The first thing I felt was weight. Not the soft, human weight of a body I'd known for decades, but something heavier, denser, built from steel and circuitry.
My vision flickered alive, a cascade of red text scrolling across the dark.
System rebooting…
Cognitive link established…
Designation: Subject-09.
I gasped, or tried to. The air didn't rush into my lungs. There was no burning in my chest, no desperate need to breathe. My body had forgotten how.
"Welcome back," a voice whispered in the static of my mind. Cold. Mechanical. Familiar, yet alien.
I sat up. Metal arms. Chrome fingers. Servos whining with every movement. My reflection stared back at me from the polished surface of a containment pod—two red optics where my eyes should have been.
My throat vibrated, words breaking through static.
"…What did you do to me?"
No answer. Only the endless hum of machines.
I staggered forward, bare feet—if you could call them feet—clanging against the steel floor. The chamber stretched around me like a cathedral of glass and wires. Rows of pods lined the walls, each one filled with a shape that used to be human.
Not all were awake.
Some hung lifeless in their tanks, tubes coiled through flesh that had half-melted into machinery. Others twitched, trapped between man and machine, their eyes rolling in mechanical sockets. A graveyard of experiments—failed subjects that should never have existed.
My gut twisted. These weren't colleagues. They weren't volunteers. They were victims.
I pressed my palm to one pod. The woman inside floated weightless, her chest still rising and falling, though half her skull was wrapped in steel. She looked almost peaceful.
Almost.
I yanked my hand back.
No. Don't think about it. Don't think about what that means for me.
Footsteps echoed.
I froze, optics adjusting automatically. Through the shifting haze, a figure approached—the sharp outline of a woman in a lab coat.
Not a soldier. Not a guard. A scientist.
She stopped a few feet away, her face pale under the sterile light. Her eyes darted across me, cataloguing every feature like I was another line of data on her clipboard.
"You weren't supposed to wake yet," she murmured.
"What am I?" My voice grated like static tearing through a broken speaker.
Her lips parted, but she didn't answer. Instead, she tapped a small device on her wrist. The pods around us hummed louder, warning lights flickering.
"She's calling them," the voice in my head whispered.
I moved before I could think. One hand shot out, clamping around her wrist. Her eyes widened, but she didn't scream.
"You're not safe here," she said, almost a whisper. "Run."
I froze. That wasn't what I expected.
Her gaze flicked to the ceiling—already trembling with distant alarms. "They'll come for you. Don't let them take you back."
The ground shuddered. The lights flared red. Somewhere deeper in the facility, an explosion thundered.
The woman shoved a small card into my hand before wrenching free. "Go!"
Doors unlocked around me, metal shutters hissing open as though the building itself wanted me gone. I stumbled forward, sensors flaring as more alarms screamed overhead.
Containment breach. Sector Seven. Engage lockdown.
The words weren't spoken aloud. They were in my head. The facility itself was talking to me.
"Not safe," the voice repeated. "Run."
I obeyed.
My feet pounded against grated walkways, sparks raining from ruptured cables overhead. The world was coming apart. I rounded a corner just as a steel wall collapsed behind me, crushing the corridor in fire and debris.
My optics blurred, recalibrating. Through the smoke, I caught sight of something worse.
Soldiers.
Armored in black exosuits, rifles glowing with energy cores. Their helmets glared with the same red optics that now lived in my skull.
"Target acquired," one of them barked.
I froze.
The soldiers raised their rifles—
—and then the ceiling tore open.
A shockwave slammed me off my feet, throwing metal and fire across the hall. The soldiers vanished under a collapsing bulkhead. My systems screamed damage reports, but I forced my limbs to move.
Through the broken ceiling, a new sight spilled in.
Light.
Blinding, fractured, not sunlight but something stranger. Neon veins streaked across storm clouds, painting the ruins beyond in colors Earth's sky was never meant to hold.
I stumbled closer, dragging myself through a shattered doorway. My optics adjusted, focusing on the impossible horizon.
The towers were skeletal, bent at impossible angles. Windows shattered. Steel frames twisted like broken bones.
This wasn't the world I knew.
The facility had been buried underground. But above it… above it lay something alien.
Something wrong.
For a moment I just stood there, staring. The hum of drones echoed faintly in the distance. My systems warned me to move, but I couldn't.
The realization hit me harder than the explosion ever could.
This wasn't just another test. This wasn't a simulation.
I hadn't survived the Quantum Bridge.
I had been thrown out the other side.
And now, in this fractured world, I wasn't Dr. Kieran anymore.
I was Subject-09.