The holographic Tokyo dissolved, replaced by a sterile laboratory. A young woman in a lab coat worked at a terminal, her face familiar despite Ren never having seen it before. The same stubborn set to her jaw. The same way of frowning when concentrating.
"Dr. Ren Tanaka," Dr. Yamazaki narrated. "Recruited to Project Neither at age nine. Graduated MIT at fourteen. Ph.D. in dimensional physics at seventeen. Brilliant, driven, and according to her colleagues, 'ethically flexible.'"
"That's my grandmother?" Ren stared at the woman who looked barely older than him. "But she was just... she made amazing rice balls and told bad jokes."
"She also designed the dimensional anchors. Created the Neither detection system. And eighteen hours before the first breach, she vanished from the facility with her infant daughter."
The scene shifted. The same woman, older now, carrying a baby through empty corridors. Alarms blared. Security footage showed her entering a restricted lab.
"She knew," Mayfell said quietly. "She knew what was coming."
"More than knew. She'd run the calculations. Seen the cascade probability. Tried to warn us." Dr. Yamazaki's expression might have been bitter if it could still manage genuine emotion. "We didn't listen. The project was too far along, too much invested. So she took matters into her own hands."
New footage. Grandmother Tanaka working frantically, the baby—Ren's mother—sleeping in a makeshift crib nearby. She was injecting something into the child, then herself.
"Genetic modification was illegal. Unethical. Unproven." Dr. Yamazaki zoomed in on the injection. "She didn't care. She'd isolated the factor that made humans vulnerable to Neither exposure. And she removed it."
"She made us immune?"
"Resistant. The modification needed generations to fully express. She protected her daughter partially. Her daughter passed it to you with greater expression. You're the culmination of her work—a human the mist can't dissolve."
"But that doesn't make sense," Ren protested. "I'm nothing special. I failed university. I can't even cook rice properly. I'm literally the least exceptional human possible."
"Exactly!" Dr. Yamazaki actually showed excitement, an emotion that sat wrongly on her artificial features. "Don't you see? The modification wasn't about making you better. It was about making you overlooked. Invisible to the Neither. Unremarkable enough that reality itself doesn't notice you."
Elanil grabbed his hand suddenly. "You're not unremarkable."
"Thanks, but—"
"No. Listen." Her crimson eyes blazed with intensity. "You survived when everyone else died. You can read languages that have been dead for millennia. You're literally fulfilling prophecies just by existing. How is that unremarkable?"
"Lucky timing?"
"Stop." Mayfell's voice cut through his deflection. "Stop diminishing yourself. Your grandmother gave up everything—her career, her life, her world—to ensure you'd exist. Honor that."
The hologram faded. Dr. Yamazaki pulled up new displays—technical readouts, facility maps, streams of data.
"The dimensional anchors are failing because they require maintenance. Living maintenance. Human operators who understand the technology." She looked at them with those too-steady eyes. "We can't leave. Our consciousness is bound to the facility's servers. But you can reach the control bunker."
"Under the Great Tree," Ren said. "The message mentioned it."
"Dr. Tanaka's final contingency. Protocol Eight. Hidden in the code where we couldn't find it. But with the key she left..." She gestured to Ren. "You can activate it."
"What does it do?"
"We don't know. She encrypted it beyond our ability to crack. But the partial data suggests it's not about stopping the cascade. It's about controlling it."
"Controlling how?"
Before she could answer, alarms screamed through the facility. The lights flickered, shifting to emergency red. Through the walls, they heard their guide's voice, no longer pretending at human inflection:
"BREACH. BREACH. NEITHER MANIFESTATION IN SECTOR SEVEN. ALL UNITS RESPOND."
"The mist," Dr. Yamazaki said calmly. "It's found us. Ten thousand years of hiding, ended because we opened our doors." She looked at Ren. "I suppose that's fitting. Poetic even, if I could still appreciate poetry."
"We need to get back to the others," Elanil said, already moving toward the door.
"Wait." Dr. Yamazaki moved to a wall panel, revealing a hidden compartment. Inside lay a device that looked like a smartphone had mated with a piece of alien technology. "Dr. Tanaka's personal data unit. Everything she knew about Protocol Eight is in there. Guard it with your life."
"Why?" Ren took the device, which felt warm despite its age. "Why help us?"
"Because in ten thousand years, you're the first to make me remember what hope felt like." She smiled, and for just a moment, looked truly human. "Now run. The facility's defenses will buy you time, but not much. The Neither has waited so long to finish what it started."
Rating: 3/10 for escape probability, 10/10 for existential revelations, grandmother/10 for unexpected family legacy.