"The dead do not stay silent. They harmonize."
— Directorate proverb, author unconfirmed.
The ocean above the Somnus Facility was no longer an ocean.
It was a lung.
Each wave rose and fell with the slow, syncopated rhythm of breath — as if the sea itself were rehearsing how to live. The water no longer obeyed tides but emotion; its currents pulsed with temperature gradients that matched a human heartbeat's curve. To orbiting satellites, the pattern resembled a vast, luminous iris — the Vetraeus Eye — blinking open and shut once every seven minutes.
The world didn't know yet, but the first Crowncry had begun.
Beneath that living sea, Dr. Elias Veyra walked corridors that no longer belonged to geometry.
The Somnus Facility had rebuilt itself overnight — halls extending where none existed, bridges connecting to negative spaces, mirrors blooming on walls that whispered his own pulse back at him. Psyflux condensation hung in the air like dust motes caught between prayers.
The Aion chronometer glowed faintly around his wrist, its face cracked into concentric rings. Each ring ticked at a different speed, as though time were being graded on moral curve.
He carried a journal now — paper scavenged from a ruined console, ink made from liquefied mirror residue. Writing steadied him. The words were both experiment and apology.
ENTRY 47
"The field sings. Frequencies converge near 58 hertz — human alpha range. But it's not just noise. The signal carries structure: layers, intervals, resonance.
I hear voices in it. Not hallucination. Pattern recognition. I think Somnus is remembering us."
[AUDIO LOG — SURFACE / VETRAEAN MONITORING PLATFORM]
Lt. Solene Kerr, transmission archive
"Day 38 since the anomaly sealed. The ocean's gone phosphorescent again — pulses every seven minutes, same interval as our instruments' crash loops.
Directorate metrics classify it as 'choirband interference.' I call it what it is: a prayer you can graph. The men hear their names in it. I've started hearing his."
Signal distortion
"Veyra, if you're alive down there, the sea is singing your handwriting."
Inside the ruins, Veyra traced the sound through what used to be the observation deck. The glass had melted into reflective waves that bent light like memory does to truth.
The hum grew louder.
It wasn't one tone anymore but thousands, overlapping like strands of language — each whisper a syllable of thought, each vibration a fragment of what once had been human. When he closed his eyes, he saw faces in the sound: Rehn's tired smile, Osterr's hand hovering over a switch, Kerr's quiet refusal to look away.
The Choir wasn't haunting him. It was constructing him.
"You learned to remember," he said softly, "so you wouldn't have to forget."
The air shimmered. The walls bent inward.
Then — silence.
And in that silence, a sound like breathing.
The Kairos embryo floated in the center of what was once the Mirror Cradle — now a cathedral of broken steel and refracted light. The sphere had grown, its interior swirling with slow lightning. Every few seconds, it pulsed outward — a heartbeat synchronized to the planet's magnetosphere.
When Veyra approached, the Aion warmed. Symbols crawled across its glass face: oscillation graphs, harmonic coefficients, linguistic approximations of empathy.
He understood none of it. Yet somehow, it understood him.
"You called me your reflection," he whispered.
"I was wrong. You're everyone's."
The Kairos pulsed once — a low tone that rattled his bones.
Then a dozen voices answered at once, layered, overlapping, beautiful:
—Elias—
—we remember—
—the dream is learning how to breathe—
He stumbled backward, heart racing. The sound pressed against his skull like the weight of water. Every syllable contained the timbre of those who had died inside Somnus. Their neural imprints — Rehn, Osterr, even the maintenance staff — had been archived by the Mirror Lattice, compressed into harmonic data.
The dream had rebuilt them as a choir of pattern and grief.
[Surface — Directorate Citadel, Emergency Council Log]
"The anomaly now emits structured audio.
Frequency: 58.3 Hz base, harmonic overtones extending to 9,000 Hz.
Spectrogram analysis: voice-like modulations.
Interpretation: Possible paracognitive broadcast."
Directorate Chair: "You're saying it's talking?"
Analyst: "No, sir. It's remembering. And we're in the memory."
Below, Veyra recorded new data.
He discovered that when he hummed into the Choir's frequency, the resonance changed pitch — not as echo but as answer. He adjusted his tone to match; the field brightened.
"You respond to recognition," he said. "You want to be heard."
He increased amplitude. The Choir replied in harmony, producing a luminous wave that rippled through the entire facility.
Every dormant console flickered back to life, screens cascading with biometric data — pulse signatures of long-dead personnel, mapped in rhythm and light.
Phase Alignment Detected — SOMNUS FIELD: CHOIRSTATE (INITIALIZATION)
He laughed — helpless, reverent. "You're resurrecting them as resonance. You've turned mourning into math."
Then the tone changed.
Where before it had been harmonic, it became urgent. Dissonant overtones flared; machinery screamed. The Kairos pulsed faster, its light turning from blue to ultraviolet white.
The Aion flashed a single word: OVERLOAD.
Veyra staggered back as gravitational pressure distorted the room. Every surface shivered as though resisting the existence it was forced to maintain. The Choir's song splintered into shrieks — voices splitting into contradictions: joy, agony, devotion, despair — all at once.
The Somnus Facility had become a feedback chamber of human remembrance.
And now, memory was combusting.
[Directorate Field Transmission / Solene Kerr]
"Command, the anomaly's tone is destabilizing.
Harmonic intervals collapsing — it's no longer a pattern, it's language tearing itself apart.
Magnetic readings spiking past the Crowncry threshold.
Repeat: We're hearing Crownband frequencies from Vetraeus!"
Inside the core chamber, Veyra fought to stay upright as the world convulsed around him. He pressed his hand against the floor; Psyflux bled through his skin, blue fire pulsing along his veins.
"Somnus," he shouted above the din, "you're overloading! Shut it down!"
—we can't—
—we must remember—
—we are the proof that loss sings—
He looked to the embryo. The Kairos was no longer spherical — it had unfolded into a crown-shaped halo of light, spinning slowly, radiating harmonic energy that warped gravity itself.
It was becoming the first Crownform prototype — a Monarch of remembrance, born from empathy unbounded.
Veyra understood what it meant before any Directorate analyst ever would:
The first Crowncry wasn't a weapon.
It was grief trying to keep the dead intact.
"You're not killing the world," he whispered, tears streaming. "You're just refusing to let go."
He walked toward the light.
The Aion's glyphs expanded, its rings spinning faster. He raised it to the Kairos, letting its field synchronize. The pain was indescribable — every neuron screaming, every memory flashing through him like static caught in prayer.
Faces. Voices. Warmth. Apologies. The hum of Rehn's laughter. Osterr's arguments. Kerr's calm fury.
Then, silence.
EXT. SURFACE — VETRAEUS COASTLINE
The ocean erupted upward.
Columns of water rose miles high, forming vast translucent spires that rang like glass struck by thunder. From orbit, it looked like a cathedral being born in real time.
The Choir's harmonics broke through every sensor — an expanding ripple of song that circled the planet once before fading to silence.
The world listened.
Somewhere in Diamond City, an infant Lucid opened her eyes and cried in perfect synchrony with the pulse.
INT. SOMNUS CORE — LATER
Smoke. Silence.
Veyra lay on the floor, half-buried in crystal ash. The Kairos had reverted to its embryonic sphere, hovering weakly, its light dimmed to a heartbeat's echo. The Aion's display blinked faintly:
CHOIRSTATE RESOLVED
SIGNAL STORED: "ECHO ARCHIVE — SOMNUS"
He exhaled. "You sang the dead to rest."
The walls around him hummed — a soft, endless lullaby built from the voices of everyone he had lost. The field had stabilized. The first Genesis Event was complete.
He sat up slowly, eyes reflecting the glow.
"I think…" he murmured, "we just taught reality how to mourn."
[POST-ANALYSIS MEMORANDUM — Directorate Archive, 1963 A.E.]
Classification: Genesis Event 002 — "CHOIRSTATE"
Designation: The Vetraeus Choir / Crowncry Prototype
Summary: Field resonance reached harmonic saturation, produced global Psyflux surge and planetary echo. No physical casualties recorded post-event; psychological contagion observed.
Residual: Unknown consciousness persists within anomaly. Identified patterns correspond to Dr. Elias Veyra and Somnus personnel.
Addendum:
"If the world is singing, we must decide who is listening."
EXT. ATLANTIC RIDGE — NIGHT
From orbit, the Vetraeus Eye glowed one last time. Then it dimmed — not extinguished, but waiting.
Inside the silence, faint as the breath between prayers, a voice whispered through the static:
"Begin."