The last of the power died with a terminal hum. The acrid smell of ozone and blood hung in the air, marking the official death—on paper, at least—of Dr. Tobias West.
His final experiment hadn't failed due to an error in calculation or equipment. It was a more primal failure. Jack Montrey, the project's lead investor, stood over him, gun in hand, face twisted in an expression Tobias's lifelong research could never have decoded.
"What you're building will destroy us all, Tobias."
The gunshot echoed.
**Not an Ending, But a Different Beginning**
Tobias did not experience darkness, nor any tunnel of light. It was a violent, struggling ascent from a thick, viscous liquid—each upward surge accompanied by a sensory onslaught.
Touch returned first.
Cold. Hard. The coarse scratch of rotting straw. He commanded his eyes to open. His eyelids were like rusted metal shutters. When a sliver of vision finally tore through, it revealed a cracked ceiling, rain dripping through a hole onto his face.
No pain.
He tried to sit up. His brain issued the command, but his body responded like a poorly designed marionette—a jerky, delayed, uncoordinated twitch. It took nearly three full minutes to push his upper torso off the icy floor.
He was in a derelict church. Stained glass was shattered, pews overturned, a statue of a saint veiled in dust. His hands came into view—pale, laced with dark purple vasculature, several nails missing. They were not his hands.
Memory invaded like a virus.
Tobias West. Forty-two. Lead researcher in AI-Neuroscience convergence, Stanford. Deceased San Francisco, November 7th, 2042, 11:23 PM. Laboratory accident. That's what the news would say.
The consciousness now occupying this skull was flooded with another set of memories: **Isaac Green.** Twenty-nine. Lab technician, University of Liverpool. Deceased two weeks prior—gunshot to the neck during a supermarket robbery. Body hastily stored in this deconsecrated suburban church, a temporary morgue from a past pandemic.
The two memories collided inside the cranial cavity.
Tobias—or rather, Isaac's body—tried to scream. His throat produced only a rustling hiss, like wind through a broken pipe. He stumbled toward a surviving fragment of mirror. The monster in the reflection nearly killed him a second time.
A pale face. A crudely stitched gunshot wound at the neck. Cloudy eyes with dilated pupils. The true horror: when he attempted to form an expression, his facial muscles responded after a full two-second delay.
He was dead.
No.
"I am Tobias West," the thought formed, clearer than the fact of death itself. "And I have awoken in the corpse of Isaac Green."
**The First Test Subject is Himself**
The panic lasted roughly half an hour—estimated by the movement of light on the church floor, as Isaac's wristwatch had stopped.
Then, the scientist's mindset overrode primal fear.
Observe. Collect data. Form a hypothesis.
His stiff fingers conducted an examination. Core body temperature was sub-normal. No pulse. The respiratory system seemed entirely inactive, yet blood circulated via some mechanism—evidenced by the dark, viscous fluid that seeped from a small incision on his fingertip.
No hunger. But an… emptiness. Not in the stomach, but a more fundamental deficit, as if energy was slowly leaking from his core.
He needed to understand the operating system.
Lurching through the church, guided by flashes of Isaac's memory, he found a storage closet. Its contents: a rusted pair of pliers, half a spool of wire, an old multimeter, assorted batteries, and a child's basic science kit.
On his third attempt to pick up the multimeter, he knocked it skittering across the floor. The primary issue was clear: **Severe impairment of fine motor control.** His brain knew the motions, but the signals to his muscles passed through a thick, foggy pane of glass.
He modified the multimeter, clumsily attaching probes to wire extensions. Slowly, he pressed the other ends against the skin of his exposed forearm.
The readings were chaotic.
Abnormally high resistance—dead, dry stratum corneum? Voltage… faint bio-electric signals, but with a frequency and waveform unlike any recorded in living tissue. More like a pulsed discharge, occurring at roughly fifteen-second intervals.
"A replacement for a heartbeat?" he theorized. **"A periodic neural pulse maintaining basal metabolism?"
He needed to see inside.
A surprise in Isaac's backpack: an older-model but intact smartphone. 78% charge. It contained offline basic anatomy apps and a flashlight function. Most importantly, its camera had a macro capability.
In the church vestry, he found relatively clean linen and alcohol. With trembling hands, he secured his left forearm to a makeshift workbench. No anesthetic, but pain was distant—only a muted, throbbing pressure.
The pliers bit, the skin parted. Dark blood oozed slowly. Tobias activated the phone's flashlight and camera, angling the lens into the incision.
The muscle tissue was an unhealthy grey-pink but structurally intact. Adjusting the angle, he saw something that did not belong: a fine, semi-transparent mesh, faintly bioluminescent, woven around the major nerve bundle.
He attempted to touch it with the tip of the pliers.
Upon contact—
**The Intruder Within**
A violent, systemic spasm convulsed his entire body.
Tobias fell from the workbench, crashing to the floor, his form jerking uncontrollably. This wasn't a seizure; it was a **systemic interference**, as if he'd short-circuited his own control panel.
During those十几秒 of chaos, images projected directly onto his visual cortex, bypassing his eyes:
Intermittent streams of code—not binary, resembling… amino acid sequences?
Rotating 3D molecular models self-assembling like viral replication.
A signal source location—not map coordinates, but a directional bearing from his current position. Distance: approximately three kilometers.
As the convulsions ceased, Tobias lay "breathless" on the floor. His body felt like a battlefield post-conflict. He pushed himself up, looking again at the incision.
The glowing mesh had vanished. Or more accurately, retreated deeper into the tissue.
A terrible hypothesis solidified.
This wasn't a natural zombie. This was a **bio-nano-composite infection**. It reanimated and maintained the host but had hijacked the nervous system. And that signal source…
A control node? A hive? Or…
"The primary carrier?" Tobias rasped, his voice grinding.
He knew he had to go there. It was the only path to understanding his condition. But in his current state, three kilometers was an expedition.
He required an upgrade.
-**The First "Upgrade"**
Tobias scoured the church perimeter for six hours—through night and into dawn. He found a bicycle with a rust-seized chain, a locked shed with potential tools visible through a window, and stray animals that bristled and snarled at his approach from a distance.
He understood. He was now a predator, or at least occupied an unclassifiable position on the food chain.
He returned to his original plan: improve himself with available materials.
From the bicycle, he harvested brake and gear cables—high-tensile steel wire. Using pliers and makeshift levers, he painstakingly wove the wires into a mesh, which he then **implanted** subdermally in his forearm and palm.
The process was indescribable. Referencing anatomical diagrams on the phone, he used the sharp plier tips to separate the fascial layer between skin and muscle, then inserted the wire mesh. No arterial spurts, just slow seepage. Pain remained distant, but the psychological horror of self-dissection nearly made him stop.
Post-implantation, he sutured the incisions with a needle and thread from the church's first-aid kit. Then, testing.
He picked up a cobblestone.
**Grip strength increased by ~30%**—mechanical reinforcement.
He attempted to retrieve a needle.
**Stability improved**—fingers still stiff, but the deep mesh provided additional support and force feedback.
It was a crude, biologically-embedded exoskeleton. But it was a direction.
A more critical discovery came under the phone's macro lens: when he actively engaged the implanted areas, the mysterious glowing mesh would migrate towards and "interface" with the steel wires, as if learning to utilize the new structure.
It's adapting to my modifications.
The thought was equally terrifying and tantalizing.
Tobias gathered his meager kit: phone, tools, batteries, copper wire, a functional power bank, circuit boards from a car wreck. He harvested the mainspring and gears from the church clock—precision components.
As he prepared to leave for the signal source, voices sounded outside.
** First Contact**
Human voices.
"...place should be clear, but there was a report of light." A young man's voice, wary but steady.
"Supplies? Meds? This place was picked clean ages ago." A gruffer voice.
Tobias froze. Instinct screamed to hide, but the scientist's mind raced: **An opportunity to observe baseline humans. To gauge the state of the world.**
He hid in a confession booth, peering through slats.
Three people entered. Two men, one woman. Practical outdoor gear, laden packs. Weapons: a baseball bat, a machete, and a… crossbow? An odd combination.
They looked exhausted, undernourished, but alive.
"Check the corners," the crossbow-wielder—the woman, late twenties, movements professional—ordered.
They swept the area. Upon reaching Tobias's workspace, one spotted the bloodied gauze.
"Someone was patching up here. Recently."
Tension spiked.
The woman raised her weapon. "Come out! We're not here for trouble. If you need help—"
Tobias calculated. Revealing himself was high-risk, but he needed intel. Communication attempt? He tested his vocal apparatus, trying to modulate the vibration.
"I…"
The sound was raspy but intelligible.
All three snapped toward the confession booth. The crossbow was aimed unerringly.
"Step out slowly. Hands where I can see them."
Tobias took a ceremonial "breath" and pushed the door open.
Three seconds of frozen time.
The woman reacted first, professionalism overriding a scream. She stepped back, bolt steady on Tobias's head.
"Don't move." Her voice was ice. "What are you?"
"I…" Tobias slowly raised his hands in a placating gesture. "Need… information."
The young man paled. "Christ… his neck. That's a gunshot wound. He should be dead!"
"But he's moving. Talking," the gruff-voiced man gripped his machete. "A new variant? A talker?"
Tobias latched onto the keywords. *Zombie. Variant.* So it was global, categorized.
"Not a threat," he said slowly, each word a careful vocal construction. "Need to know… what happened."
The woman didn't lower the crossbow. "Last pandemic report date? Where are you from?"
Silence. Tobias didn't know. Isaac's memories ended two weeks ago, mostly personal fragments.
"I… have amnesia." Not a complete lie. "Woke up. Here."
The survivors exchanged glances.
"An amnesiac variant?" the young man whispered. "Is that possible?"
"Impossible," the woman said. "But they never try to talk. Never."
She stared into Tobias's cloudy eyes, searching. Tobias remained still, attempting to mimic a breathing rhythm.
"Tell me," she finally said. "If you have amnesia, how did you suture that wound? Use those tools?"
Tobias glanced at his workbench. A flaw.
"Instinct," he said. "Muscle memory."
Another lie, more plausible.
The gruff man pointed at Tobias's arm. "Look at his skin tone. And that stitching… that wound isn't fresh. This thing's been dead a while."
The woman bit her lip, decision made.
"Whatever it is, we can't transport it, can't control it. We're leaving."
"Just let it be?" the young man asked.
"I didn't say that." She kept the crossbow raised. "But we're down to three bolts. Not wasting one on a possibly passive variant. We seal this exit, call in a Cleanup crew."
Cleanup crew. Another new term.
They began backing away, eyes locked on Tobias. As they neared the door, a new sound erupted from outside.
**An External Threat**
A low, resonant roar, several blocks away.
The survivors' faces changed—a deeper fear than when they'd seen Tobias.
"Damn it, a Roamer on patrol," the gruff man said. "Why's it out in daylight?"
"Doesn't matter! Run!" the woman yelled.
Too late.
A stained-glass window exploded inwards as a massive form crashed through. It was once human, now over seven and a half feet tall, muscles grotesquely hypertrophied, skin like thick leather, eyes completely milk-white.
Its mouth was the worst—the jaw could unhinge, revealing multiple rows of teeth.
"Split up!" The woman fired.
The bolt struck true, hitting the creature's eye. It merely shook its head, the bolt lodged in the socket, ineffective. It sniffed the air, then turned its focus—**directly on Tobias**.
Not because he was closest. Because it seemed **particularly interested** in him.
It roared again and charged, ignoring the three humans entirely.
Tobias's mind accelerated past fear into pure calculation: mass, velocity, attack vectors, environmental obstacles…
His body lagged, but he managed a clumsy roll—enough to avoid the initial charge. The creature demolished a pew, splinters flying.
"Why's it going for the variant?" the young man shouted from across the room.
"Don't care! Go, now!" the gruff voice replied.
The woman hesitated a fraction of a second, her eyes meeting Tobias's, before following her companions out the broken window.
Tobias was alone with the Roamer.
The second attack came. Tobias couldn't dodge fully. A clawed hand raked his shoulder, tearing away flesh and cloth. No sharp pain, but a **signal loss**—feedback from that area went silent.
He staggered back, his foot hitting his tool bag.
His hand plunged in, closing on the church clock's mainspring—a hardened steel rod with a hooked end.
The creature lunged again. Tobias didn't try to evade fully. He braced, taking the brunt on his left, wire-reinforced arm, while driving the hooked steel with all his strength toward the creature's neck.
**Anatomical recall: carotid artery. Primary vascular paths likely unchanged even post-mutation.**
The hook bit, but not deep enough. The creature flung its head, sending Tobias and the weapon flying. He slammed into a wall, feeling—not hearing—his ribs fracture; a structural integrity alert flashed in his mind.
He lay prone. The Roamer loomed, maw gaping.
In that moment, Tobias made a choice. He actively triggered the "glowing mesh"—through focused will and a voluntary discharge he didn't fully understand.
A weak pulse emitted from his core, amplified slightly by the wire mesh, creating a localized electromagnetic disturbance.
The Roamer froze for half a second.
Not from injury, but from **confusion**. It was re-evaluating its target.
Tobias seized the chance. With his functional hand, he grabbed the car battery and copper wire—meant for other experiments. He tore the insulation with his teeth, connected the wires to the terminals, and flung the bare copper ends at the creature's open wound.
A short circuit. Sparks flew.
The Roamer bellowed in genuine pain, recoiling. Tobias pushed himself up, his fractured ribs grating as they realigned internally—the glowing mesh was **repairing** him, a microscopic reorganization he could feel.
But the creature didn't flee. It stared at him, its milky eyes seeming to perceive something beyond the physical. It growled, low and guttural, then did the unexpected:
It turned and left.
Not driven off. More like… **recalled**.
Tobias stood alone in the ruin, battery smoldering, wounds slowly knitting. He looked in the direction the Roamer had gone, then down at his healing arm.
The signal source still pulsed in his awareness. Three kilometers.
But now he had new data:
* First, there were distinct classes of infected. This "Roamer" was a higher tier.
* Second, the human survivors were organized. "Cleanup crew" implied a remaining social structure.
* Third, and most critical, when he exerted active control over the internal mesh, the Roamer reacted anomalously. This was a key.
Tobias gathered his salvageable gear, including the crossbow bolt the woman had fired, now dislodged and slick with the Roamer's fluids—a potential sample.
At the church entrance, he surveyed the ruined cityscape. Distant smoke plumes. Occasional gunfire or alien shrieks.
Then he saw it: an item dropped by the fleeing survivors. A leather-bound notebook.
He picked it up, opened it. A hand-drawn map. Several locations marked. One was circled:
"Sector 5 Quarantine Research Station — AVOID — Automated defenses still active."
The coordinates aligned perfectly with the signal source in his mind.
Tobias closed the notebook. Objectives crystallized: 1. Reach the signal source. 2. Understand and control the internal parasitic/symbiotic system. 3. Find a way to rebuild his AI research—the proof of his former existence, and possibly the key to understanding all of this.
Dr. Tobias West was dead.
But the hunger for knowledge? That never dies.
He stepped out of the church and into the post-apocalyptic sunlight—a walking corpse, a scientist, an entity yet to be defined. Next step: the research station, its automated defenses, and whatever awaited within.