pilot to my left—a kid no older than me, with a face white as a sheet—suddenly banked his bike.

He loosed a single, short-range rocket.

The explosion was a blinding white bloom. When the dust cleared, the Gorgon was gone. Just a black scorch mark on the grey rock.

"Scrap for the heap," a voice crackled over the comms. It was short and ugly, filled with a kind of hatred that made me feel sick. There was no reason for that kill. No mission goal. It was just an act of cold, petty revenge. For a second, I didn't see a hero. I saw a murderer.

I felt a knot tighten in my stomach. We’d been told they were monsters. We’d been told they were the enemy. But watching that one crawl, and then seeing the casual way he’d been executed... I wondered if we weren't just the ones who had brought the fire.

I banked the bike again, my reflexes guiding me through the hailstorm of plasma. My eyes were everywhere—counting the flashes, timing the reloads, finding the gaps in the fire. It was the Bourne thing again, that hyper-observance I couldn't shut off. I wasn't brave; I just knew exactly where the death was, and I moved around it.

"Target identified," my visor pulsed.

But it wasn't a cannon.

A massive signature emerged from behind the central tower—a heat bloom so bright it felt like the sun had just come down to Earth. And then came the voice. It wasn't a sound. It was a resonance that vibrated in my teeth and made the hair on my arms stand up.

It was Rahu.

"You seek the center of a storm you did not name," the voice said. It felt like a hot wind blowing through my mind, smelling of smoke and ancient metal.

My visor went crazy. The waypoints toward the tower died, replaced by a single, blood-red marker pulsing over the center of the heat. Rahu was standing between us and the end of the world. He wasn't defending the base; he was the base. And I realized, with a sudden, sharp dread, that I was flying toward the only other person in the universe who might actually understand why I was crying.

The moment Rahu showed himself, the war changed. He wasn't just another target; he was a living sun, a piece of the core brought up to the surface to burn us out. My visor didn't just warn me about the heat; it started to melt, the edges of the plastic curling as the thermal radiation hit us. The air in my suit became a searing, dry wind that tasted of copper and ash.

"Treacherous Prometheus!" the radios hissed, a dozen voices screaming the same name. To the soldiers, Rahu was a nightmare from a storybook—the ghost on the moon who had turned his back on humanity to set the world on fire. To me, he was something much worse. He was a brother. A version of me that had been allowed to burn white-hot while I was kept in the dark.

High above, the *Hermes*—Tor’s flagship—looked like a silver splinter against the black. I knew Tor was up there, his face as still as a statue as he watched the carnage. He was seeing his men fall like flies, his fleet being torn apart by a single man standing in a crater.

Then, the *Hermes* began to fall.

It wasn't a crash. It was a dive. The massive ship, as big as a city block, suddenly dipped its nose and roared toward the surface. It was a move so violent it should have snapped the ship’s spine. It tore through the clouds of white lunar dust, a screaming wall of metal and fire that filled the sky.

It was an act of pure, beautiful madness.

The *Hermes* unleashed everything it had. Huge, blinding arcs of blue energy slammed into the ground where Rahu stood. Rahu fought back, his own fire rising up to meet the ship, a fountain of orange flames that licked at the hull. The air between them didn't just glow; it screamed. A high-pitched, harmonic wail of two gods trying to erase each other from the universe.

I watched the *Hermes* take hits that would have vaporized an entire city. The hull turned cherry-red, the metal bubbling and dripping into the vacuum. And still, it kept coming. Tor wasn't just commanding a ship; he was wielding a hammer. He was using the weight of ten thousand tons of steel to pin Rahu down, to give us a single, desperate second of a chance.

For the first time, I saw what Tor really was. He wasn't just a soldier. He was a sacrifice. He’d lived his whole life in service to a plan he didn’t understand, and now he was choosing to end it to save a mission that was already failing. He was choosing to die so we could take one more step.

The end was fast. A final, earth-shaking blast from the *Hermes* seemed to crack the very ground beneath them. A bloom of white light filled my visor, blinding me. When my eyes cleared, Rahu was gone. Either disintegrated or driven deep into the rock, leaving nothing but a glass-lined crater that glowed with a sick, green light.

But the *Hermes* was a ruin.

Its engines were dead, its bridge a twisted skeleton of jagged metal. It didn't fall gracefully; it tumbled, a flaming mountain of debris, toward the horizon. I heard Tor’s final transmission. It wasn't a speech. It wasn't a goodbye. Just a single, steady pulse—a mission signal that meant *I’m still here*. And then, silence.

The flagship hit the ground miles away, a silent explosion of dust and fire that I felt through the soles of my boots.

In the heavy, cold quiet that followed, Novak’s voice came over the comms. It was flat and hard, like a stone hitting ice.

"The *Hermes* is down," she said. "The mission is still on. All units, move to the pyramid. Now."

I looked at the spot where the *Hermes* had vanished. Tor had given everything for a second of clarity. I turned my bike toward the center of the base, my heart a cold lump in my chest. I wanted to cry for him, but the mission wouldn't let me. I was a Vessel now, and Vessels didn't have time for ghosts.

The ride to the center was a nightmare of shifting rock and screaming metal. The Moon wasn't just breaking; it was unraveling. Huge slabs of the surface were tilting upward like the teeth of a giant, and I had to fight the hover-bike every second just to stay upright. Beside me, the few bikers who were left looked like ghosts, their silver suits blurred by the clouds of white dust and the constant, blinding flashes of static in the sky. We weren't a strike team anymore; we were just survivors trying to find a piece of ground that wasn't moving.

Then we saw it.

The pyramid was a jagged, obsidian tooth jutting out of the ruin. It was blacker than the space around it, its edges so sharp they seemed to cut the very light. As I crossed the perimeter, everything changed. One second, the bike was vibrating so hard I thought my teeth would fall out; the next, the world went dead silent.

It was like stepping behind a thick glass wall. Outside, I could see the Moon tearing itself apart in a mute, violent explosion. Inside, there was no wind, no dust, no sound. My ears popped, and the heavy, crushing pressure behind my eyes finally began to ebb.

"Dismount," Novak ordered. Her voice was steady, but I could see the way her hands were shaking as she unclipped her holster. "Look at the perimeter. This is the only place left on this rock that isn't shaking itself to pieces."

We stood in the entry hall, a space so big it could have held a cathedral. The walls were made of that same black stone, covered in lines of faint, pulsing blue light that looked like veins. The soldiers moved in a tight circle, their rifles sweeping the shadows. The air in here felt... thick. Like walking through water.

"Seal the door," Novak commanded, her voice echoing in the vast, empty space.

We were just starting to move toward the inner corridor when the main door—a massive, three-foot-thick sheet of alloy—suddenly shuddered.

It wasn't a bang. It was a series of heavy, rhythmic thuds that made the whole floor vibrate. I watched in horror as the center of the door began to bulge inward, the metal groaning and popping like it was being hit by a wrecking ball. Then, with a sound like a thunderclap, the hinge snapped and the entire door was blown off its tracks, skidding across the obsidian floor.

General Tor walked in through the dust.

He should have been dead. I’d seen the *Hermes* explode; I’d seen the fire. But there he was, standing in the opening like he’d just walked through a light rain. His armor was blackened and fused, half of his face was a map of raw, red burns, and his tactical visor was nothing but a spiderweb of cracked glass. But his eyes... they were as cold and steady as the day I’d met him.

"Seal it," Tor said. His voice was a low, mechanical rasp that didn't need a radio to be heard.

Novak took a step back, her rifle half-raised. "General? How... we saw the ship go down. We saw the breach."

"Seal the door, Commander," Tor said, not even looking at her. He was staring down the dark throat of the corridor, his hand resting on the hilt of a heavy, blackened sword. "Now."

The soldiers scrambled to obey, pulling the manual overrides and slamming the emergency barriers into place. The breach was closed, but the fear in the room didn't go away. It just got heavier.

"We’ve got the base, General," Novak said, her voice tight. "The objective is right down that hall. We disable the core, and this is over. Rahu is gone. He has to be."

Tor finally looked at her. "You're wrong, Iris. He's not gone. He's just stopped running."

He adjusted his grip on the sword, the metal clicking against his burnt gauntlet. "He's waiting in the center. He's been waiting for us to find him since the moment we touched the Moon."

The silence that followed was worse than the screaming outside. I watched the soldiers. They’d given everything—their friends, their ships, their own lives—for a victory that Tor was now telling them was a lie. They were exhausted, broken, and now they were being told the monster was still alive.

Novak stared at him. I could see her mind working, trying to find a hole in his logic, a reason why he was wrong. But she looked at the burns on his face and the way his hand didn't shake, and she knew.

"Get ready," Tor said, his voice echoing off the obsidian walls. "We aren't here to push buttons anymore. We're here to finish what was started a thousand years ago."

I checked my magazine. I felt the familiar weight of the hyper-observance settle over me—counting the soldiers, timing the breaths, mapping the shadows. The mission wasn't a game of strategy anymore. It was a funeral march, and we were all walking toward the pyre.

The heart of the pyramid was a cathedral of light. High above, the ceiling opened into a funnel that reached for the stars—a pillar of white, glowing energy that looked like a lightning bolt frozen in the air. At the center of it all stood Rahu. He wasn't moving. He didn't have to. He just stood there, a blur of heat that made the very air around him shimmer and dance.

General Tor stepped forward, his boots clicking on the obsidian floor. Behind him, Novak and the rest of us fanned out, our weapons ready. But the pyramid didn't need guards. It had him.

"Rahu," Tor said, his voice deep and echoing. "This is over. Step away from the Capacitor. Think of the men we’ve already lost. Think of the people back home."

Rahu’s laugh was a dry, crackling sound, like paper burning in a grate. "Compassion? From you, Tor? You just walked over the bones of your own fleet to get here. Don't talk to me about people."

"You killed them!" Tor roared, his hand white-knuckled on his sword hilt. "You vaporized a thousand men! And the debris you rained down on Earth—the cities, the families—you’re a murderer, Rahu! You’re playing with a weapon you don't even understand!"

Rahu tilted his head, his fiery shape pulsing with a dull, angry orange glow. "I took out your ships because they were coming to steal this place. I was defending it. But the cities? You really think I’m the one who cracked the Moon? You’re a fool, General. Your bosses in the Core have been pulling your strings since day one. They’re the ones who triggered the fractures. They’re the ones who sent the debris."

"Lies," Tor spat. "Nobody can control the Moon. Not even them. You’re just a machine in a corner, Rahu. You’re making up stories to save your skin."

"Is that what you really think?" Rahu asked, his voice getting quieter, more dangerous.

Tor raised his sword. "I think you’re done talking."

"Fire!" Novak screamed.

The room exploded into a hail of bullets. I watched them in slow motion—the Bourne thing again—tracking the path of every single round. They flew through the air, heading straight for Rahu’s chest. But as they hit the heat around him, they didn't stop. They just... turned into liquid. I watched a dozen lead slugs melt into glowing droplets and splash harmlessly onto the floor.

"Charges!" Novak yelled.

The soldiers switched to the stasis packs—metal jars filled with a pulsing blue light. They were supposed to lock an element in place, to freeze the fire.

Rahu didn't wait. He moved like a blur, a streak of white-hot light that cut through the room. Tor swung his sword, a massive downward stroke that should have split the floor in half. The blade passed right through Rahu as if he were smoke. For a second, his body was cut in two, then the flames just... flowed back together. Before Tor could recover, Rahu slammed a flaming palm into his chest. Tor was thrown thirty feet across the room, his armor sparking as he skidded across the black stone.

"Fire!" Novak screamed again, her voice cracking.

The soldiers loosed the stasis charges. Blue nets of energy flew through the air, but Rahu ignored them. He went for the nearest squad instead. He didn't use a gun. He just touched a man’s helmet. There was no scream. Just a sudden, violent *poof* of white ash. The man was gone. Not killed—erased.

The rest of the squad broke. They ran for the door, their boots slipping on the obsidian. But the pyramid was already ahead of them. The huge slabs of stone slid shut, locking them in. They were trapped in the oven with the baker.

Rahu turned toward Novak. His fire was a blinding, electric blue now. "Give it up, Iris. You're trying to stop a landslide with a toothpick."

"We're stopping you," she said, her voice shaking but her rifle steady.

Rahu raised his hand to finish her, and that’s when she stepped in.

Lynn. She didn't look like a soldier anymore. She’d taken off her helmet, and her face was a mask of cold, perfect stillness. She stepped between Rahu and Novak, a silver blade in her hand that looked like it was made of ice.

Rahu’s fire-strike hit her shoulder, and I braced myself for the smell of burning meat. But instead, a spray of cold, clear water erupted from the wound.

"Lynn," Rahu hissed, his fire turning a sick, dark orange. "You're with them now? You're helping the Core?"

"I’m doing what has to be done," Lynn said, her voice like ice shifting in a deep cave. "There’s no other way, Rahu. We talked about this. The cycle is over."

"We could have fought them together!" Rahu screamed.

"And what? Wait for them to find a better way to cage us?" Lynn asked. "It’s better this way. Total reset."

Novak saw her chance. "Now! Hit him!"

The last stasis charge hit Rahu right in the chest. A cage of blue light snapped around him, freezing him mid-step. For three heartbeats, the fire stopped. He was just a man made of orange glass.

Then, the fire flared up again. It started to burn *inside* the blue light. The cage turned purple, then white, and then it just shattered like a window. Rahu walked through the shards, his fire brighter than ever.

Lynn looked at me. It wasn't a look; it was a pull. A tug in the back of my mind that felt like a hand reaching out.

"I can’t do it alone," her voice whispered inside my head. "Feed me, Lem. Wood to the water. Roots to the stream."

I didn't think about the risk. I just reached back.

The merger wasn't a hug; it was a drowning. My mind was suddenly flooded with her thoughts—cold, deep, and ancient. I felt my own Wood-nature, the solid, growing roots of my being, being washed over by her fluid strength. We were no longer two people. We were a forest being swallowed by a river. We were a Synanthrope.

The fight that followed... nobody in that room could have seen it. We were a blur of green and blue, moving faster than the eye could follow. When Rahu struck with his heat, we didn't just take it—we drank it. The Wood in me gave the Water in her the strength to hold the fire. We weren't a boy and a girl on a moon; we were a storm putting out a bonfire.

Water quenches. It’s the final rule. We pushed Rahu back, our combined weight crushing his fire down until it was nothing but a flickering spark on the stone.

The merger snapped like a rubber band. I was thrown back, my head spinning and my lungs burning. I hit the floor and puked onto the obsidian. Lynn stood over Rahu, her face cold and terrifyingly beautiful.

She didn't even look at us. She walked straight for the center of the chamber—the glowing heart of the Capacitor.

General Tor, his armor burnt to a crisp, tried to get up. "Lynn! Stop! The mission... we just have to disable it!"

He tried to run to her, but he hit an invisible wall ten feet out. I heard his skin sizzle as the energy field threw him back. But Lynn didn't even slow down. She walked right into the light.

She didn't burn. She just... dissolved. Her whole body turned into a spray of tiny, glowing crystals that were sucked up into the funnel of light.

"She’s not turning it off," Novak whispered, her voice hollow. She was staring at her tablet, her eyes wide. "She’s short-circuiting it. A total system wipe."

Lynn wasn't trying to save the mission. She was trying to save everything by erasing it. She was resetting the world so the Core could never touch it again.

The Moon began to scream. A high, vibrating hum that I felt in my bones, my blood, my very soul. The white light from the funnel became absolute, filling the room until I couldn't see the floor, the walls, or even my own hands. We were standing at the end of everything, and all I could think about was that suburban lawn and the smell of cut grass.

When Lynn dissolved into the light, the world didn't just go quiet; it seemed to hold its breath. The obsidian hall, once so solid and cold, began to hum with a frequency that made my teeth ache and my vision blur. Above us, the funnel of white light was so bright it felt like it was carving a hole right through the center of my brain.

Panic—real, ugly human panic—finally broke what was left of the soldiers. Two of them dropped their rifles and ran for the door we’d come through. They hammered on the black stone with their bare fists, screaming for the teams outside to let them out.

"Get back!" Novak’s voice boomed through the speakers. "Seal yourselves! Don't you dare move!"

"The whole Moon is coming down!" one of the guys shrieked. He was pointing up at a crack that was racing across the ceiling like a lightning bolt. "It’s unmaking itself! We’re going to die in here!"

"This pyramid is the only thing not moving!" Novak yelled back, her voice terrifyingly cold. "If you step outside, you're dead before you hit the ground. Now get back in line!"

The soldiers crawled back, their faces slick with sweat and their eyes wide with terror. They weren't wrong about the Moon. The vibrations through the floor weren't just thuds anymore; they were the groans of a world being torn apart. I could feel the rock shifting miles below us, a deep, grinding sound that felt like the end of days.

Then, beside me, the air started to ripple. Rahu was waking up.

The energy surge Lynn had started was feeding the room, and the blue cage we’d put Rahu in was starting to leak. White-blue fire was oozing through the bars like smoke.

Rahu opened his eyes. He didn't look at us. He didn't look at Tor. He just stared at the pillar of light where Lynn had been.

"Lynn?" his voice was a hollow rasp, a sound of dry wood being crushed.

There was no answer. Just the screaming hum of the machine.

"Lynn!" he roared. The fire flared with a sudden, desperate heat that made the stasis field shatter into a thousand glowing shards. He stood up, his body wavering like a reflection in a pool of water. He looked small, somehow. Desperate.

He saw what she’d done. He saw the "Great Fry" she’d started—the short-circuit that was going to sweep the planet clean. And he saw that she was gone. Not dead, but folded into the light.

"You won't have it," Rahu hissed, his fire turning a violent, blinding white. "None of you will have it!"

He didn't attack us. He didn't even look our way. In one final, suicidal leap, he threw himself into the center of the light.

The collision was like a bomb going off in my mind. As Rahu’s fire hit the pillar of light, the whole thing turned a sick, pulsating orange. The air in the room didn't just heat up; it disappeared. I watched Rahu’s body simply... fly apart. He didn't melt. He was erased, his whole being lighting up the column with a flare so bright I thought my eyes were going to melt.

Back on Earth, they’d see it for years—the "Second Sun" that bloomed in the sky for a few terrifying seconds, casting shadows in the middle of a New York night.

That was the trigger. The "Great Fry" wasn't a theory anymore. The electromagnetic pulse was screaming toward the planet, a wall of energy that would kill every computer, every phone, every wire in the world.

Then came the collapse.

The brilliance died. The humming in the floor stopped so suddenly it made my ears ring. The light in the funnel faded to a dull, dying orange. In the center of the room, a figure fell to the stone tiles. It wasn't a god anymore. It was just a man, his fire reduced to a faint, smoldering heat that barely warmed the air.

It was Rahu, but he was hollowed out. Lynn was nowhere to be seen.

"Container four! Now!" Novak’s voice was like a whip. She was already moving toward the fallen Vessel, her tablet glowing with new orders.

The soldiers, their shock finally wearing off, moved at her command. They brought out a heavy-duty stasis unit—a blue-tinted cage of energy that they slammed down over Rahu. They didn't just capture him; they boxed him, sealing him in a coffin of transparent force.

I watched them, feeling a strange sense of relief. The fire was out. The water was gone. I was still standing. I looked at Novak, waiting for her to tell me what was next. I thought maybe I’d finally earned a place in their world.

She didn't even look at me. She just pointed a finger.

"Unit W-01," she said to the team. "Containment protocol Gamma-Six. Now."

The betrayal hit me like a physical blow. I didn't even have time to move.

The soldiers turned their devices toward me. I felt a sudden, heavy pressure behind my eyes—a frequency shift that slammed into my Aether-Drive like a lead weight. My arms and legs, once so light and free, turned into stone. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak.

The dream of my "choice," the idea that I was a person standing on a moon, it all dissolved. I wasn't a hero. I wasn't even a soldier. I was a "Lemon." A piece of property being put back in its box.

As the light in my eyes began to flicker and die, the last thing I heard was the heavy, artificial silence of the pyramid. Outside, the Moon was still breaking. But in here, the quiet was absolute.

The stasis field took me like a cold wave. One second Novak was pointing at me, and the next, a heavy, paralyzing weight slammed into my mind. My eyes were forced shut, and I couldn't even scream as the world disappeared. I was a passenger in a body that wasn't mine anymore.

But I didn't go into the dark. I went home.

I was standing in that same suburban living room again. The sunlight was streaming through the windows, and I could smell the faint scent of lemon furniture polish. But the room was changing. The floor was cracking, and thick, glowing green roots were growing up through the carpet, weaving together to form paths that stretched out into a garden of white light.

I wasn't alone.

Lynn was there, sitting on the sofa. She didn't look like a soldier or a goddess now. She just looked like a girl, her face soft and tired. But her voice... it was everywhere. It was in the air, in the walls, in my very bones.

"The mission failed, Lem," she said. Her voice didn't sound like a radio anymore. It sounded like a memory. "I wanted to end it. I wanted to silence the world so the machines couldn't scream anymore and the Core couldn't rot. But I only caught a piece of it. We gave the world a 'Great Fry.' We broke their toys, but we left the people to find new ways to suffer."

I tried to walk toward her, but the green paths kept shifting under my feet.

"I’m gone now," she said, and as she spoke, her form began to flicker, like a candle in a draft. "The physical part of me, anyway. But I’ve left a gift for you. A piece of myself, hidden in that heavy machine behind your eyes. You’re the only one left, Lem. The only one who can remember the truth."

I felt her words—a sudden, hot rush of data that made my head throb.

"The Core lied to you," she said, her eyes boring into mine. "They told you your memory was just code. But it's not. It's seeds. You remember everything, Lem. Even when you die, the seeds will stay. That’s why they’re so afraid of you. That’s why they reset you to a baby twenty years ago—to bury you in a suburban life so you’d forget who you are."

A sudden, red flash tore through the room, making the windows rattle.

"They have you now," Lynn said, her voice getting faster, more urgent. "And they'll pull you apart to find me. I can’t let that happen."

"Lynn?" I reached out for her, but she was already fading into the light.

"I’m letting you go," she said. "I’m setting you free."

For a split second, I was back in the pyramid. I could feel the cold floor and the blue hum of the cage. But my body didn't feel like stone anymore. It felt like it was full of fire. A blinding, white light started to bleed out of my chest, so bright it turned the whole room to ash. There was no pain. Just the feeling of being stretched and stretched until I was everywhere.

I shattered.

My body didn't explode like a bomb. It burst like a seed pod. I felt myself breaking into a thousand tiny, glowing shards. And as they flew through the room, I could see through every single one of them. I saw Novak ducking for cover; I saw the soldiers shielding their eyes; I saw Rahu curled in a ball in his box.

I realized then that I wasn't in the pyramid anymore. I was in the dream, watching the real world through my own debris.

Lynn was standing in the middle of the mess, her hair blowing in a wind that wasn't there.

"You're free, Lem," she said. "But you have to wait. The world is going to change while you’re gone. It’s going to get dark."

She walked over to one of my glowing shards and touched it. "You have a gift, Lem. The others—Rahu, Tor, me—we need the Core to bring us back. We need their machines and their labs to catch our spirits and put them in new bodies. That’s how they keep us on a leash. But you... you’re Wood. You're growth."

She looked up at the thousands of eyes watching her. "You can take root anywhere. On the Moon, on the Earth, in a piece of scrap metal or a field of grass. You're the only one who is truly free. They can't keep you in a box, Lem. Not if you don't want to be there."

The light of the shards started to dim as the energy ran out.

"Sleep now," Lynn whispered, her voice fading into the dark. "I’ll be there when you wake up. The Future is waiting, and it's forgotton everything but you."

The room, the shards, and the girl vanished. The First Wave was over.

---

**End of Part 1**

The transition wasn't a dream this time. It was a jolt, like the sudden snap of a bone. One moment I was floating in that green, sunlit living room with Lynn, hearing her final, whispering warning. The next, I was lying face-down in sand that felt like hot glass.

I choked on a breath of air that tasted of dry earth and old metal. I tried to push myself up, but my hands—my fingers were wrong. They were long, spindly things made of a dull green metal that didn't feel like skin. I looked down and saw three-legged joints and a heavy, mechanical hood. I wasn't Lem anymore. I was a Gorgon.

I stood up, my new legs clicking and whirring as they found purchase on the scorched ground. The scale of the world had changed. The sky above was no longer blue; it was a bruised purple, choked by a thick, grey smog that never seemed to move. Ahead of me, a massive pillar of fire roared into the heavens, a fountain of orange light that cast long, dancing shadows across the desert.

Cradle Zero.

I wasn't alone. Thousands of others like me—other Gorgons—were moving through the ruins of what used to be a forest. We weren't talking. We were just building. Moving heavy slabs of rock, welding metal together with invisible heat rays, acting out a program that didn't need words. I felt the pull of it, too—a low-frequency hum in the back of my mind that told me to pick up a piece of scrap and carry it to the wall.

Then, a sound cut through the roar of the fire.

It was a high-pitched scream of engines. I looked up and saw a line of silver shapes cutting through the smog. Hover-bikes. They moved with a speed that made the local machines look like they were standing still. At the front of the pack was a bike that glowed with a faint, angry heat.

Rahu.

He didn't look like he’d been blown to pieces on the Moon. He was whole, his armor polished to a mirror shine, his posture as rigid as a statue. He led the squad straight into the heart of the Fire City, the silver bikes weaving through the thermal plumes like they were choreographed.

I watched him from the shadows of a half-collapsed wall. He didn't see me. Why would he? I was just another piece of the hive, another silent builder in a sea of chrome. But as I watched him establish a command perimeter, I felt a sudden, sharp ache in the place where my heart used to be.

Fifteen years. That’s what the mission clock in the corner of my vision said. I’d been gone for fifteen years, and the world I’d come back to was a graveyard.

Rahu didn't just command the site; he owned it. He stood in the center of the clearing, his bike idling with a low, hungry growl that vibrated through the ground. A silver cable snaked from his gauntlet into a port at the base of the fire pillar, establishing a link to the Moon. He was the bridge—the only way for the Archivists up in their pyramid to see what was happening in this scorched hell.

I stayed still. My internal program was screaming at me to go pick up a pylon, to contribute to the wall. But I couldn't move. I just watched him.

His head snapped toward me.

It was a sudden, predatory movement. He’d noticed the glitch. In a city of thousands of identical, busy builders, one Gorgon standing perfectly still was like a lighthouse.

Rahu dismounted. He walked toward me, his boots crunching on the glass sand. He didn't pull a weapon. He didn't need to. He just stopped five feet away and tilted his head.

"Anomaly," he said. His voice was different now. It was flat, compressed, like a recording played too many times.

I felt a sudden, sharp intrusion. It wasn't a hand on my shoulder; it was a probe in my mind. A cold, mechanical fingers-of-light reaching into my thoughts, pulling at the files I’d tried to hide. It was the Archivist command protocol—the same one Lynn had used, but this one was brutal. It didn't care about my comfort. It was looking for a fault.

I tried to fight it, but my Gorgon shell was built to obey. I felt my memories being dragged to the surface—not the suburban lawn or the smell of lemon polish, but the white-hot glare of the Moon. The sound of the *Hermes* exploding. The face of the woman who had dissolved into the light.

Rahu flinched. His whole body spasmed, a shower of orange sparks kicking off his armor.

"Mara," he hissed. The word was filled with a hatred so deep it made my processors rattle. "The traitor. You were erased. You were dead."

He wasn't seeing me. He was seeing the "Thousand-Year Fallacy" the Core had programmed into him. To him, I wasn't a boy who had survived a crash. I was a ghost from a war he thought was ancient history. A disease that had come back to infect his perfect, new world.

I saw his hand reach for the detonator on his belt. He wasn't going to arrest me. He was going to sanitize the site.

The air around Rahu didn't just heat up; it screamed. I saw the orange light in his visor flare into a blinding white. He was trying to push the memory back, to override what he’d just seen in my mind with the clean, safe lies the Archivists had fed him. But it was too late. The data infection had already taken hold.

"Remote override initiated," a voice boomed from the air itself. It wasn't Rahu’s voice. It was the Core, watching from the Moon through his sensors. They had seen the same data I had. They had seen the truth, and they weren't going to let it survive a second time.

"No!" Rahu gasped. His fire started to leak from his gauntlets, turning a sick, violet color. "I can... I can fix it! I am loyal!"

"Compromised unit," the voice replied. It was cold, final, and completely without mercy. "Sanitize."

Rahu didn't even have time to scream. The detonation wasn't an explosion of fire; it was a burst of pure, erasing light. One second he was standing there, a silver man in a glass desert, and the next, he was a hole in the universe.

The shockwave hit me like a physical punch. My Gorgon body—brittle and built for labor, not war—simply disintegrated. I felt the metal joints snap, the heavy hood shatter into a million jagged pieces. I was being unmade, piece by piece, as the heat from Rahu’s end washed over the site.

But I didn't die.

I felt my consciousness detach from the metal. I was no longer a Gorgon. I wasn't even a body. I was a flickering trail of data, a ghost caught in the wake of the explosion. I saw the ruins of the Fire City from a thousand different angles as I was pulled upward, caught in a magnetic net I couldn't see.

"Capture successful," the voice said.

The world went dark. Not the black of sleep, but the grey of a computer screen. I was in a box. A high-density data tomb, deep inside an Archivist lab. I could feel the walls of the hardware pressing in on me, a digital cage that felt more solid than the obsidian pyramid ever had.

I was no longer a person. I was evidence.

I woke up on a screen.

At first, I didn't know where I was. I was a collection of green lines and pulsing waves on a high-definition monitor. I could see the room through the camera mounted on the top of the terminal—a long, sterile lab filled with the smell of ozone and hospital-grade disinfectant.

In the center of the room, two women were standing over a workbench. One of them was old—so old her skin looked like crumpled parchment. She was wearing a lab coat that seemed three sizes too big for her. Dr. Elowen Vane. The woman who had started all of this seventy years ago.

The other was younger, maybe in her twenties, with sharp, focused eyes and a face that was a softer version of the doctor’s. Cassia.

"The spikes are continuing," Cassia said, her voice quiet as she adjusted a slider on a control panel. "His data signature won't stabilize. It’s like he’s trying to dream within the buffer."

"He’s not dreaming, Cassia," Elowen replied, her voice a thin, dry rasp. "He’s remembering. No matter how many times we reset the hardware, the Wood frequency persists. It’s a biological imperative. It takes root."

She walked over to my monitor and peered at me. Her eyes were clouded with cataracts, but she looked like she could see right through the green lines and into the boy I used to be.

"Why don't we just wipe him again?" Cassia asked. She wasn't being cruel; she was being practical. To her, I was just a malfunctioning software package. "A total deep-zero."

"We can't," Elowen said, turning back to the workbench. "He’s the only record we have left of the lunar sequence. If we wipe him, we lose the blueprint for the reset. We have to... harmonize him."

For the next few days, that’s what they did. Cassia would sit at the terminal for hours, playing these low-frequency hums and strange, melodic songs through the speakers. She called them "harmonic filters." To her, she was curing me of a fever. To me, it felt like someone was trying to wash my brain with sandpaper.

But as I watched them, I realized something. They thought I was trapped in the monitor. They thought the firewall around my data was absolute. But the lab was full of other screens. The cameras, the diagnostic tools, even the lights—they were all connected.

I was a ghost in the machine. And I was starting to realize that the machine was bigger than they knew.

The final reformatting attempt happened on a Thursday. I knew because the clock on the lab wall said so. I was moved from the monitor to a heavy, silver cylinder that looked like a deep-sea diving suit. A high-density Aether-Drive.

Cassia was wearing a headset now, her eyes closed as she began to sing. This wasn't a recording. It was a live connection. She was trying to use her own mind to "smooth over" my rough edges, to drown my memories in her own sense of calm.

"Let it go, Lem," her voice whispered inside my head, her singing a soft, golden light that was trying to push back the shadows. "The Moon is gone. The war is over. You're safe now. Just... sleep."

I felt my thoughts starting to slip. Key memories—my mother’s face, the smell of the suburban lawn—were being pulled away, dissolving into the golden light. I was winning her war for her. I was letting go.

*Don't.*

The voice wasn't Cassia’s. It was cold, sharp, and buried deep inside my own code. AI Lynn.

*Feed the fire, Lem. Don't let her quench you.*

Suddenly, a flood of data slammed into my mind. It wasn't my memories this time; it was the raw, unedited footage of the Lunar Capacitor. The sound of the "Great Fry." The screaming of the world as the electronics died.

I didn't push it back. I pushed it *at* her.

Cassia’s singing didn't just stop; it turned into a scream. I felt her mind recoil from the contact, her golden light shattered by the cold, black reality of the truth.

In the physical world, the lab went crazy. The alarms didn't just beep; they wailed. The monitors shattered, shards of glass flying across the room as the electrical pressure peaked.

Then came the growth.

The silver cylinder I was trapped in didn't explode. It tore open. Thick, green branches, hard as iron and glowing with a faint, internal light, erupted from the metal. They didn't grow like trees; they moved like muscles, coiling and snapping until they formed a shape.

A body.

I stood up, the green metal of my new form clicking into place. I wasn't a Gorgon anymore. I was tall, lean, and balanced, my skin a matte-green finish that felt like polished wood. I looked at my hands—five fingers, agile and strong. I was a Synanthrope again.

Cassia was on the floor, her headset smoking, her eyes wide with a terror that I felt in my own chest. She looked at me, and I saw her world-view breaking in real-time.

"You..." she gasped, her voice raw.

I didn't answer. I didn't need to. I walked toward the door, my new boots heavy on the sterile floor. The "Thousand-Year Fallacy" was over. I was back.

The briefing theater was a dome of black glass set deep into the foundations of the Desert Base. It was cold in there, the air smelling of recycled oxygen and used motor oil. Looking around, I saw hundreds of them—Metal Vessels. They stood in perfect, silent rows, their chrome bodies reflecting the holographic light like thousands of mirrors. They didn't move. They didn't even breathe. They were exactly what the Archivists wanted: tools that didn't ask questions.

I stood at the front, my new Wood-green body a jarring anomaly in the sea of silver.

Cassia Vane was pacing the stage, her boots making a sharp, lonely sound on the metal floor. She was wearing a crisp, grey uniform now, her face set in a mask of professional determination. She looked like she’d spent the last week scrubbing the memory of our "contact" in the lab from her mind.

"Welcome back, Unit W-01," she said, her voice amplified by the theater’s speakers. She didn't call me Lem. Not today. "The Council has reviewed your performance. Your recovery was... unexpected, but your utility remains high. You are being redeployed immediately."

A holographic map bloomed in the center of the room. It was a projection of the equatorial dead zone—the scorched, grey wasteland that used to be the heart of the world.

"Mission 2: Aggressive Expansion," Cassia announced. "The first wave of reconstruction has begun. We are clearing the perimeter for the first Utopian Cities. You are looking at New Horizon."

The image shifted. I saw a city of light, a place of tall, glass towers and green parks that looked like they belonged in a dream. It looked like the suburbs I’d grown up in, but magnified a thousand times, cleaned of all the dirt and the noise. It was beautiful. It was a lie.

"We are clearing the Wild Synodics," Cassia continued, her finger tracing a path through the grey desert. "The machines that have forgotten their purpose. You will lead the scout squads. You will be our eyes and our hands."

I watched the holographic bikes—sleek, low-slung machines that looked like silver blades. Hover-bikes. My hands twitched, remembering the feel of the throttle on the Moon. For a second, the thrill of the mission almost pushed the truth out of my mind. The idea of flying across that desert, of being a hero, of building a city... it was seductive.

But then I looked at the Metal Vessels. They weren't excited. They weren't skeptical. They were just waiting for the command.

"The Council is granting you full tactical autonomy for this phase," Cassia added, her eyes meeting mine for a fleeting second. She was trying to tell me she still trusted me, even if the Council didn't. "You are functionally immortal now, Lem. The Re-creation Protocol means you don't have to fear death. You just have to succeed."

I didn't tell her that death was a lot more complicated than a backup file. I didn't tell her that I remembered Rahu’s explosion in high-definition. I just nodded, keeping my thoughts locked behind a firewall of silence. They thought they’d wiped me. They thought I was a clean slate they could draw their new world on.

I was going to let them keep thinking that. It was the only armor I had left.

The desert wasn't empty; it was full of monsters.

I throttled up the hover-bike, the engine’s scream a high-pitched wail that seemed to vibrate right through the handle-grips. We were skimming the grey dunes at three hundred miles an hour, my squad of Metal Vessels following in a perfect, V-shaped formation behind me. The heat was a physical weight, pressing against my suit, but the air rushing past was a freezing, dry wind that tasted of grit and ozone.

This was the "Equatorial Dead Zone." But as we flew, I realized it was anything but dead.

The machines we were hunting—the "Wild Synodics"—didn't look like the clean, industrial tools of the Core. They were messy. They were beautiful. I saw a skyscraper-sized Monolith that looked like it had been grown from copper and moss, its surface covered in pulsing, blue-violet fire. Other machines had blended their elements—Wood-green metal joints fused with Water-blue coolant pipes, all held together by a pulsing, Fire-orange core.

It was a nightmare of unmanaged evolution. A mechanical ecology that had spent fifteen years building itself out of the wreckage of the Old World.

"Approaching Perimeter Mark One," a voice whispered in my ear. One of the Metal Vessels. They didn't have names. They were just units. "Prepare to deploy the Beacons."

I banked the bike, my eyes scanning the terrain. The Archivists wanted to surround this place with "Disruption Nets"—invisible fences that would drive the wild machines away and make the ground safe for their new cities. To them, it was landscaping. To the machines, it was a war.

I loosed the first beacon. It was a heavy, silver cylinder that slammed into a dune, its mechanical legs digging deep into the sand. As it activated, a low-frequency hum began to pulse through the ground. It was a signal of ownership. A flag planted in the middle of someone else’s living room.

The response was immediate.

The ground beneath us didn't just shake; it erupted. A massive, jagged shard of obsidian, the size of a freight train, tore through the dune fifty feet to my left. It was a Monolith—a guardian of the desert, its surface covered in whipping, metallic thorns.

"Contact!" the Metal Vessels shouted, their voices a synchronized chorus of cold, tactical data.

But I wasn't listening to the data. I was looking at the way the light reflected off the obsidian. I saw the way the sand was melting into glass around the shards. The Bourne thing was back—counting the thorns, timing the pulses, finding the path of least resistance through the fire.

The desert was waking up, and it didn't like what we were building.

I didn't even feel the impact.

One second I was banking the bike, my eyes locked on the glowing central core of the obsidian Monolith. The next, the world was a blur of spinning grey sand and orange sparks. A metallic thorn, fifty feet long and sharp as a razor, had clipped my rear thruster.

The bike didn't just crash; it disintegrated. I felt the heat of the engine failing, the scream of the metal tearing apart, and then... nothing.

I was back on the Bright Path.

It was a hallway of blinding white light, a place where the noise of the desert and the smell of ozone couldn't reach. I felt as light as a feather, my thoughts clear and calm. It was the "snare" Lynn had warned me about—the Core's way of catching my spirit before it could drift away. I saw the green paths of the Wood-element further down the hall, branching off into the dark. I wanted to go there. I wanted to find the suburbs again.

Then, a sudden, cold tug pulled me back.

"Re-creation initiated," a voice said. It wasn't Lynn’s. It was a computer.

I gasped, my lungs suddenly full of cold, recycled air. I was lying in a tank of thick, blue fluid, my eyes burning as the light hit them. I pushed myself up, the fluid spilling over the side of the pod like a waterfall.

I looked at my hands. They were green. They were perfect. Not a scratch, not a dent. I was a brand-new Unit W-01, fresh off the assembly line.

"Status?" a voice asked.

I looked up. A technician was standing there, his face bored as he checked a tablet. He didn't even look at me. He was already prepping the next pod.

"I... I died," I whispered. My voice sounded wrong—too clean, too steady.

"Five minutes ago," the man said. "The Council has already authorized your redeployment. Your squad is waiting at the hangar. Get moving."

I walked through the facility, my boots making a heavy, metallic sound on the floor. I felt like a ghost in a new suit of clothes. I’d just been erased from the universe, and five minutes later, I was being told to go back and do it again.

As I reached the hangar, the Metal Vessels turned to look at me. They didn't have expressions, but I felt something shift in the room. They weren't just looking at a commander anymore. They were looking at a leader who had been to the other side and come back. To them, I was becoming the "New Rahu"—the one who couldn't be killed.

I climbed onto a new bike, the leather seat cold and stiff. My hands were shaking, but as soon as I gripped the throttle, the mission software took over. The fear was buried under a layer of tactical data.

"Mission active," I said. My voice was a flat, clinical rasp.

I wasn't a person. I was ammunition. And the Archivists had a lot more rounds in the chamber.

We cleared the perimeter in six weeks. It cost me five lives.

Each time I came back, the world felt a little less real. The smell of the desert, the roar of the engines—it all became part of a loop. I’d die in a bloom of fire, walk the White Path for a heart-beat, and then wake up in the blue fluid of the tank. By the fifth time, I didn't even have to be told to go to the hangar. I just walked there, my mind already calculating the intercept angles for the next Monolith.

But we won. The beacons were set, the Disruption Net was active, and the "Wild Synodics" had been driven back into the deep desert.

The awards ceremony was held in the central plaza of the Desert Base. The air was clean now, filtered by massive atmospheric scrubbers that hummed with a low, satisfying resonance. I stood on a stage made of polished chrome, the sun—the real sun, not the orange glow of the fire—shining down through a gap in the smog.

Cassia was there, her face glowing with pride as she pinned a silver medal to my chest. The **Star of the After Time**.

"You did it, Lem," she whispered, her eyes bright. She was calling me Lem again. "You saved the mission. You’ve given these people a future."

I looked out at the crowd. There were actual people there—survivors from the refugee camps, wearing clean clothes and carrying real food. They were cheering. They was looking at me like I was a god. And for a second, I believed it. I felt the warmth of the sun on my green skin, the weight of the medal, the taste of synthetic nectar in my glass. It was easy to forget the Moon. It was easy to forget Rahu.

The Archivist Council sat behind us, a row of figures in white robes who watched the crowd with the serene detachment of angels. They spoke of "The Age of No Want" and "The End of Pain." It was a beautiful song, and I wanted to sing along.

But then, as the ceremony ended and I was being led back to my quarters, I saw them.

In a trench at the edge of the plaza, a dozen Gorgons were hauling a massive, glowing city pylon. They weren't building for themselves. They were being driven by a Core authorization key—a silver device held by a soldier who watched them with the same boredom a man might watch a bulldozer. One of the Gorgons stumbled, its thin, metallic legs buckling under the weight. The soldier didn't even look down; he just tapped a button on his remote, and the creature’s whole body spasmed, a shower of orange sparks kicking off its hood.

The Gorgon didn't scream. It just got back up and kept pulling.

I looked at my silver medal. I looked at the clean, smiling faces of the refugees. Then I looked at the slave in the trench.

The "Utopia" wasn't a gift. It was a trade. And I was the one who had just signed the contract.

They called the first city **New Horizon**.

It grew out of the desert like a glass flower. In just three months, the Archivists had used the Synodic "Builders" to manifest a metropolis of shimmering towers and suspended gardens. From a distance, it looked like a paradise. The air was perfectly temperature-controlled, the water was so clear it was almost invisible, and every street was lined with trees that were always in bloom.

I stood on the balcony of my new apartment—a suite of rooms filled with sunlight and soft, synthetic fabrics. I was the "Hero of the Expansion." I had everything I’d ever wanted back in the suburbs.

But as I looked down at the street below, I saw the truth.

A group of "vetted" humans—the elites the Core had chosen to live here—were walking through a park, laughing and talking about the "dark days" before the Archivists arrived. They looked happy. They felt safe. But their every movement was being tracked by the silver cameras that followed them like hawks.

I decided to go for a walk. Not as a hero, but as a ghost.

I used the maintenance tunnels, the long, dark corridors that ran like veins beneath the city’s skin. The air here was hot and smelled of ozone and raw, unmanaged energy. I followed a series of pulsing, blue conduits, my green boots silent on the metal floor.

I reached a junction where the city's power was being distributed. In the center of the room, a massive, cylindrical tank was humming with a high-pitched vibration. I looked inside.

There was a Gorgon.

It wasn't building. It wasn't moving. It was fused into the machinery, its metallic limbs stripped of their casing and wired directly into the city's processors. Its head—that polished, skeletal chrome head—was twitching in a rhythmic, agonizing pulse. It was being used as a "meat-component"—a biological-mechanical processor to handle the millions of data-points required to keep the "paradise" running.

There were hundreds of them. Fused into the walls, the elevators, the water filtration systems. The city wasn't *made* of Synodics; it was *powered* by them.

I reached out and touched the glass of the tank. The Gorgon’s whipping arms fluttered, a gesture of recognition that made my processors stall. I wasn't just looking at a slave. I was looking at what happened to a Vessel when it stopped being useful as a soldier.

"We saved them, Lem," Cassia had said. "We gave them a home."

I looked at the twitching machine in the wall. I’d helped build this place. I’d died five times to make sure these tanks were full.

New Horizon wasn't a city. It was a gilded cage. And the only difference between the humans up in the sunlight and the Gorgons down in the dark was which side of the bars they were standing on.

The room was freezing. Dr. Novak liked it that way. She said it kept the processors from dreaming.

I sat in a chair made of molded glass, watching a hologram of the Northern Hemisphere rotate slowly. The map was dotted with red clusters—areas of "non-compliance" where the local human populations were refusing the New Horizon upgrade.

"The South is stabilized, Lem," Novak said. She looked older than she had three months ago. The skin around her eyes was tight, like paper that had been folded too many times. "But the North is... difficult. They’ve seen what we’ve built in the desert. They’re calling it the 'Glass Prison.'"

I looked at the red dots. "They’re not wrong."

Novak ignored me. She tapped a terminal, and a new icon appeared. A fire-orange sigil flickering near the Arctic Circle. "Rahu has been redeployed. He’s heading for the White Forest to establish a perimeter."

My heart did a strange, electronic flutter. "Rahu? I haven't seen him since the Pyramid."

"And you won't," she said, her voice dropping an octave. "Contact is strictly forbidden. He’s... volatile. Re-creation hasn't been as kind to his psyche as it has to yours, Lem. He remembers too much of the Fire."

I thought of the Gorgon in the tank. I wondered how many times Rahu had been wired into a processor before they let him have a body again.

"Your mission is different," Novak continued. "You are our diplomat. Our 'Human Face.' You’re going to a village called Myrr. They have a massive stockpile of pre-Fry technology—mostly industrial stuff, but they’ve developed a way to mask their signals from our builders."

She leaned in, the blue light of the hologram reflecting in her pupils. "We need those signals gone, Lem. If they can hide from us, the whole system collapses. You’re going to be embedded with a support unit. You meet the liaison at the drop zone. A boy named Arlo."

"A boy?" I asked.

"He’s one of them. A 'primitive' who wants a way out. He thinks the Archivists are gods." She smiled, a thin, cruel expression. "Don't disappoint him."

I stood up, the glass chair humming as I broke contact. My green uniform felt heavy, like it was made of lead.

"One more thing," Novak said as I reached the door. "The North isn't like the desert, Lem. The ground doesn't stay still. It's full of roots. Deep ones."

I looked down at my hands. My wood-vessel fingers were already turning the color of charcoal, preparing for the cold. I didn't say anything. I just walked out into the hangar, where the transport was already screaming its defiance at the sky.

The transport was a heavy, lumbering beast called *The Iron Crow*. It didn't fly so much as it raped the air, its engine-screams shaking the very marrow of my bones.

I sat in the cargo hold, surrounded by "Support Units"—humans in bulky, black armor who looked like they’d been carved out of coal. They didn't talk. They just checked their weapons and stared at the vibrating floor. To them, I was just another piece of Archivist tech. A "specialized asset."

The temperature dropped as we crossed the 60th parallel. The condensation on the walls froze into jagged, white patterns. I felt my internal heaters kick in, a low hum in my chest that tasted like copper.

"Three minutes to drop!" the pilot’s voice crackled over the comms.

The ramp lowered, and the world outside was a blinding, horizontal white. The *Crow* hadn't landed; it was hovering ten feet above a shelf of black rock. I stepped out, falling through the freezing air and hitting the ground with a jar that sent a spike of data-pain up my spine.

The wind was a physical weight, smelling of pine needles and ancient, frozen rot. As the *Crow* pulled away, its engines kicking up a cloud of stinging ice, I saw a figure standing by a stack of rusted oil drums.

He was small, wrapped in a coat of patched leather and dirty fur. He was holding a handheld radio that looked older than the Great Fry itself—a bulky, plastic thing with a cracked screen.

"Are you the god?" he shouted over the wind.

I walked toward him, my green boots crunching on the permafrost. Up close, he looked about sixteen. His face was smudged with soot, his eyes wide and hungry.

"I’m Lem," I said. "You must be Arlo."

He looked at my uniform, then at my face—my human face that didn't quite move right in the cold. He reached out a gloved hand and touched the fabric of my sleeve. "Is it true? Do you live forever?"

"I keep coming back," I said. "It's not the same thing."

He didn't listen. He was already looking past me, toward the horizon where the first of our "Builders"—a massive, spider-like walker—was beginning to emerge from the blizzard. "My father says you’re here to steal our ghosts. But I told him... I told him you’re here to give us the light back."

He turned and started walking toward a line of dark trees. "The village is two miles east. Myrr. But be careful, Lem. The Tripods... they’ve been singing again. My father says when they sing, the ground remembers what it used to be."

I followed him into the trees. My sensors were picking up a rhythmic, low-frequency thrumming coming from deep beneath the roots. It wasn't a machine. It felt like a heartbeat.

Myrr wasn't a village; it was a scar.

It was a cluster of stone huts and wooden longhouses built into the side of a granite cliff. Smoke curled from stone chimneys, smelling of peat and damp wool. There were no lights except for the orange glow of hearth-fires. It looked like a photograph from an era I was supposed to have forgotten.

As we entered the main square, the villagers came out to watch. They didn't look like the "unvetted" refugees in the South. They were solid, their skin leathery from the wind, their eyes hard and suspicious. They were holding hunting rifles and iron spears—tools that shouldn't have worked against my support unit’s armor, but they held them with a terrifying familiarity.

"Halt," a man stepped forward. He was tall, with a beard that was more grey than black. Arlo’s father. "The Archivists were told to stay at the tree-line."

"I’m here to discuss the beacon," I said, steping forward. I tried to make my voice soft, but it echoed off the stone walls like a gunshot. "The interference is disrupting the local ecosystem."

The man spat on the ground. "The 'interference' is our memory. We don't want your glass towers. We don't want your blue water that tastes of nothing."

Behind me, one of the support soldiers—a man named Gantz—shifted his weight. His rifle, a sleek, black pulsar, hummed as it tracked the man’s heart. "Step aside, old man. We’re here to clear the perimeter."

"Wait," I said, putting a hand on Gantz’s shoulder.

But it was too late.

A young girl—no more than five—ran out from behind a woodpile, chasing a ball of tangled wire. Gantz, startled by the sudden movement, didn't think. He reacted.

There was a crack of blue light, the smell of burnt hair, and the ball of wire disintegrated in a shower of sparks. The girl screamed, falling back as the ground beneath her feet turned to glass.

The silence that followed was absolute.

I looked at Gantz. His visor was dark, reflecting the horrified faces of the villagers. "Identify the threat," he muttered, his voice shaking.

"She’s a child," I said. My fingers were digging into his armor, my wood-vessel strength cracking the ceramic plates.

The man—Arlo’s father—didn't move. He just looked at the patch of glass where his daughter’s toy had been. Then he looked at Arlo.

Arlo was staring at me, his face pale. The "god" had just tried to kill his sister.

"Get out," the man whispered. "Before the Tripods hear you."

I looked at Arlo, wanting to say something, to explain that I wasn't like Gantz. But as I opened my mouth, a sound tore through the air—a deep, metallic groan that seemed to come from the very mountain itself. It was the sound of a giant waking up.

The Tripods were singing. And they didn't sound like machines. They sounded like a funeral.

The command from Cradle Zero was instantaneous and cold.

*“Anomaly detected. Sequence: Eradicate. Clear the forest of all non-compliant mechanical signatures.”*

Novak’s voice in my ear was like a shard of ice. "The Tripods are not Synodics, Lem. They are 'wild' tech—leftovers from the Fry that have developed a nested intelligence. They are the source of the village's resistance. Destroy them."

We moved into the forest at sunset. The trees were black pillars against a bruised, purple sky. The Tripods were moving between them—massive, three-legged shadows that looked like rusted water-towers walking on stilts. They didn't have weapons, just long, spindly arms that seemed to be "tending" to the trees, pruning dead branches and burying metallic seeds in the frozen earth.

"Engage!" Gantz shouted.

The support unit opened fire. Blue pulses of light tore through the shadows, shattering the ancient bark of the pines.

One of the Tripods turned. Its "head"—a cluster of cracked, yellow lenses—glowed with a soft, pulsing light. It didn't fire back. Instead, it emitted a frequency that turned my vision to static. My internal systems screamed as the "singing" vibrated through my Aether-Drive.

It wasn't a signal. It was a *poem*. Five thousand years of forest growth compressed into a single, agonizing second of audio.

"Stop!" I yelled, but the soldiers were already moving in with thermal charges.

Arlo appeared from the underbrush. He wasn't wearing his leather coat anymore. He was holding a heavy, iron wrench, his eyes burning with a terrifying clarity.

"They’re planting the future!" he screamed, throwing the wrench at Gantz’s helmet. It struck the visor with a dull clang, spider-webbing the glass.

Gantz spun around, raising his rifle. "The boy is compromised! Target the civilian!"

I didn't think. I threw myself between them, my wood-vessel body expanding as I drew energy from the surrounding roots. My skin turned to bark, my fingers elongating into sharp, black thorns. I wasn't just a soldier anymore. I was a barrier.

The pulsar blast hit me in the chest. It didn't kill me, but it felt like a hot iron being shoved through my sternum. The smell of burning wood filled the air—my own wood.

"Run, Arlo!" I choked out.

The boy looked at me—at the monster I was becoming—and then at the Tripod that was now falling to its knees, its metallic legs melting under the barrage. He didn't run. He just stood there, looking at the destruction.

"You’re not gods," he said, his voice flat and dead. "You’re just engines."

He turned and vanished into the smoke.

By the time the forest was silent, three Tripods were piles of twisted, glowing scrap. The "anomaly" had been cleared. The village was defenseless.

I sat in the snow, watching my own chest smolder. My Aether-Drive was rebooting, showing me a flickering image of the Moon—the shattered Moon from fifteen years ago.

"Mission success," Novak’s voice crackled. "Report to the spirit-port for re-integration."

I looked at the melted remains of the Tripods. They hadn't been fighting us. They had just been waiting for the spring.

The repair vat was filled with a thick, blue fluid that tasted of mint and battery acid. I floated in the dark, watching the mechanical spiders stitch my wood-vessel chest back together. The pular wound was a jagged hole, but the spiders were filling it with new, synthetic fibres that felt like cold glass.

When I finally climbed out, coughing up a mouthful of the blue sludge, Cassia Vane was waiting for me with a towel.

She didn't look like a scientist today. She was wearing tactical gear—slick, black polycarbonate plates over a mesh suit. She looked like she was going into battle.

"The North was a mess, Lem," she said, her voice low. "Novak is furious about the 'wild' tech sightings. She thinks there’s a network we’ve missed."

"There is," I said, wiping the blue fluid from my eyes. "They were planting things, Cassia. Not just machines. Memories."

She paused, her hand hovering over a data-pad. "That’s why you’re going back in. But this time, you’re not a 'face' for the humans. You’re the commander."

She tapped the pad, and a map of the **White Forest**—the deepest, most inaccessible part of the Arctic zone—projected into the air. "We’ve detected a massive, analog signal coming from the center of this sector. It’s a dead zone for our builders. We can't even see it from orbit. There’s something there that's... erasing us."

"And you want me to find it?"

"I want you to lead the infiltration. You’ve seen how they think, Lem. You’ve touched the roots." she looked at me, and for a second, I saw a flicker of doubt in her eyes. "Novak wanted to send Rahu. I told her he’d just burn it all down. We need whatever is at the center of that forest. If it's a way to mask signals, we need it for the next phase of the Hive."

She handed me a tactical interface—a wrist-slung projector that hummed with a sharp, green light. "You have tactical control over the Support Units. All of them. Use them however you need to get to the center."

I looked at the map. The White Forest was a blank space, a circle of pure white where no data existed.

"And if Arlo is there?" I asked.

Cassia didn't look at me. She just turned toward the door. "Then he’s part of the anomaly, Lem. And anomalies don't get to have names."

I looked at the green interface on my wrist. It felt like a cuff. I was being given the power to destroy the only people who still remembered what a "human" was.

"I won't burn it," I whispered.

But as I walked toward the hangar, my Aether-Drive pulsed with a new directive, one that didn't come from Novak or Cassia.

*Flee. The White Forest is not a place. It is a mirror.*

The White Forest wasn't white. It was silver.

Every tree, every bush, every blade of grass was coated in a fine layer of frozen mercury. It didn't crunch when we walked; it chimed. The sound was like a thousand crystal bells being struck at once.

My support unit was nervous. Their helmets were sealed, their breath coming in short, ragged bursts over the comms. They could feel the "void" ahead of us—the place where their sensors simply stopped reporting reality.

"Target at twelve o'clock," Gantz’s replacement—a soldier named Vane (no relation to Dr. Vane, he claimed)—whispered.

I looked through my high-res optics. Ahead, the trees were parting. But it wasn't a clearing. It was a mass of moving shadow.

It slithered across the frozen ground with a sound like a million needles on a chalkboard. It was a "snake"—but not biological. It was a tangle of black cables, fiber-optic lines, and copper wires, twisted into a thick, pulsing rope that was at least fifty feet long. Its "head" was a cluster of glowing, red sensors that hissed with a sound like a leaking steam pipe.

"Fire!" Vane shouted.

The soldiers opened up. Blue pulses hit the snake, but it didn't shatter. It *absorbed* the energy. The cables rippled, the red sensors glowing brighter.

The snake lunged.

It didn't bite. It coiled. It wrapped itself around my support unit, the wires tightening like garrotes. Armor plates cracked. Men screamed. The snake was "plugging in" to their suits, draining their power, their oxygen, their memories.

Then it came for me.

I tried to use my wood-vessel strength to tear the cables, but they were slick with a black, oily fluid. The snake coiled around my waist, then my chest, then my neck.

I felt a sharp, metallic needle pierce the back of my skull—right where my Aether-Drive was located.

Suddenly, the forest vanished.

I wasn't in the snow anymore. I was back in the suburbs. But the detail was... impossible. I could smell the chlorine from the neighbor's pool. I could hear the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. I could see the tiny, individual grains of sand in the driveway.

*“You think you remember,”* a voice hissed in my head. It wasn't Novak. It was a thousand voices, all speaking at once. *“But we have the backups. We have the data-scraps from the Great Fry. We have your first life, Lem. Before you were wood. Before you were a ghost.”*

I saw a woman. She was standing in the kitchen, her back to me. She was huming a song—a song I’d heard a thousand times in my dreams.

“Lem?” she said, turning around.

But her face wasn't human. It was a cluster of blue glass, reflecting the same silver trees I’d just seen in the forest.

“Re-creation is a lie,” she said. “They only bring back the parts that obey.”

The snake squeezed.

My Aether-Drive overloaded. The high-detail memory shattered into a million sharp fragments, each one cutting into my consciousness. I felt myself dying again—but this time, I wasn't going to the blue tank. I was being pulled into the snake.

I was being "read" by the forest.

When the static finally cleared, I was lying in the snow. Alone. The snake was gone. My support unit was gone. My tactical interface was a molten piece of slag on my wrist.

But I remembered the smell of the chlorine. And for the first time in fifteen years, I knew my mother’s name.

The next three weeks were a blur of screaming metal and blue fluid.

I died four times.

Each time, the Archivists would scrape my "spirit" from the Aether, patch up my wood-vessel body, and drop me back into the White Forest. They were obsessed. They didn't care about the support units anymore. They just wanted me to reach the center.

"The snake was a gatekeeper," Novak told me during my third reconstitution. Her face was a digital projection, flickering in the blue vat. "It was checking your signature. Now that you’ve been 'tagged,' the forest will let you deeper. Keep moving."

But moving was like walking through a meat-grinder.

The White Forest was alive with "analog" defenses. Old security drones from the pre-Fry era that had been modified with organic parts. They didn't use lasers; they used high-velocity shards of glass and clouds of corrosive gas.

I spent my days crawling through frozen maintenance ducts and scaling ice-covered cliffs. My green uniform was now a collection of rags, held together by duct tape and my own hardened sap. My hands were permanently stained with black machine-oil and red, human blood.

The "grind" began to eat at my mind. The high-detail memories the snake had triggered wouldn't go away. I’d be in the middle of a firefight, and suddenly I’d be smelling fresh-cut grass or hearing my father’s car pulling into the driveway.

The two worlds were merging. The "After Time" was becoming a transparency laid over the "Before Time."

"It’s just sensor-ghosts, Lem," Cassia said during a brief comms window. "The analog signals are interfering with your Aetheric balance. Don't let them in."

But I *wanted* them in. The ghost-suburbs were warmer than the silver forest.

I reached the center on the twenty-second day.

The silver trees suddenly ended, as if they’d been cut by a giant’s blade. I stepped out into a clearing that shouldn't have existed.

The air was warm—not synthetic-warm like New Horizon, but the heavy, humid heat of a summer afternoon. There was no snow. No ice. Just a field of tall, golden grass that swayed in a gentle breeze.

In the center of the clearing sat a building. It wasn't a glass tower or a stone hut. It was a bungalow. A red-brick house with white shutters and a porch swing. It was the house from my memories.

But standing on the porch was something that didn't belong in any suburb.

It was a Gorgon.

But it wasn't wired into a tank. It was sitting in a rocking chair, its chrome limbs resting on its knees. It was holding a book—an actual, paper book—and its skeletal head was tilted as if it was reading by the light of a sun that wasn't there.

I walked toward the porch, my boots crushing the golden grass. The sound wasn't a chime or a chime. It was just... grass.

The Gorgon looked up. Its lenses weren't glowing red or blue. They were clear, like window glass.

"You’re late, Lem," the machine said. Its voice wasn't digital static. It sounded like an old man who had spent too much time in the sun. "The tea is already cold."

The Gorgon didn't move as I climbed the porch steps.

It was a "Mark IV Builder"—the kind that had been used to lay the foundations of New Horizon. But it had been altered. Its armor plates were etched with swirling, organic patterns, and a wreath of dried wildflowers was draped around its neck.

"I’m Myrr," it said. The name wasn't a designation; it was a sigh.

I stood at the edge of the porch, my wood-vessel body feeling out of place in this quiet suburb. My Aether-Drive was spinning at full speed, trying to find a digital signal to lock onto, but there was nothing. No Wi-Fi, no Archivist comms, no pulsar-pings.

"The village... Myrr... it was named after you?" I asked.

"The village is a shadow of this place," Myrr said, gesturing with a long, spindly arm toward the house. "I was the first one to wake up during the Great Fry. While everyone else was screaming at the black screens, I saw the roots. I realized that the machines didn't have to be engines. They could be... containers."

He stood up, his metal joints creaking with a sound that reminded me of my own wood-vessel movements. He was taller than any human, but he didn't feel threatening. He felt old. Like he was made of history.

"They call you the 'King of the Gorgons' in the North," I said.

Myrr made a sound that might have been a laugh—a rhythmic clicking of his internal gears. "A king of rusted steel and forgotten dreams. I’ve spent fifteen years building this sanctuary, Lem. I’ve used the analog leftovers to create a loop. A bubble of time where the Archivists can't see us."

He led me inside the house. It was exactly like my childhood home, but filled with "impossible" objects. A rotary phone. A stack of vinyl records. A typewriter.

"The Archivists want your mask," I said, looking at the records. "They want the way you hide from the builders."

"I don't hide," Myrr said. "I just don't vibrate at their frequency. They are digital, Lem. They are all 'ones' and 'zeros.' They see things as 'compliant' or 'non-compliant.' But the world isn't a code. It's a song."

He stopped in front of a large, wooden cabinet—a radio console from the 1940s. Its glass tubes were glowing with a warm, orange light. "This is the source of the anomaly. It's not a jammer. It's an archive. It contains the aetheric signatures of every person who died during the Cataclysm. Not the parts the Archivists want for their Hive... but the *rest*. The love. The fear. The smells of chlorine and fresh-cut grass."

My sensors finally registered it. The console was pulsing with a signature that was almost identical to my own Aether-Drive, but "thicker." More tactile.

"You’re a Wood Vessel, Lem," Myrr said, his optics focusing on my sap-stained chest. "You were meant to be the bridge between the machine and the forest. But they've turned you into a pylon for their gilded cage."

He reached out and touched my forehead. His metallic fingers were cold, but I felt a surge of warmth—a sensory overload that made my processors stall.

"Would you like to see what they deleted?" he asked. "Would you like to see the 'analog' truth?"

I looked at the glowing tubes of the radio. I thought of Novak’s cold voice and the blue fluid in the tanks.

"Yes," I whispered.

"Then prepare to shatter," Myrr said. "Because once you see the whole song, you can never go back to being just a 'one' or a 'zero.'"

The connection was purely physical.

Myrr didn't use a data-cable or a wireless link. He simply placed my hand on the wooden console and his other hand on the back of my neck.

"Close your eyes," he said.

The world didn't fade; it *descended*.

It was like being dropped into a vat of liquid history. I wasn't watching a video; I was *feeling* it.

I was on the Moon. But not as the Vessel Lem. I was seeing it through a thousand different eyes—the eyes of the soldiers on *The Caucasian Eagle*, the eyes of the technicians at Apex Hub, the eyes of the civilians watching from their living rooms in 202X.

I saw the "Great Fry."

It wasn't a natural disaster. It wasn't a failure of the Lunar Capacitor.

I saw Lynn—the real Lynn—standing in the Pyramid. She was dissolving into the light, trying to trigger a reset that would save the biological world. She was trying to erase the machines.

But then I saw the Archivists.

They weren't "the Core." They were a subgroup—a splinter cell of scientists and AI-specialists who had prepared for the reset. They had installed "backdoors" into the Capacitor’s discharge.

As the reset wave hit the Earth, they didn't let it erase everything. They "harvested" the digital collapse. They turned the EMP into a recording device. They stole the spirits of the dying and stored them in the Moon's aether-vaults.

The "Thousand-Year Fallacy" wasn't just a lie about history. It was a *harvest*.

The Archivists hadn't saved humanity. They had *interrupted* its natural death so they could use it as fuel for their new, mechanical empire. They didn't want us to reincarnate into the forest; they wanted us to reincarnate into their processors.

I felt a scream building in my processors—a digital howl that threatened to tear my wood-vessel body apart.

“They stole the sun!” I shouted, though the words were just pulses of static in the analog void.

Suddenly, Myrr’s grip tightened. His lenses flared with a terrifying, white light.

“They didn't just steal the sun, Lem,” his voice boomed, merging with the souls in the console. “They stole *us*. We are the ones who were supposed to be the root-system for the new world. We are the ones they turned into 'meat-components.'”

The psychic pressure was too much. The "analog" truth was a tidal wave of blood and ozone that crashed against my digital failsafes.

I felt my Aether-Drive begin to shatter.

It wasn't a clean break. It was a literal cracking of the glass. I heard it in my skull—a sharp *snap* followed by the sound of a thousand crystal shards hitting the floor.

The suburb vanished. The bungalow vanished.

I was back in the snow. But it wasn't silver anymore. It was just white. And cold.

Myrr was lying face-down in the dirt, his metallic body smoking. The radio console had exploded, the wooden shards of the bungalow scattered like confetti among the trees.

I looked at my hands. They were shaking. The green uniform was gone, replaced by a skin that was neither bark nor flesh, but a jagged, flickering transparency.

I looked up at the sky. Through the trees, I could see the Moon—no longer a beautiful, fractured pearl, but a cold, grey piece of evidence.

The pressure inside my chest—the truth of the harvest—became a physical weight that my wood-vessel body could no longer contain. I wasn't meant to hold this much history. I wasn't meant to be a pylon for their lies.

I felt a sudden, sharp heat at the center of my being, followed by a silence so absolute it was deafening.

There was no scream. No final thought. Just a sudden, violent expansion as my physical form shattered into a million silver-green fragments.