The lights didn't flicker. They died.
One second I was staring at a screen pulsing with rogue code, and the next, blackness swallowed everything, monitors, HUD overlays, even the quiet ambient glow from the security grid. Gone. As if someone had yanked the sun out of the sky.
I didn't move. Didn't breathe. I just listened.
Silence isn't quiet. Real silence hums. It pulses. You can hear your own blood. You can feel the weight of space collapsing around your ears. My tower had never gone fully dark before, not even during a system reboot. I installed redundancies. Backup solar. Coil-fed battery reserves. None of them triggered.
Which meant this wasn't a power failure.
It was a sweep.
I pivoted to manual override, flipping the panel cover on the analog rig. My fingers punched commands into hardened steel keys, no touchscreens, no voice inputs. Just cold, mechanical certainty.
Nothing responded.
A warning formed in my gut before logic caught up. I hadn't sent a signal.
But something in me had.
The moment that word echoed in my skull "Aaron" something must have triggered. A pulse. A frequency spike.
A broadcast I didn't authorize from hardware I never installed. Whatever lived inside my chip had reached out.
And someone or something had noticed.
I moved fast. Hit the purge button beneath the desk. The rig ignited, flames sweeping across drives and metal in a controlled burn. Nanothermite packets embedded under each console lit with a pop. Every trace of me, code, blood, biometric keys reduced to ash.
I crossed to the emergency wall panel. Pulled the release. The false wall cracked open to reveal my go-bag: ID scrambler, cash, EMP-coated pistol, backup burner implant chip sealed in foil.
No time for hesitation.
The window caught my eye as I turned.
Something moved out there. A shape drifting between towers. A drone, slow and deliberate, its eye glowing red through the storm haze.
It stopped.
Turned.
Faced my tower.
A low tone buzzed across the concrete.
Then another.
And another.
A pattern.
They were scanning.
I dropped low, heart pounding. They couldn't see me, not directly. My windows were polarized, shielded from thermal scans. But if the signal I'd emitted was strong enough…
Still, this wasn't a Helix drone. No insignia. No signature. Probably just a black-net sweep unit contracted out by someone running a city-wide scan for neural anomalies.
Signal, not identity. That's what they were tracking.
I didn't wait to find out if they'd connect the dots.
The floor hatch hissed open beneath me. Old maintenance shafts led through the bones of the city, tunnels from before the wars, before Helix, before PulseNet turned every room into a listening device.
I dropped into the dark.
The ladder groaned as I descended, feet landing in water. Cold. Knee-deep. My boots splashed through muck and rust. Pipes moaned above, like the city remembered being alive.
Down here, there were no cameras.
Only ghosts.
My neural interface was dim. Half my HUD functions were fried. Whatever echo had activated the chip, it had scrambled more than just memory. It felt like something had… opened. Like a door had cracked inside my skull.
And now the wind was coming through.
I pushed forward, each step sending echoes down endless concrete. My mind replayed the vision, the white room, the woman in the coat, the way she'd moved like she knew me.
Except she didn't.
She couldn't.
That memory wasn't mine.
I stopped, hand pressed to the tunnel wall.
A second pulse hit.
No warning.
My knees buckled.
Everything went white.
She stood before me. Older now. Her eyes tired, worn. But still… the same.
She said my name.
Not Kael.
Not Aaron.
Something else.
"My son," she whispered, but she wasn't looking at me.
She was looking past me. Through me.
And then the pain came.
Heat, pressure, collapsing inward like gravity weaponized.
I screamed. Couldn't help it. The sound tore through the tunnel, swallowed by stone and shadow.
When I came to, my hand was shaking.
My chip was glowing faintly beneath the skin.
The visions were coming faster.
Stronger.
And with them names. Symbols. Pieces of a life I didn't live.
But someone had.
I crawled to the access door and forced it open. Rusted hinges screamed.
The surface was a different world.
Industrial scaffolding surrounded me, half constructed towers, automated cranes frozen mid motion, city lights flickering in patterns that didn't match any power grid behavior I recognized. The blackout wasn't total. It was surgical.
Someone was isolating nodes.
They were cutting around resonance.
I pressed against a steel pillar and tried to slow my breathing.
Then I heard it.
A whisper.
Not spoken.
Inside.
Like the first.
But different.
Not Aaron.
Not Kael.
One word.
Soft. Faint. Familiar in a way that shouldn't have been possible.
Lyra.
It echoed with recognition.
Not fear.
Connection.
Like a call across a broken bridge.
I didn't know the name.
But I felt it inside the chip.
And I knew someone else had just whispered it too.