The corridors of FLUFF-13 felt tighter than usual.
It wasn't the walls themselves — they hadn't changed. But the way people moved between them had. It was in the glances that darted too quickly, in conversations that ended a beat too soon when someone else walked by. In the way the mess hall was full of noise, yet not a single word felt real.
Luke noticed it first when he passed a patrol unit near the eastern storage block. Three rabbits, armed and armored, standing rigidly silent as he walked past. Not talking. Not joking. Just… staring ahead, as if waiting for a command that hadn't come yet.
When he mentioned it to Hrum during a nightly check on the surveillance logs, the rabbit merely nodded grimly.
"Condition Shadowwhisker isn't just for outsiders," Hrum said. "It's for the ones already inside."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning not everyone here is who they were last week."
Luke swallowed. "That's... incredibly comforting."
"Good. I wasn't trying to comfort you."
Hrum pulled a battered notebook from his vest — actual paper, rare and precious — and handed it over.
"Start recording everything. Every shift in behavior. Every misplaced patrol. Every anomaly, no matter how small. Do it by hand. No digital. If you log it into the system, it could be intercepted."
Luke flipped the notebook open. The first page was already filled — Hrum's tight, efficient handwriting.
Subject: Lt. Fenn.Change: Late to morning drills. Smiled during reprimand.Note: Fenn has never smiled at discipline before.
Luke looked up. "You think Fenn is compromised?"
"I think everyone's compromised until proven otherwise."
The next few days turned into a blur of whispered observations and quick glances. Luke noticed how the guards on Watchpoint Bravo rotated early without logging the change. How one of the radio operators — a chipmunk named Dally — started humming an old nursery rhyme during transmissions, off-mic but just audible enough if you listened carefully.
Hush now, burrow deep,Sleep away your soul to keep...
It gave Luke chills every time he heard it, as if the very air around the base had grown colder.
Meanwhile, the command center shifted patrol routes with no warnings. New faces appeared — supposedly transferred reinforcements — but no one could agree where exactly they'd been assigned before.
"Theta-2," someone said.
"No, Echo-4," another corrected.
Too many discrepancies. Too many smiles that didn't reach the eyes.
On the third evening, Luke sat with Hrum behind the old ventilation monitors, flipping through his handwritten notes under the dim light of a single battery-powered lamp.
"Something's wrong with the schedule in Sector Nine," Luke whispered. "Same guards every night. No rotation. Two weeks straight."
Hrum's ears twitched. "Sector Nine stores the cold archive backups. Old resistance records. Biometric data."
"You think someone's after the records?"
"Or deleting them," Hrum said, his voice dark.
A silence settled between them.
Luke closed the notebook, heart pounding louder than the generators humming deep beneath the base.
Across the hall, two soldiers passed, laughing too loudly at nothing at all.
"Whispers in the burrow," Hrum said under his breath, his voice almost reverent.
Luke looked at him sharply. "Starts?"
Hrum didn't answer immediately. He just stared down the corridor where the soldiers had gone.
"First you stop trusting your enemies," he said finally. "Then you stop trusting your friends."
The atmosphere was already cracking. They just hadn't realized it yet.
—
The first alarm hit at 3:17 AM.
Luke jerked awake, nearly tumbling off his cot. The shrill, grating sound of the internal emergency klaxon echoed through the base — but only once. A single blast, then silence. No repeating tones, no mobilization orders. Just one sharp, clean sound that left more questions than answers.
He glanced at Hrum, who was already on his feet, grabbing his blaster and strapping it across his back in one fluid motion.
"Sector Nine," Hrum said grimly. "That's the cold archives."
The urgency in his voice had no room for argument.
They raced through dim corridors, weaving through half-dressed operatives and confused techs stumbling from bunkers. The walls seemed to pulse with every heartbeat.
When they reached the secure archive wing, two guards were already posted, looking pale and jittery, their eyes darting to the corners of the hallway.
"What happened?" Hrum barked.
"Motion sensor tripped inside Vault 3," one of the guards said. His paws tightened nervously around his rifle. "But... when we checked, nothing was missing."
"And the security feed?" Luke asked.
"Glitched," the second guard said. He turned a screen toward them — the footage showed Vault 3's hallway, clear and undisturbed. No motion, no breach.
Except...
Luke squinted. For a split second — barely a flicker between frames — a shadow crossed the lens. A shape that didn't belong. Then it was gone.
"Rewind that," Hrum ordered.
They rewound it three times. Each time, the same — a glimpse of something moving too fast, too distorted, to recognize. No heat signature. No ID ping.
"Scrubber," Hrum muttered.
Luke turned to him. "What's a scrubber?"
"Prototype infiltration drones," Hrum said, voice low. "Designed to disrupt both physical and digital evidence. Leave no footprint. Just enough static to let you doubt your own senses. CarniCorp's best tech... but we thought they hadn't deployed them yet."
Luke's stomach twisted. "They're already inside."
Hrum nodded grimly. "Or they left a calling card. Either way, this place isn't clean."
Zina arrived moments later, dressed in full tactical gear, her presence slicing through the uncertainty like a blade.
"Report," she snapped.
Hrum gave the basics — the false alarm, the glitched footage, the suspected scrubber.
Zina listened without interruption, then looked around at the growing cluster of operatives gathering nearby, their faces pale with questions they were afraid to ask.
"Disperse them," she said sharply. "No public panic. I want rumors at a minimum."
The guards moved quickly, herding the confused personnel back to their quarters with reassurances of "system error" and "sensor recalibration drills."
But Luke could see it in their faces. The seed of doubt had been planted.
And it was already growing roots beneath their feet.
Later that day, when Luke checked the patrol logs, he found something worse.
Two patrols assigned to secure the cold archives had been reassigned at the last minute.
But no one could explain who authorized the changes.
Not even the system itself.
And in that silence, Luke realized: someone was erasing their own footsteps.
The first thing Luke noticed was the laughter.
It started the morning after the archive breach — bright, sudden bursts of laughter echoing through the halls of FLUFF-13. But not the usual kind. Not jokes. Not war-stress humor. It was wrong. Too sharp. Too synchronized. It buzzed through the corridors like static in the air, making the fur on the back of Luke's neck prickle.
The first incident came during breakfast. Luke sat at the far corner of the mess, picking at a ration square that tasted more like cardboard than nutrition, when he heard it.
Three soldiers, uniformed and cheerful, laughed in perfect rhythm. One said something Luke couldn't catch, and the other two erupted into mechanical chuckles. But their faces barely moved. Their eyes — glassy and too wide — never really smiled.
Across the room, Hrum sat motionless, tearing pieces of bread apart with slow, deliberate movements.
"Notice anything?" Luke whispered, nudging his tray slightly toward Hrum.
"Yes," Hrum said without looking. "Smile drills."
Luke frowned. "Smile drills?"
"It's an old psychological warfare tactic. Force behavioral responses until they become automatic. Sometimes it's loyalty chants. Sometimes it's smiling. Make the lie look natural."
Luke felt his skin crawl. "So they're... trained to act normal?"
"To act trusting," Hrum corrected, voice low. "So you lower your guard."
Later that day, as Luke moved through the checkpoint near the eastern barracks, he caught another incident.
Slate — a grizzled officer known for his grumpy sarcasm and perpetual scowl — now grinned from ear to ear, chatting animatedly with an armorer. When he spotted Luke, he winked.
"You look tense, buddy!" Slate chirped, clapping him a little too hard on the shoulder. "Smile a little. We're all on the winning side now."
Luke's blood turned cold.
He nodded awkwardly and moved past, trying to hide the chill that raced down his spine. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Slate's grin linger several seconds too long, frozen in place like a malfunctioning marionette.
Slate had never called anyone 'buddy' before.
He recorded the incident in Hrum's notebook that evening.Entry 42:
Subject: Slate.Change: Excessive smiling. Forced friendly behavior. Repeated use of unfamiliar language patterns.
By nightfall, the base seemed split into two groups.
Those who were wary.
And those who smiled.
At the security checkpoint near Hangar C, Luke spotted two more "smilers" — a pair of medics who usually kept to themselves, now laughing loudly while recounting some unfunny story about a broken food dispenser.
Their laughter didn't match the story. Their eyes didn't match their mouths. Their movements were stiff, almost rehearsed.
Luke backed away, unease gnawing at his gut.
He found Hrum outside the comms bunker, adjusting a field radio dish manually in the cold night air.
"We have a bigger problem than saboteurs," Luke said, voice low, glancing around to make sure they weren't overheard.
Hrum wiped grease from his paws, his jaw tightening. "They're not just inside," he said grimly. "They're active."
Luke's heart pounded louder. "You think they're communicating with someone?"
"I think," Hrum said slowly, "they're waiting for a signal."
Luke opened his mouth to respond, but a chill wind cut through the open yard, and for a moment, it felt like the base itself held its breath.
Because whatever that signal was… it hadn't arrived yet.
But soon, it would.
And when it did, the smiles would no longer be pretending.
The night crept deeper over FLUFF-13, swallowing the base in a darkness that felt too heavy to be natural. Somewhere beyond the concrete walls and the flickering floodlights, something unseen was pulling the strings — and their time was running out.
Luke tightened the straps on his gear as he and Hrum slipped through the maintenance corridors, sticking to the shadows. They had to find the source of the signal — whatever was activating the sleepers among them.
The auxiliary maintenance tunnels were barely more than crawlspaces, old maintenance routes predating most of the newer expansions of FLUFF-13. The air was damp and stale, heavy with the smell of rust and mold. Metal creaked with every vibration, making Luke flinch at shadows that flickered with the unreliable emergency lights.
"Sector Nine's back corridors link to the old server wing," Hrum whispered, his voice steady despite the tension crackling around them. "Before it was sealed, it had its own hardlines. If someone's transmitting, it'll be from there."
Luke's heart hammered against his ribs. He clutched the small recording unit tighter, his palms sweating despite the cold.
They crept forward, pausing every few meters to listen. No active scanners. No comms. Just ears and instincts.
At junction E-17, they heard it.
Soft. Muffled. A series of low, rhythmic clicks followed by a strange, whispered chant that seemed to come from the walls themselves.
Luke froze, adrenaline surging through him.
Hrum raised a paw — a signal: Stay low. Stay silent.
They moved closer, pressing themselves against a rusted vent grate where the sounds grew louder.
The words drifted toward them through cracked seams and ancient piping:
"Beneath the fur and behind the smiles,Soil remembers, soil smiles."
The cadence was hypnotic. Mechanical. As if the voices recited not by will, but by programming.
A pause. Then a faint, mechanical beep, like a coded confirmation.
Another voice answered — higher-pitched, distorted through layers of static:
"Transmission secured. Phase awaiting."
Luke's breath hitched.
He risked a glance through the grate.
Three figures hunched around a makeshift relay, cobbled together from scavenged tech and old server cores. Two wore standard issue uniforms. The third wore something... off. An old, neutral-toned jacket with no rank or insignia. Like a blank slate.
All three smiled.
Wide, vacant smiles that didn't reach their eyes.
They rocked gently as they spoke in unison:
"We are the seed.They are the harvest."
Luke's stomach twisted into a knot.
He leaned closer instinctively — and his boot clipped a loose bolt.
Clink.
The metallic sound sliced through the air sharper than any alarm.
Instantly, the figures stopped. The chanting ceased. Their heads turned slowly, perfectly synchronized, their blank eyes scanning the dark.
Luke barely had time to react. Hrum seized his arm and yanked him back just as something small and fast whirred past — a dart or a microblade, embedding into the wall with a soft thunk.
"Move!" Hrum barked under his breath.
They bolted, weaving through the narrow tunnels as more projectiles zipped around them. Sparks lit the darkness where blades scraped old pipes. The chase was eerily silent — no shouted orders, no cries of alarm. Just the relentless, mechanical pursuit.
Behind them, the smiling ones advanced. Steady. Inhuman.
As they reached the emergency hatch leading back to the active sectors, a sound like a soft chime echoed through the complex.
A single, musical tone — pure and chilling.
And Luke understood: the signal had begun.
Not a theory anymore. Not a fear.
It was happening.
The base was no longer theirs.
It belonged to the harvesters.
And the harvest had started.
The base shook under the weight of its own betrayal.
Luke and Hrum burst from the tunnels into the main hallways of FLUFF-13, lungs burning from the sprint, the metallic taste of fear thick on their tongues.
Alarms now howled properly — no more fake drills, no more polite warnings. A deep, wailing siren echoed off every surface, vibrating through the floor and rattling loose panels overhead. But it wasn't the sirens that froze Luke's blood.
It was the operatives.
They gathered in clusters through the halls. Dozens of them. Uniforms crisp. Boots clean. Heads tilted at unnatural angles. And smiling — always smiling — that same wide, vacant expression, like puppets waiting for their strings to be pulled.
They didn't attack. They didn't move.
They just... stood there.
Waiting.
"To the comms room!" Hrum barked, gripping Luke's sleeve and hauling him forward.
They sprinted, dodging between frozen figures. Some twitched slightly as they passed, like old radios picking up pieces of static. Luke dared a glance back — a mistake — and saw one operative's eyes roll back into empty whites, the smile stretching impossibly wide for a moment before snapping back into place.
The comms center was chaos incarnate.
Screens flickered in and out of existence, data streams corrupted and twisted into swirling symbols. Security footage jumped and cut — first showing empty corridors, then distorted faces too close to the cameras. Everywhere Luke looked, crimson glyphs pulsed on the displays, like heartbeats synced to something monstrous.
Zina was already there, surrounded by a few hardened veterans — soldiers Luke recognized by reputation, old blood of the Resistance. None of them were smiling.
"Report!" Zina snapped the moment they stumbled in.
"Subversion," Hrum panted. "Transmission triggered sleeper conditioning. Multiple units compromised. Not just field agents — support, logistics, tech crews. Whole sectors."
Zina's mouth twisted into something between a snarl and a grimace. "Knew it was coming. Didn't know it would be this fast."
Luke dropped to the nearest console, trying to make sense of the madness. He sifted through layers of corrupted data manually, hands flying over the cracked keys. Every few seconds, the system glitched — replacing command codes with one repeating phrase:
WE ARE THE SEED. THE HARVEST HAS BEGUN.
Luke's chest tightened. It wasn't just a slogan. It was a manifesto.
Behind him, Hrum yanked him away from the terminal.
"No more systems," Hrum said sharply. "Analog only. They're poisoning the net."
Zina pointed at an old schematic pinned to the wall, one few had touched in years.
"We have to shut down the broadcast manually. Root level access. Core server wing."
Luke's blood froze. "The old server wing... where the smiling ones are."
"Exactly," Zina said grimly. "We can't win by shooting them all. The code is wired through their heads. We cut the signal — we save who we can."
No digital override would save them now. No firewalls. No kill-switches.
Only raw courage and speed.
"We take the abandoned ventilation shafts," Zina ordered, outlining the path with a battered stylus. "Minimal exposure. No comms. Hand signals only."
"And if they see us?" Luke asked, voice low.
"Then we hope," Hrum muttered, checking his sidearm, "that they're still dreaming and not ready to harvest yet."
A pause settled over the group.
Then — crackling static from the overhead speakers.
A final, broken announcement stuttered through the base:
"Harvest initiated. Cleanse incomplete. Phase Two imminent."
As the voice faded, the smiles deepened.
Across the halls, the standing figures began to shift — not running, not attacking, but tilting their heads in eerie unison, as if hearing a music no one else could hear.
The base — their home, their stronghold — was no longer theirs.
And Luke, clutching his gear and notebook tight, knew deep inside:
This wasn't sabotage.
This wasn't infiltration.
This was conversion.
The true battle for FLUFF-13 had only just begun.