The industrial corridor outside Matius's room was hot and trembling. Red lights blinked across the ceiling like the pulse of a dying heart. Eline coughed twice, the acrid smoke clinging to her lungs as they ran—her small hand clutched in Matius's bony grip.
They didn't speak.
Words were inefficient.
Down the hall, behind thick iron grates and cracked wall panels, screams echoed from the east wing of the orphanage. Someone was being dragged. Another was shot. The rebellion outside had given the Empire justification to execute indiscriminately. Anyone could be a rebel. Even children.
Especially orphans.
Matius already anticipated this months ago.
They turned sharply into an old supply shaft—abandoned for years, hidden behind a crumbling wall he had quietly carved open over many nights. Matius entered the darkness without hesitation. Eline stumbled, terrified.
> "Where… are we going?" she whispered.
He clicked on a dim green light fixed to his wristband. No answer. He didn't waste effort explaining what didn't need to be understood. But in his mind, a plan bloomed like a fractal.
This wasn't escape.
It was the first field test.
---
At the end of the shaft was a steel hatch leading to Sublevel D—an illegal sector beneath the slums. No guards. No light. Just rot and silence.
Matius slid open the hatch, dropped in, then reached up and pulled Eline down. Her body shivered from the sudden cold. A pool of dark water soaked her feet.
Here, beneath the Empire, was where his true work lived.
Rows of makeshift shelves lined the chamber—stacked with forbidden documents, broken tech, hybrid cores, ancient circuit diagrams, and weapons in early prototype stages. A mechanical skeleton sat half-finished on a slab of stone, its chest cavity glowing with a tiny unstable energy coil. Illegal. Extremely unstable. His greatest failure. For now.
Eline stared at the room, stunned.
> "What… is this place?" she finally managed.
He responded, softly: "The future."
---
Matius walked over to a metal case—coded shut, voice-locked, gene-bound. He placed his palm on the scanner. With a click-hiss, the lid opened.
Inside were blueprints.
Sheets of poly-synthetic fibre, unburnable and encrypted with reactive ink. They shimmered when touched. Thousands of lines, angles, equations, energy routing paths and symbolic logic danced across the pages.
They were not weapons.
They were revolutions.
One was labeled: Project Lazarus
Another: NetMind Hyperspine
And the last: Nexus Seed – Phase Zero
Matius spread the Nexus Seed schematic on the table.
Eline leaned closer. Her eyes widened.
> "You drew this?"
He didn't answer.
Because he didn't just draw it.
He dreamed it.
Every night for the last three months, he woke up with fragments of this machine in his memory—as if someone, or something, was feeding him knowledge through his dreams. It wasn't just advanced.
It was non-human.
---
Suddenly, Orthus pinged in his neural thread.
> "Alert. Imperial scan-sweeps initiated. Sector 6 perimeter breached. Four minutes until aerial thermal scan of Sublevel D."
He didn't blink.
> "Deploy shroud net," he ordered mentally.
A hidden coil inside the chamber spun to life, releasing a wave of electromagnetic interference that masked all life signatures and energy traces within a 20-metre radius. The Empire's drones would see nothing but static.
"Someone's coming?" Eline asked, trembling.
"Yes."
She waited for more, but he had already turned away. He was deep in thought—reading the Nexus schematic again, eyes glowing with mental acceleration.
He could see it now.
This machine—if built—could override every cognitive net in the capital. It could collapse the communication grids, paralyze the military's command flow, and rewire the very language of digital control.
It wasn't a bomb.
It was a cerebral virus.
A thought-weapon.
A seed to plant in the brain of civilization itself.
---
> "Why… why are you doing this?" Eline asked quietly, watching him.
Matius paused.
He didn't turn.
He didn't like talking.
But something in her voice cracked through the shell of numbers and probabilities in his head.
> "Because they burn things they don't understand," he said softly.
Then, almost to himself: "I'm going to build something they can never kill."
---
Above, the Empire raged against the dying slum. But below, in that silent room, a blueprint glowed.
And with it, a boy with no name, no history, and no mercy began building the first key to rebellion.
Not with armies.
Not with banners.
But with silence… and impossible designs.
---