Elsewhere, across space and time, or perhaps beneath both, there was a room.
It was massive, cavernous in the way a cathedral is, or a tomb. Steam hissed softly from rusted valves embedded in the steel-gray walls.
Thick pipes snaked along the ceilings like metal serpents, their joints groaning with pressure as strange fluids pulsed within.
The architecture bore the scars of a world where technology had never turned sleek; instead, it had grown grotesque, industrial, and maybe less practical. A steampunk grotesquerie of wires, gears, and breathing machines.
The room was dim, its walls washed in a cold, unnatural blue cast by the glow of a monolithic screen.
The screen itself was immense, wider than a city street, thick as a blast door, and mounted with cabling so large it looked like the veins of some digital beast, plugged into the ceiling above.
The bluish light it exhaled spilled like mist across the floor, casting the figures below into silhouettes.
The hum of unseen machinery filled the air, constant and low, a kind of mechanical heartbeat.
Before the screen stood six individuals. Five in long, clinical lab coats, stiff, nervous, meticulous, and one in a sharp dark suit, his silhouette angular, posture rigid with tension.
The suited man stood slightly ahead of the others, arms crossed, his presence commanding despite the flickering shadows across his face.
They all stared up at the screen, where dozens, maybe even hundreds, of vertical glass tubes stretched into infinity like a grim greenhouse.
Each tube was filled with murky greenish liquid, and suspended within were human bodies, motionless, eyes closed, their limbs floating like the drowned.
Wires pierced the base of each skull, feeding from complex harnesses bolted into the glass. Some of the individuals in the tubes showed faint movement, twitches, muscle spasms, and fingers curling into fists.
They were still alive. Or something like it.
The suited figure stepped forward slightly. His face came into partial clarity, with sharp cheekbones, deep-set eyes, and a meticulously styled mustache.
There was something old-fashioned about him, as if he didn't belong in any particular era, or perhaps belonged to all of them.
His voice was clipped, smooth, but betrayed the tightness of nerves beneath it.
"Status?" he asked.
One of the lab-coated men turned. He was younger than the rest, his white coat stained with ink and something darker, his glasses fogged slightly from the humidity.
He adjusted them with shaking fingers, eyes fixed on the shifting data on the screen.
"The experiment has entered the Response Phase," he said. "All three hundred volunteers are registering neurological activity. We should begin seeing cognitive projections within the next thirty to forty minutes."
The mustached man's eyes didn't leave the screen. "And their physical integrity?"
The scientist hesitated. "Holding. So far. A few of the earlier... inconsistencies were filtered out during the upload process. The environment calibration matrix has stabilized."
The suited man's jaw tensed. "Define 'inconsistencies.'"
The scientist flinched slightly. "Neurological echo loops. Recursive trauma signatures. A few participants experienced simulated death states too early. We're correcting. But... some remain volatile."
A silence passed between them, long and uncomfortable. The hum of machines deepened, like something awakening in the walls.
Then the suited man spoke again, quieter now. "And when this is over… how do we know who's truly alive?"
The scientist glanced back at the screen. The figures in the tubes floated in eerie stillness. Their faces were slack. Their minds are elsewhere.
"We'll know," he said, his voice distant. "Only the strong minds make it back."
The mustached man nodded once, but his eyes lingered, uneasy. "Let's hope."
The screen pulsed with shifting glyphs and biometric readouts, unreadable to anyone but the scientists, and perhaps not fully understood even by them.
The mustached man turned slowly, his polished shoes echoing against the metal floor. His voice carried, crisp and venom-laced with quiet pressure.
"This is critical," he said, every syllable carved sharp as glass. "We were fortunate—miraculously so—to secure a faction permit under this cycle. You understand what that means, don't you?"
The scientists stood straighter. Some nodded. No one spoke.
He stepped closer to the lead researcher, the one with fogged glasses, ink-stained cuffs, and the look of someone who hadn't slept in days.
The suited man's shadow fell across him like a blade.
"If we don't produce results," he continued, "the Order will revoke the permit. And then? They'll auction it off to someone else. One of the other approved programs. Probably Black Line, or Voss Kinetics. Those bastards."
His mouth curled with disdain.
"And the Order," he added, "doesn't fuck around."
Silence followed, heavy and electric.
The lead researcher adjusted his glasses again, as if they might protect him from the weight of the man's gaze. He cleared his throat, voice strained but steady.
"Yes... Yes, of course, Director. We're aware of the stakes. Our last iteration was... a statistical outlier. Anomalous failure rate. But with this sequence, we've made substantial improvements to the neural bridge, the immersion scaffolding, and the temporal isolation buffer."
The Director raised an eyebrow.
"In plain language," the man with glasses said, "we're confident that at least one percent of the participants will survive the simulation and undergo full cognitive reintegration. They will emerge Awakened."
He gestured toward the screen. Behind the glowing metrics and data scrolls, the forms in the tubes floated in their green stasis. Limbs twitched. A jaw clenched.
"If even five emerge intact," the scientist said, "it fulfills the factional requirement. Five Awakened. That grants us established status. A real seat at the Assembly. Resources. Protection. Authority. The Order will be happy with us."
The mustached Director tilted his head slightly, his expression unreadable.
"Five," he murmured, almost to himself. "After three hundred bodies."
The scientist winced. "Volunteers. Technically."
The Director turned away again, staring back at the screen.
"I don't pay you to technically succeed," he said coldly. "And I sure as hell don't pay you to keep sending failures into that machine."
He stepped forward, placing one gloved hand on the cold steel railing in front of the screen. The glow turned his mustache a sickly blue, his eyes sharp and shadowed.
"I want to see a spark," he said. "Someone. Anyone. Prove that this works. That we're not just killing people for a theory, even if they are the lowest of the low."
He glanced over his shoulder.
"Because if this ends in another blackout," he said, voice lowering to a whisper, "the next experiment might be you."
The room was still.
Then, somewhere on the far-right quadrant of the screen, a new pulse emerged. Faint. Flickering.
One of the neural vitals began to spike.
The room leaned in.
The individual died.
The Director's voice, usually a blade of authority, dropped into something closer to frustration.
His fingers tapped against the cold steel railing, each strike like a metronome counting down to disaster.
"We can't keep killing people, without gain," he muttered.
The other scientists exchanged glances in the cold blue glow of the data screen. None dared interrupt.
"We've already had families contact the Order," he continued, his voice sharp and bitter. " Disappearances are harder to bury when grieving mothers start preaching outside Assembly halls. Commander Ray says he's handling it, but what does that mean to us?"
He turned to the lead researcher, his mustache casting a long shadow across his gaunt face.
"So what if the Order permitted us? Public outcry gets attention. And if we attract too much attention, the Order will shut us down. Permanently. Zone 10 might be a hell hole but zone 9 still holds some people with awareness, even if those Jitters are taking over. Voss Kinetics is trying to use their own research to gain a permit, and we can't allow them to catch up."
The man with glasses swallowed hard. "Director... The contract is still active. The Order authorized another two phases. I'm confident that we will be fine. Technically, we're still compliant—"
"Technically won't save us," the Director growled. "We've burned through eight hundred people. Eight hundred! And how many Awakened have we produced?"
Silence.
The scientist lowered his eyes. "None."
The word echoed, hollow and damning.
Then, movement.
A flicker across the screen.
Lines of code shifted. Columns of numbers, one to three hundred, lined the sides of the screen like a digital roll call.
One by one, numbers began to blink... and then vanish.
The biometric signals they represented flatlined, extinguishing like dying stars.
Their glass chambers, shown in small feed windows, erupted with twitching motion.
Bodies seizing, eyes rolling back, mouths opening in silent screams beneath green water.
Some twitched so violently that the fluid splashed against the inside of the glass. Then they went still.
The numbers beside them blinked off, final and cold.
In less than a minute, one hundred and fifty numbers had gone dark.
The room went deathly still. No one moved. No one spoke.
From three hundred to one-fifty, like the flip of a coin.
The Director stared at the screen, face pale beneath the blue glow. "Here we go..." he whispered.
Another number vanished.
Then another.
The lead scientist began reading off vital signs. The others huddled behind him, tense, watching the list shrink second by second.
"One-twenty... ninety-four... seventy-two..."
Their expressions hardened. Eyes grim. Knuckles were white on the edge of the console.
Only twenty numbers remained.
"The process is at ninety-five percent," one of the assistants said, her voice barely a whisper. "We're entering the final cognition phase."
The room was breathless.
As the percentage ticked upward, 96%, 97%, the number of survivors plummeted.
Fifteen.
Ten.
"Moment of truth," the Director murmured. His eyes had a manic gleam now. "This is it. Come on. Come on."
At 99%, only six numbers remained.
Then, an anomaly.
A number that had previously gone dark, 33, suddenly reappeared.
It lit up the way a corpse might sit up during an autopsy.
Everyone noticed this impossibility. A ripple passed through the room, but no one spoke at first. All eyes were locked on the screen as the digital tide reached its final marker.
100%.
A sharp chime sounded.
And then there was a celebration.
The lab erupted into wild relief.
Applause. Cheering. Laughter that bordered on manic. Papers flew. Someone embraced another.
The lead researcher slammed his fist against the console and shouted, "Seven! Seven!"
The Director stepped back from the screen like a man struck by divine revelation. He almost stumbled, chest rising and falling with breathless wonder.
Seven Awakened.
Seven people survived the experiment.
Seven minds who had endured whatever had been and returned.
Their future had just changed.
Behind the laughter and elation, the screen still glowed with cold light. Rows and rows of extinguished numbers.
Two hundred and ninety-three people had died, writhing in silence, drowning in synthetic amniotic fluid, their minds torn apart in unseen dimensions.
But in this room, none of that mattered now.
They had won.
And victory had never looked so much like a massacre.