The holding cell disguised itself as comfortable accommodation, but I knew better now.
Seven days. Seven days in a space designed to feel like a dormitory room while functioning as a sophisticated containment system. The walls curved smoothly at every corner, eliminating angles where someone might attempt to hide or apply leverage for escape. The furniture—bed, desk, chair—flowed seamlessly from the structure itself, offering no loose components that could be weaponized or used as tools.
Most telling of all, there were no sharp edges anywhere. Nothing that could cut, nothing that could be broken into fragments. Even the light fixtures were integrated so completely into the ceiling that they seemed grown rather than installed.
It was a room designed by people who understood exactly what kind of prisoner they were housing: someone whose mere existence posed questions their entire worldview couldn't answer.
'Soft chime.'
On the morning of the second day, a gentle tone drew my attention to the desk. A section of its surface had dilated open like an iris, revealing a compartment I hadn't known existed. Inside lay a single object that would become my window into this strange new world: a watch that looked like it had been carved from a piece of the night sky itself.
I lifted it carefully, surprised by its weight. The device was heavier than any timepiece had a right to be, its black surface reflecting light in ways that suggested it was made from materials that didn't quite behave according to normal physics. When I strapped it to my wrist, the band adjusted itself with mechanical precision, settling against my skin with the subtle pressure of something designed to never be removed.
'Soft pulse.'
The moment the clasp sealed, the watch pulsed once—a heartbeat of acknowledgment that traveled up my arm and into my chest. The Federal Bureau of Supernatural Defense crest bloomed across its face in lines of pale blue light, held for three seconds, then faded to black.
My tether to their world. My window into the knowledge they'd decided I was allowed to possess.
By the third day, I'd learned to navigate its interface through experimentation and stubborn persistence. The watch responded to gestures that felt somehow familiar despite my having never used anything like it before. Two fingers across the surface brought up a main menu. A counterclockwise twist revealed search functions. A double tap accessed what appeared to be an extensive database.
The accumulated knowledge of a civilization that had been forced to rebuild itself around the impossible.
I started with the fundamentals: 'The Collapse.'
The files were written in the dry, clinical language of official reports, but the images they contained spoke with brutal clarity. Cities twisted into geometric impossibilities that hurt to contemplate. Highways that curved up into empty sky, connecting nothing to nothing. Bridges that spanned gaps in reality itself, their far ends disappearing into dimensions the camera couldn't capture.
But it was the personal accounts that truly drove home the scope of what had happened thirty-one years ago. Video testimony from survivors, recorded in the immediate aftermath while their memories were still raw with trauma:
Sarah Chen, atmospheric physicist, recorded October 15th, two days after the initial manifestation: "I was walking to work. Just walking to work like I had every day for three years. The pigeons started screaming—not bird sounds, human screams coming from bird throats. My coffee cup fell, and the liquid just... hung there in the air. Floating. I reached out to touch it and the light bent around my fingers like it was alive."
Marcus Rodriguez, construction foreman, recorded October 18th: "The building site just rearranged itself. Thirty stories of steel and concrete, just folded itself into a shape that doesn't have a name. My crew was inside when it happened. We found them three days later, standing in a room that was somehow bigger than the entire building used to be. They were fine. Physically fine. But they kept talking about the walls whispering mathematical equations in languages that don't exist."
Dr. Elizabeth Warren, emergency room physician, recorded October 23rd: "The injured kept coming, but their injuries didn't make sense. Burns that gave off their own light. Broken bones that had healed into crystalline structures. A seven-year-old girl whose shadow had detached itself and was following her around, copying everything she did but three seconds delayed. How do you write a medical report for something like that?"
'Deep breath.'
Thirty-one years of aftermath. Thirty-one years of learning to live in a world where the impossible had become routine, where breakfast conversations included updates on which laws of physics were currently operational in your neighborhood.
The section on 'Aberrations' was harder to read. Not because the information was particularly gruesome, but because of what it implied about the scope of the transformation all life had undergone.
The creatures in these files had once been ordinary animals. Pets, livestock, wildlife—transformed by energies that operated according to rules no one fully understood. A golden retriever whose fur had become strands of living light that sang in harmonics when the wind touched them. A murder of crows that flew in perfect mathematical formations, their wings trailing equations written in smoke that solved themselves as they dispersed. A herd of cattle whose bodies existed in multiple dimensions simultaneously, creating visual paradoxes that drove observers to temporary madness.
The images were accompanied by behavioral studies that read more like philosophical treatises than scientific papers. The animals weren't just physically changed—they'd become something else entirely. Beings that operated according to logic systems human minds weren't equipped to fully comprehend.
From the field notes of Dr. James Morrison, xenobiology specialist: "The transformed specimens display behaviors that suggest they've developed forms of consciousness fundamentally different from baseline animal cognition. They don't simply react to stimuli—they appear to be processing information using cognitive frameworks that exist partially outside normal space-time. When observed, they demonstrate awareness of the observation itself, responding not to the observer's presence but to the observer's intent to observe. This creates recursive paradoxes in our data collection that may be literally unsolvable using current scientific methodologies."
I closed that file and moved on to something that felt more relevant to my situation: 'Essence Manifestation and the Awakened.'
This database was vast—thousands of individual case studies documenting the human response to the world's transformation. Unlike the animals, humans who developed supernatural abilities seemed to retain their essential personality and cognition while gaining access to forces that shouldn't exist.
But the key distinction, I learned, was that not everyone who survived the Collapse became Awakened. Every living being possessed essence—a fundamental life energy that connected all things—but only some individuals experienced manifestations that transformed that essence into usable abilities.
The classification system was comprehensive to the point of obsession:
Kinetic Manipulators: Individuals who could influence physical forces through conscious intent. Subcategories included telekinesis (1,247 documented cases), gravity manipulation (89 cases), and molecular acceleration/deceleration (334 cases).
Elemental Shapers: Those who commanded natural forces. Fire conjurers, water benders, earth movers, and the rarest category—air dancers, who could manipulate atmospheric pressure and wind patterns with deadly precision.
Sensory Expansionists: People whose perceptual abilities had extended beyond normal human limits. Mind readers, precognitives, individuals who could see across vast distances or perceive electromagnetic spectra invisible to baseline humans.
Biological Enhancers: Enhanced physical capabilities ranging from superhuman strength and speed to regenerative abilities that bordered on immortality.
Reality Interfacers: The most dangerous and least understood category. People who could manipulate fundamental aspects of existence itself—time distortion, dimensional displacement, matter transmutation. These individuals were automatically classified as Priority Alpha threats and subjected to intensive Bureau oversight.
Each category was further subdivided into dozens of specialized classifications, with power levels ranked on a scale from Minimal (barely detectable abilities) to Existential (capabilities that posed threats to large-scale infrastructure or population centers).
'Nervous swallowing.'
I searched for my own entry with trembling fingers.
SUBJECT: Karl Morrison [DIMENSIONAL EXPOSURE SURVIVOR]
CLASSIFICATION: 00-00-111-NULL
ESSENCE TYPE: UNCLASSIFIED - POTENTIAL ANTI-MANIFESTATION
THREAT LEVEL: CLASS ZERO - REALITY ANCHOR FAILURE
STATUS: PENDING ACADEMY EVALUATION
NOTES: [CLEARANCE LEVEL INSUFFICIENT]
HANDLER: Director S. Merritt
SPECIAL DESIGNATIONS: Code Black - Extinction Event Potential
The empty fields stared back at me like accusations, but it was those final classifications that made my blood run cold. 'Class Zero.' 'Reality Anchor Failure.' 'Extinction Event Potential.' Whatever those designations meant, they clearly placed me in a category beyond their normal threat assessment scale.
I wasn't just someone with unknown abilities—I was listed as someone whose very existence posed a fundamental threat to reality itself.
The files on the power structures that had emerged from civilization's ashes were equally illuminating and deeply disturbing.
'The Holy Order of Light' presented itself as humanity's spiritual response to the Collapse. Their doctrine taught that essence manifestations were divine gifts, signs of a world being remade by an entity they called the Architect. Every piece of their literature ended with the same phrase: 'By the grace of the Architect, all shall be mended.'
But reading between the lines revealed something more complex and troubling. The Order had established a rigid hierarchy based on essence classifications, with the most powerful Awakened serving as a priestly class that governed through a combination of genuine faith and supernatural enforcement. Their "temples" were described in architectural terms that made my head ache—structures that existed in more dimensions than human perception could fully process.
From a recruitment pamphlet: "Do you hear the Architect's voice in the spaces between your thoughts? Have you been blessed with manifestations that set you apart from baseline humanity? The Order offers purpose, community, and guidance for those called to serve in the Great Work of universal restoration. Join us, and help build tomorrow from the ashes of yesterday's limitations."
'The Families of Influence' represented a different approach to post-Collapse power—dynastic control based on both supernatural abilities and traditional resources.
House Valerius had positioned itself as the political spine of the new order. Their crest appeared on everything from Bureau uniforms to legislative seals, and their family members held key positions in governments across North America. The files suggested they specialized in what were euphemistically called "consensus-building abilities"—forms of mental influence that made their political opponents remarkably cooperative.
The Orlova Clan commanded respect through sheer psychic dominance. Three generations of telepaths, precognitives, and what the files carefully termed "reality consultants" had made them the power behind multiple thrones. Politicians came to them for advice, corporations paid astronomical fees for their consultation, and even the Bureau treated them as partners rather than subjects of regulation.
The Thorne Cartel had built their empire on humanity's most reliable constant: the need for things that were technically illegal. In a world where reality itself had become unreliable, they specialized in smuggling stability. Need medicine that worked in regions where chemistry had become negotiable? Call the Thornes. Want electronics that would function despite localized electromagnetic anomalies? The Thornes had solutions, stored in what they called "dimensional storage rings"—pocket spaces that existed outside normal reality where the laws of physics remained constant.
The Sato Dynasty controlled the technological infrastructure that kept the post-Collapse world functional. Every working computer, every stable power grid, every communication system that operated reliably despite reality's new flexibility bore their invisible fingerprints. The files contained more speculation than hard data about their activities, but their influence was undeniable. When the Satos wanted something, it happened. When they wanted something to stop happening, it stopped.
And then there was the Merritt Family.
Military aristocracy didn't adequately describe what they'd become. They were strategy incarnate, tactical thinking given human form and generational continuity. The files traced their lineage back through conflicts most people had never heard of, showed how each generation had adapted their warfare philosophy to new circumstances.
In one photograph from the early post-Collapse period, I found Sloane standing beside a man who could only be her father. Both wore dress uniforms, both carried themselves with the same controlled precision, both had eyes that seemed to calculate the tactical value of everything they observed. The caption identified him as General Marcus Merritt, architect of the Containment Protocols that had prevented complete civilizational collapse in the first years after reality broke.
Sloane hadn't just inherited her position—she'd been bred for it, trained from childhood to think in terms of strategic necessities and acceptable losses. Looking at that photograph, I understood why she'd shown no hesitation in ordering increasingly dangerous tests on me. In her worldview, individual welfare was always secondary to systemic stability.
Each family had carved their domain from the carcass of the old world, building power structures that would have been impossible before the Collapse. They weren't just influential—they were the invisible architecture that held human civilization together in an age when the universe itself had become unreliable.
And me? According to their files, I was a null space in that carefully constructed order. Not just someone who didn't fit their categories, but someone whose existence might actively undermine the foundations they'd built their power upon.
'Heavy sigh.'
By the sixth day, I'd absorbed enough information to understand the true scope of my situation. The Academy wasn't just a research facility or even a high-security prison. It was a contingency plan, a solution for problems that threatened the basic assumptions the post-Collapse world depended upon.
But it was on the seventh day that I found the files that changed everything.
Hidden deep in a subsection marked "Historical Anomalies - Restricted Access," I discovered references to something called the "Null Protocols." The files were heavily redacted, most of the text replaced with black bars, but what remained was terrifying:
'...dimensional cascade events triggered by reality anchor failures...'
'...total essence nullification within a 50-kilometer radius...'
'...recommend immediate termination of Class Zero subjects before manifestation reaches critical mass...'
'...Project Tabula Rasa initiated as final containment option...'
'Sharp intake of breath.'
The implications hit me like a physical blow. I wasn't just being sent to the Academy for study or containment. I was being sent there to be eliminated before I could become something that might end the world.
'Electronic chime.'
The watch chimed softly, interrupting my increasingly dark thoughts. Text appeared on its surface in crisp, official font:
[PREPARATION PHASE COMPLETE]
[TRANSPORT AUTHORIZATION: CODE BLACK]
[DESTINATION: ACADEMY FOR SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES]
[DEPARTURE: 0600 HOURS - TODAY]
[RESISTANCE WILL BE NEUTRALIZED]
'Mechanical hiss.'
The door whispered open with mechanical precision, revealing the corridor I'd first walked a week ago. But everything felt different now. The pulsing light-veins in the walls seemed more ominous, the charged air tasted of endings rather than possibilities.
I stood at the threshold, the weight of seven days' worth of knowledge pressing against my chest like a physical burden. The Bureau's files had taught me about the world, about power, about the careful balance of fear and cooperation that kept their version of order intact.
But they'd also taught me something else, something they probably hadn't intended for me to learn: I wasn't just different or dangerous. I was potentially apocalyptic. My null readings didn't just mean I was outside their classification system—they suggested I might be capable of destroying the very forces that had allowed humanity to survive the Collapse.
And somewhere out there, people were making decisions about whether the world was safer with me in it or without me.
'Footsteps in corridor.'
Down the corridor, I could see figures in dark uniforms waiting beside what looked like an armored transport vehicle designed more for containing nuclear materials than transporting human beings. My escort. My captors. The people whose job it was to ensure I reached my destination regardless of whether I survived the journey.
I took one last look around the room that had been my world for seven days, at the seamless walls and integrated furniture designed to contain someone too dangerous to trust with sharp edges or loose components.
Then I stepped into the corridor and began walking toward whatever waited for me at the Academy for Special Circumstances.
Behind me, the cell door sealed itself with a soft hiss, erasing the last evidence that Karl Morrison—dimensional exposure survivor, classification null, extinction event potential—had ever existed anywhere but in the files of people who'd decided his story needed to end before it could really begin.
'Heavy boots on metal flooring.'
The transport bay felt like a tomb designed for the living.
High ceilings disappeared into shadows that seemed too deep for the available space, and the walls were lined with equipment whose purpose I could only guess at. Most of it looked like restraint systems—chairs with integrated monitoring equipment, pods that resembled technological sarcophagi, arrays of devices that hummed with the kind of energy that made my teeth ache.
But it was the people waiting for me that truly drove home the gravity of my situation.
Eight figures in dark uniforms that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. Their faces were hidden behind masks that covered everything from the nose up, leaving only mouths visible—mouths set in grim lines that suggested they weren't looking forward to this assignment any more than I was.
Each of them carried equipment I recognized from the diagnostic rooms: devices designed to monitor, contain, and if necessary, neutralize supernatural abilities. The fact that they'd brought such comprehensive gear for someone who supposedly had no detectable powers suggested they weren't taking any chances with whatever I might be capable of.
At the center of the group stood a woman whose uniform bore insignia I didn't recognize—silver symbols that seemed to shift when I looked at them directly. When she spoke, her voice carried the kind of authority that came from years of handling situations most people couldn't imagine.
"Subject 00-00-111," she said, consulting a tablet that flickered with text in languages I couldn't read. "You will board transport vehicle Seven-Seven-Alpha for immediate transfer to the Academy for Special Circumstances. Compliance with all directives is mandatory. Any attempt to resist or escape will result in the immediate implementation of Emergency Pacification Protocols."
She paused, letting that sink in. The phrase "Emergency Pacification Protocols" sounded like a euphemism for something I didn't want to experience firsthand.
"Do you understand these instructions?"
I nodded, not trusting my voice to remain steady.
'Throat clearing.'
"Verbal confirmation is required."
"I understand."
"Acknowledged. Please proceed to the transport vehicle and take your assigned seat. You will remain seated and silent for the duration of the journey. Any questions?"
A thousand questions burned in my throat, but I could see in her posture and the readiness of her team that this wasn't the time or place to voice them. Whatever waited for me at the Academy, I would face it with only the knowledge I'd already gained.
"No questions," I said.
She nodded once, a sharp gesture that conveyed both approval and finality. "Transport team, secure the subject for departure."
'Mechanical whir of transport doors.'
As the uniformed figures moved to escort me toward the waiting vehicle—something that looked like it had been designed to transport weapons of mass destruction rather than human beings—I felt the watch on my wrist pulse one final time.
When I glanced at its face, new text had appeared:
[DESTINATION: ACADEMY FOR SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES]
[ARRIVAL: IMMINENT]
[FINAL MESSAGE: SURVIVE]
The last word hung on the screen for a moment longer than seemed necessary, as if whatever artificial intelligence controlled the device wanted to make sure I understood the stakes.
Then the display went dark, and I realized that my connection to the Bureau's databases, to the accumulated knowledge of the post-Collapse world, had been severed.
'Transport doors sealing.'
I was on my own now, walking toward answers I wasn't sure I wanted to find, carrying questions that might be too dangerous to ask, and burdened with the knowledge that somewhere in the Academy's files was a protocol designed specifically for dealing with people like me.
People who might unmake the world simply by existing in it.
The transport doors sealed behind me with the finality of a coffin lid closing, and the vehicle began to move toward whatever waited at the Academy for Special Circumstances—the place where problems like me were sent to disappear from the world's equations entirely.
But as I sat in that armored transport, surrounded by guards trained to kill people with supernatural abilities, I made myself a promise: they might have classified me as a Class Zero extinction event, but I was still Karl Morrison. Still the same person who'd been curious enough to explore that cave, stubborn enough to touch something that screamed danger, and apparently resilient enough to survive thirty-one years of dimensional exposure.
If they thought I was going to disappear quietly into their protocols, they were about to learn just how wrong even their most sophisticated systems could be.