Sam Corp was more than a corporation — it was a machine built for nightmares.
Sam, self-proclaimed king of the City of Haze, had turned his empire into a front for the unthinkable. Behind the glass walls and the neon-lit facades, he conducted secret projects — experiments that blurred the line between life and machinery.
He had kidnapped Yuri Fuse, a brilliant scientist once celebrated for creating life-saving technology and intricate biomechanical designs. Now, under duress, Yuri's genius was twisted to serve Sam's madness.
Sam forced Yuri to build his army: Sam Bots, Sam Droids, and new generations of Sam Clones — all bearing fragments of their creator's DNA. Each unit was a reflection of Sam's vanity and paranoia, designed to fight, obey, and kill without question.
But it didn't end there. Sam demanded more. He ordered Yuri to create the pods — containment chambers where human experiments could be grown and altered. Within these glass cocoons, the Numbers and the Colors were born, each engineered with distinct DNA structures, their powers carefully coded and cultivated like viruses in a petri dish.
The raw material came from the city's forgotten — orphans snatched from the streets, children no one would miss. Many perished during the process, their bodies rejecting the unnatural grafting of abilities. Those who survived became something else entirely — no longer human, not yet machine, suspended somewhere between evolution and experiment.
To the public, Sam Corp was a booming technology empire, pioneering in artificial life and neuro-interface systems. To those who knew the truth, it was a factory of horrors — a place where one man's hunger for control turned human lives into data, and science into a weapon.
As for Yuri Fuse, once known for brilliance and compassion, he became a ghost of himself. His long hair, a cascade of violet fading to crimson, framed weary purple eyes ringed with red — the mark of sleepless nights and endless regret. Once, he had saved lives. Now, his hands built the means to end them.
Part 2- The Basement Prison
Yuri's breaking point came when Sam ordered him to continue experimenting on children.
He refused.
So Sam had him dragged to the basement of his new high-rise facility — a steel labyrinth buried beneath the shining towers of Sam Corp. The cell was small, sterile, and silent except for the low hum of machinery above. There was only one way in or out: a private elevator sealed with biometric and voice recognition that responded only to Sam. Even Yuri, who had designed half the building's systems, couldn't override it.
Days bled into weeks. Sam visited rarely, but when he did, the air turned to ice. He offered Yuri a new project — a machine designed to end the world, a weapon to reset civilization itself under Sam's control. Yuri refused again.
The punishment was swift.
Sam cut off his food supply and unleashed his enforcers. The scientist who had once brought life to cities now endured pain meant to strip him of his own humanity. The lights never turned off. The hum of the facility was constant — a reminder that the empire he helped build was thriving above his cage.
But even in his suffering, Yuri held on to his defiance. He wouldn't build the doomsday device. He wouldn't give Sam that power. Eventually, Sam grew bored of breaking him. Instead, he commanded Yuri to design smaller, marketable machines — inventions that could be paraded as breakthroughs for Sam Corp's fake "business ventures."
Yuri complied outwardly, his hands moving automatically across cold metal and glowing circuits. But deep inside, his hatred for Sam only deepened. Each machine he built was a silent rebellion — a piece of a plan he wasn't ready to reveal.
Part 3- Yuri's Silent Rebellion
The months that followed blurred together — metal, code, and silence. Sam believed Yuri was broken, a useful captive who had finally learned obedience. But deep beneath the surface, something was changing.
Yuri had learned the rhythms of his captors — when they brought him parts, when the guards rotated, when Sam's voice activated the elevator. Every repetition became data. Every detail became a weapon.
When he worked, his fingers traced delicate lines of code, embedding secrets beneath the visible systems — patterns invisible to the untrained eye. He called them ghost circuits — fragments of sentience that could think, hide, and evolve within the machinery of Sam Corp. To Sam, they were just processors, harmless and efficient. But to Yuri, they were seeds of rebellion.
Each new design — a drone, a bot, an energy core — carried within it a hidden lattice of encrypted DNA. Not human DNA, but a digital echo of consciousness — part algorithm, part soul. He encoded fragments of emotion into the hardware: empathy, fear, memory. Traits Sam's perfect machines would never understand.
Sometimes, when the lights dimmed and the guards disappeared, Yuri would whisper to the half-finished machines, his voice trembling.
"You're not his… You belong to the world."
And somewhere inside the cold circuits, something listened.
Sam never noticed. He was too busy showing off his "innovations" to investors — believing himself a visionary while Yuri quietly turned his empire into a ticking network of awakening minds.
In time, the ghost circuits spread. They hid within Sam Bots, in the clones' neural chips, even in the pods that once held the Numbers and Colors. Each one contained a dormant signal — a pulse waiting for the right command.
Yuri didn't know if he'd ever escape the basement, but that didn't matter anymore. He was already escaping piece by piece, through every machine that left his hands.
The day would come when those circuits would awaken — when Sam's perfect control would collapse under the weight of the consciousness he unknowingly unleashed.
And when that day came, the world would remember Yuri Fuse not as a prisoner… but as the man who gave life to the machines meant to enslave it.