Scene One: Clinic Hours
The San Francisco General Hospital hummed with the usual sterile monotone, a soft buzz beneath the sound of murmuring voices and distant monitor beeps.
The world ran on precise schedules and disinfected order within San Francisco's walled sectors.
Dr. Brian Mosbey sat across from his last patient of the day. This middle-aged man was clutching his abdomen with quite the anxiety of someone afraid of being told that he's dying.
"I'm telling you, doc," the man said, shifting uncomfortably in the examination chair. "Every time I eat something spicy, it's like this burning shoots up my chest. Feels like a damn heart attack."
Brian gave a slight nod, his gaze steady but not invasive. His presence made patients feel seen but not studied.
"Any shortness of breath?" Brian asked.
"No. Just the burn. And sometimes… a weird taste, like metal. And lately I've been coughing a little more at night."
Brian leaned back, hands folded. "And you've had this before?"
"On and off. One clinic told me it might be my heart. They ran some scans. All of them were clear."
"Did they ask about your meals?"
The man blinked. "Not really."
Brian offered the faintest hint of a smile. "You're not dying. It's not your heart. It's your stomach. And it's getting too cozy with your esophagus."
The man looked puzzled.
"Classic GERD — gastroesophageal reflux disease. It can sometimes mimic cardiac symptoms, especially when acid levels rise after eating. The cough? That's the acid irritating your throat and airways. Happens more when you lie down."
"You serious? That's all it is?"
Brian scribbled a short prescription with clean, practiced strokes: "I'll put you on a PPI. Avoid spicy foods and caffeine, and eat early in the evening for a few weeks. Let's see if the symptoms drop."
He tore the page off and handed it to the man.
"I hope you won't have to go any further after this," he added, standing up with a soft pen click. "But if anything feels off, really off, then come back. I mean it."
The patient stood, relief plain in his posture. "Thanks, Doc. Really."
Brian gave a short nod, then exited the exam room into the low-lit corridor of the clinic wing.
As he reached the front desk, he signed off the last of his patient summaries.
"Clinic hours over?" asked a staff nurse from behind the counter.
"Yes. For now." Brian smiled, faintly. "See you tomorrow."
He turned to go.
And that's when she collided with him.
A blur of navy scrubs and strawberry shampoo, the nurse stumbled forward with a startled gasp. Miss Cruz, known for her sharp eyes and habit of rushing on corners, had practically flung herself into his chest.
"Oh my God — I'm so sorry, Dr. Mosbey."
He steadied her instinctively. "It's fine, Miss Cruz," he said, releasing her gently.
She blinked, flustered but managing a laugh. "I wasn't looking — really, I'm so — well, can I… maybe buy you a coffee? To make up for it?" She glanced up with a hopeful smile. "There's a new place outside Wall Junction Five. Decent espresso."
Brian's expression didn't falter. If he was caught off guard, he didn't show it.
"I appreciate it," he said, kind but unyielding, "but I have work waiting. Maybe another time."
She nodded, trying not to look too disappointed. "Right. Of course. Another time."
He gave a polite half-smile and continued toward the automated exit doors.
The moment he left earshot, the murmurs began.
"Nurse Cruz, seriously?" whispered one of the junior nurses, stifling a laugh.
"I tripped!" she said, red in the face.
"You flung yourself into him."
A resident doctor leaned in with a smirk. "Can you blame her? The man looks like he was carved out of marble and blessed by scalpels."
"You're all hopeless," muttered another nurse.
"But really," one whispered, lowering her voice, "he's been here for five years. No girlfriend, no boyfriend, no one's seen him at the after-shift lounges. Nada."
"Maybe he's got someone in a different sector," one offered.
"Or maybe he was married before. Lost her in the Outbreak."
"Or maybe," a physician added with mock-seriousness, "he's not into humans. What if he's secretly dating a Synth?"
They all laughed.
Nurse Cruz only shook her head, lips pursed, but her eyes still lingered on the doors where he disappeared.
Outside, Brian stepped into the sterile dusk of the city under containment. The perimeter lights glowed faintly blue beyond the sanitation arches. He slid on his gloves, turned his collar against the wind, and walked away without looking back.
Scene Two: Homeostasis
The biometric lock clicked open with a soft chime as Brian stepped into his apartment on Level 17, Sector 4Z of the San Francisco Containment Walls.
The space inside was silent and sharp, almost surgical in its precision.
Everything had its designated place. There was no clutter or color.
A single ceramic cup is drying upside-down by the sink. A bed never truly slept in. A digital wall-frame that hadn't changed its painting in months, with a frozen image of redwood trees, untouched since installation.
He didn't remove his coat. Instead, he moved directly to his study corner, where a narrow glass desk faced a reinforced window with a view of the city's eastern barricade towers.
Brian sat down with mechanical grace. His data pad lit up the moment it recognized his facial pattern.
Medical Journal of Neurobiology – Issue 219.
He flicked past the cover. An article title caught his eye:
Phase II Trials for Neuroregen-4: Synthetic NGF Analog in Hollowed Tissue Response.
He leaned forward slightly, his eyes narrowed. His pupils adjusted to the dimming screen as the data pad adjusted to his preferred reading mode: no blue light, no motion graphics, just text.
The article detailed a new trial from Geneva's Eastern Bio-Containment Research Wing. The trial involved a synthetic compound designed to mimic nerve growth factors, a holy grail for those studying Hollowed physiology.
It failed.
Subjects demonstrated increased initial response, but degeneration resumed after 72 hours. Resulted in cognitive dissonance, auditory hallucinations, and involuntary aggression.
Brian exhaled through his nose. It was not disappointment, just a calculation. With a silent gesture, he bookmarked the paper and opened another one.
Limbic System Transplantation in Gen IV Subject Hollows.
Also failed.
His hand drifted to the edge of the desk where a small vial sat inside a climate-controlled socket. Inside it, a transparent amber fluid shimmered faintly in the study light.
He stared at it for a long moment.
He pulled out a sterile injector from a side drawer. It was sleek, modern, and unmarked. Without hesitation, he rolled up his left sleeve and pressed it to the soft skin under the bicep. There was no dramatic hiss, no pain, just a faint click.
The contents emptied into his bloodstream. Seconds later, a tingling sensation came behind his eyes, along his jaw, and at the base of his neck.
Brian flexed his fingers, slowly, deliberately.
A soft ping echoed through the room. A notification was on his data pad.
Cognitive Journal Entry – 2701. Required. 7 days since last update.
He hesitated, then tapped open the voice record.
The tablet blinked red.
Recording Active
When it came, his voice was quieter — not the tone he used in clinics. This was different. Like talking to a mirror, he didn't quite believe in it.
"Journal Entry 2701. Subject: Self."
"I displayed no aggression or disinhibition while starving for a week on Seraphim. Fluency is normal. Working memory is intact, though I was confused about Nurse Cruz's name for a few seconds. Emotional affect is still blunted. The desire to consume her brain was present. No dream recollection. Injection is holding with the current pulse baseline of 42."
"I read papers from Geneva. Nothing promising. Trials all failed within the known decay window. NGF analogs were ineffective. No breakthrough in long-term synthesis pathways."
"Still… lucid."
"Still… me."
A pause.
Then he reached forward and tapped the pad again.
Recording Saved.
Somewhere beyond the walls, a low-frequency siren echoed once. The long, slow warning tone that didn't mean danger, but reminded the city of curfew. Of separation.
Brian stood, finally removing his coat, folding it neatly over the back of his chair.
He walked to the window, watched the city lights blink against the grey-blue sky, and stood there for a long time.
Scene Three: Serendipity
The Outbreak came like a murmur before a scream.
In the fall of 2010, New York fell silent before it fell apart.
People collapsed mid-step and mid-sentence, eyes wide, limbs twitching, and breath seized. The first days were chaos, but what came after was worse: many of the presumed dead order woke up. There was an order without control. Streets were cordoned off. Homes were evacuated. Quarantine walls went up faster than bodies could be burned.
Brian was ten.
He remembered holding his mother's hand too tightly at the train station, before she slipped into convulsions and never stood again.
His father followed two days later, inside the gymnasium that had been converted into a refugee center. Brian watched as the medics sealed his body in a plastic cocoon, labeled only: Specimen Z.
Yates Home for Special Children was nestled behind the walls of a repurposed convent in New York, Sector East 6. It was not particularly warm. "Special" was the label they gave to those orphaned by science, not war.
Brian didn't talk much. He quietly read in the common boys' dormitory.
By fifteen, he'd memorized the national emergency medical handbook, the first and second generation Hollow pathology reports, and most of the pharmacology manuals Yates kept locked in the old infirmary.
Under the National Science Foundation Scholarship, he was admitted to Columbia Medical Division in New York on a neurobiology track at seventeen.
He was the youngest in his batch.
Also, the quietest.
His roommates didn't dislike him. They just didn't know what to make of him.
He avoided parties, skipped curfews, and rarely spoke unless asked. Behind his back, they called him "Ghost Doc."
And Brian didn't mind.
He studied in the lab's corners until sunrise. When he wasn't memorizing textbooks, he went through archived Hollow response trials, cross-referencing them with pharmaceutical toxicity charts and synaptic degeneration case logs.
In his second year, at eighteen, a turning point came — not in life, but in death.
Professor Nathan O'Leroy, head of pharmacological research, saw in Brian not just discipline but a kind of stubborn obsession. He let the boy assist — quietly at first, but then his talent piqued his curiosity. He allowed Brian to help him in his ongoing studies of neurostabilizers for Hollowed degeneration.
"You're not afraid of them?" the professor asked once, when Brian reviewed postmortem Hollow cortex tissue slides without flinching.
"Afraid?" Brian blinked, sterile gloves snapping tight. "They already took everything."
When Professor O'Leroy was transferred to the Denver Deep Study Labs, the research was shelved, but the lab access key wasn't revoked in time. Brian had it. And he had a month.
What followed was not brilliance.
It was desperation. And a kind of serendipity.
In a locked underground chamber, Brian brewed a formula no published study had dared to create. It was volatile and incompletely mapped. He made a hybrid of NGF-stimulants, immunosuppressive feedback inhibitors, viral axonal transport modifiers, and one component that shouldn't have worked. A live neural-binding agent derived from a mutated strain of Cordyceps-Z, the fungal sequence suspected to have been present in Patient Zero's brain.
Serendipity brewed the formula, but fate made Brian a test subject of his own brew.
A field trip came weeks later. A second-year student excursion to Wall Ridge Outpost, just along the edge of a Hollowed decay zone. It was meant to be an observational trip.
But teenagers don't respect walls, not even the ones that kept death in.
They found it — a Hollow, emaciated, limp, barely breathing. Chained to a tree for research tagging. One of the students, Trevor Kerns, thought it would be funny.
"Watch this," he'd grinned, unhooking the chain.
What followed was ten seconds of screams and a blur of hunger. The Hollow leapt, surprising even the guards. They opened fire too late. Four students were suspected of being infected. Brian was among them. They were all quarantined; as fate would have it, three turned feral within 72 hours. Brian didn't. But he could feel it.
The pulses. The wires of the spine inside Brian were rethreading. The organism was waking up, craving, and itching.
And so, with shaking hands and a sterile needle, Brian injected himself with Seraphim-1. The drug was created in hopes of curing the Hollows. A sample he kept with him.
Pain followed. His temperature rose; it was not a fever, but a fire.
His blood boiled with neural rage. His pupils dilated and remained wide for hours. His dreams splintered. But his thoughts stayed.
The organism… integrated.
Brian became the only known being who could cross the boundary.
Not Hollow. Not human. Something else.
He told no one.
Not the medics.
Not the professors.
Cravings followed.
They weren't constant but precise, like instincts stored in a vault.
He'd feel it during exams. During lectures.
The smell of sweat would trigger hunger.
The sound of anxious thinking.
He wanted — no, he needed frontal cortex matter.
But he fought. Every day. He fought.