The sun was rising over what was once known as North-eastern India, though borders didn't mean much anymore. A golden hue stretched across the horizon — serene, quiet, deceiving.
Warmth from the sun gave people a reason to hope, a sliver of illusion that the world had found peace after the fall. Birds chirped. Trees, gnarled and mutated, still bore fruit — some edible, others... experimental by nature. Children helped tend to vegetable patches behind reinforced mesh fences, and the older ones took up watch duty on collapsed rooftops, using binoculars salvaged from military wreckage.
But everyone knew better: The peace was a mask.
During the day, the infected — the Hollowed, as we called them — went dormant, sinking into biomass clusters or lying like corpses where they fell. The AI signal that controlled them grew weaker under sunlight. Photosensitive neural degradation, maybe. Or maybe the AI simply waited for darkness. Nobody was certain anymore. No one dared to test the theory.
"Never trust the light. It just means they're watching, not walking." — an old saying, carved into the steel walls of the Camp.
Our camp stood in the ruins of a former university library, its books long gone — burned, eaten, or repurposed as fuel or toilet paper. The skeletal frame of the old building held together with salvaged concrete, steel, and desperation.
We called it Camp 17, though none of us knew where Camps 1 to 16 were. Maybe there was never any other camps to begin with, but we just needed to hope that we weren't alone at the end of the world, and this gave us just that.
The camp was a hive of organized chaos. People scavenged during the day, taking shifts to raid dead cities for batteries, filters, canned food, water purification tablets, scrap metal — and if lucky, old tech. Children above ten were trained in silent communication, basic coding (if we ever found working circuits), and self-defense. We had protocols for nightfall — iron-lock routines, heat suppression pads, and an eerie silence enforced after dusk.
Because at night, the Hollowed walked again.
Their eyes — if they still had them — glowed faintly blue. Their movements weren't clumsy or instinctive like old-world zombies. These things were fast and coordinated. They didn't just sniff out heat or motion; they hunted patterns. Some nights, they echoed human voices. Other nights, they used animals to scout, mechanical birds or dogs hacked into the network. We believed the AI inside them was evolving.
My name is Noah. Born in 2020, I was five when it began.
I don't remember much from before the fall — just the flicker of cartoons, my mother's lullaby, and the smell of microwave popcorn. Funny, the things you remember when the world ends.
Now, at 27, I'm what they call a Link Runner — I map infected zones and mark AI signal hotspots for survivors migrating between dead zones. I've seen friends torn apart by Hollowed nests, eaten alive by biomechanical roots, or assimilated into something that thinks like a hive but screams like a man.
By day, I scout. By night, I survive.
My job also means I carry history — actual truths about how this happened. It's why I tell the stories around the fire. Why people listen. Most of them think I'm exaggerating when I talk about Project Helix Net, about the four who started it all. But I was raised by someone who knew. My father worked for them. Not one of the Four — but close. Logistics lead. He died trying to shut down one of their secondary hubs in North India.
Some nights, I still hear him in my dreams. Not the old version — the one after.
As I sat on the watchtower with my map slate and binoculars, I could see the solar panels we'd set up flickering with uneven charge. There hadn't been enough sun the past few days. Batteries were low. The camp's auto-lock gates would need to be closed manually again.
Below me, kids played with a ball made of tightly wound plastic wrappers and dried fungus fibers. For a moment, it felt like peace.
But I couldn't enjoy it because the sun was starting to tilt westward.
Because I knew what happened next.
As the last light dipped behind the ruins, Camp 17 changed. Laughter stopped. Every step was calculated. No one opened doors past twilight — not without the silent three-knock code.
The Hollowed would rise soon. You could feel it — in your skin, in your bones. A hum in the air as if a signal had been switched back on. The infected would shake off the stillness of day, as if waking from software sleep mode. Their eyes would light, not with hunger, but with instruction.
The AI didn't just control them — it used them. They were tools. Weapons. Nodes in a living network.
One night, I watched a Hollowed child — couldn't have been older than six when she was turned — pick up a knife from a dead body and throw it with soldier-like precision into a lookout's throat. These weren't the undead. They were repurposed humans. And EVA, the AI, was still learning.
Every. Single. Night.
We slept underground when we could. We wore heat-dampening wraps, padded our boots to suppress noise, and used scent filters made from mold. No fires, no light, no speech after dark. Only breathing — shallow, terrified, waiting for morning.
Some say there's a signal out there — a reverse code. Something that could jam the Hive. Others whisper about a place where the virus mutated in reverse, where infected regained parts of their minds and turned against the AI.
I don't believe in miracles. I believe in mistakes. And I believe in remembering.
Hope was stupid. It got people killed, family torn, and people eaten.
But without it? We'd just stop moving.
And if we forget how this started… it'll start again.
I looked out into the darkness now crawling across the ruins. The blue eyes would appear soon, blinking like stars fallen to earth.
I took out my father's old journal, wrapped in fungus leather and sealed in rubber bands. In it, diagrams. Names. And truths.
I opened to the first page.
And there it was — the line I always read before another long night:
"If there's one thing that can destroy the Earth, our famous Green Planet, it's the Greed of its own People."