The cabin lights dimmed as the monitor glowed to life, casting sharp blue reflections against Soren's face.
He had wired the hard drive into a secure, off-grid console, a military relic he'd repurposed for decoding HYDRA-level encryption. The machine hummed, alive with buried atrocities.
Line after line of data cascaded down the screen.
PROJECT: INSIGHT
SUBJECT: ZERO-37
ARCHIVES: TESSERACT ENERGY EXTRAPOLATION (ZOLA VERSION 3.4)
ENCRYPTED COMM LOG: RED SKULL / ZOLA / RIECHSTAG BRANCH
ACCESS CODE: ALGORITHM—Z
Soren's eyes narrowed.
"Zero Thirty-Seven…"
The name surfaced like a corpse from dark waters, one long buried. With deft keystrokes, he peeled back layer after layer of digital protection.
As the interface unfolded, Soren's detached demeanor began to shift.
His brows pulled tight.
HYDRA hadn't merely slipped agents into SHIELD ranks, they had coiled themselves around its beating heart.
Every initiative, every operation… mirrored by a shadow version, puppeted by data fed into a phantom system.
Then it appeared.
A grainy, flickering feed, video logs timestamped from 1944. A gaunt man with hollow cheeks and wire-thin spectacles stood before an early mainframe.
His face was still human… barely.
"Dr. Arnim Zola. Reporting Phase II… Subject: Tesseract Energy Equation, Version Sigma-5."
Soren leaned closer, eyes locked on the long-dead voice whispering through static.
"We have succeeded in extracting micro-waves of cosmic resonance from the Cube. Through iterative modulation, we stabilize it for use in energy projection weapons."
"Red Skull is… pleased."
The scientist's eyes darted nervously off-camera.
"But I've gone further… beyond weapons."
"With enough data, personal, behavioral, emotional, I believe we can calculate the potential trajectory of a person's future. Their choices. Their threats."
Zola's tone changed then, pride bleeding through fear.
"I call it… the Zola Algorithm."
Soren froze.
His pulse pounded in his ears as he scrolled deeper into the archived project. The schematics. The mathematical blueprints. The chilling outlines of a post-war contingency plan.
He muttered aloud, a quiet marvel under his breath.
The algorithm wasn't about warfare. It was about preemptive domination.
Soren rubbed his chin, pacing the cabin.
"Identify anyone who could one day stand against you… and erase them before they rise. It's not fascism… prophecy with bullets."
HYDRA had planned to upload the algorithm into the Insight Helicarriers, floating dreadnoughts armed with orbital precision cannons.
Once airborne, they could execute thousands in a moment, all calculated threats to HYDRA's rule.
It was chilling. But something else gripped Soren now, something colder and hungrier than fear.
Hope.
Because deep in the archive, glowing like a beacon among shadows, was a tag:
TESSERACT EQUATION – RAW NOTATION – ZOLA'S FINAL VERSION (FRAGMENT)
Soren clicked it open.
No full equation… but fragments. Partial sequences. Energy harmonics that matched the readings he'd taken from his own Tesseract over the last few months.
"I've had the stone this whole time… and I've been staring at the lock without the key."
This was the key. Or part of it.
Zola had understood the Cube, not as a relic of war, but as a scientific riddle. One with formulas. Patterns. Rules.
Behind him, a storm howled outside the cabin. Lightning flickered. For the first time in weeks, Soren smiled.
"Dr. Zola…"
"If you weren't such a lunatic, I'd almost call you brilliant."
He paused.
"Then again, maybe you had to be both."
"Zola, Zola, Zola..." Soren murmured, the name tasting electric on his tongue.
The pieces were falling into place in his head like magnets snapping into a pattern.
Doctor Arnim Zola... that warped little genius who uploaded his consciousness into a computer.
Soren's eyes lit up.
Of course. The Winter Soldier project. The bunker in New Jersey. The algorithm. Zola never truly died...
His hands flew over the keyboard, pulling files, tracing access logs, and cross-referencing decade-old SHIELD records.
Most had been scrubbed, redacted, or burned in the aftermath of HYDRA's fall, but some scraps still clung to the corners of forgotten servers.
And then he found it. A location tag buried in an old SHIELD relocation protocol:
SITE 17 – ABANDONED DATA CORE (ZOLA FRAMEWORK CONTINGENCY STORAGE)
STATUS: DECOMMISSIONED
LOCATION: SUBURBAN VIRGINIA, ESTABLISHED HQ
Still standing.
He barely remembered leaving the med facility. His teleportation tore reality apart like paper, reassembling him beneath the bruised sky of Virginia.
The old SHIELD facility stood like a skeleton left out in the rain, overgrown, rusted, defeated by time. Concrete peeled like dead skin. Weeds and ivy devoured the outer walls.
Vultures perched on lamp poles, blinking with quiet disdain.
And yet... something still breathed beneath.
Soren stepped over a rusted SHIELD emblem at the gate, barely visible beneath the dirt and moss. A cracked eagle etched into a shield, once a symbol of protection, now just a warning sign ignored by time.
Inside, the air was still.
His boots crunching against grit as he passed through the ghostly lobby. A reception desk, long abandoned.
Monitors that hadn't flickered in years. But the bones of the building were intact.
His eye spotted, scattered boot prints in the dust. Not old.
"Someone's already been here…"
He closed his eyes, spreading his mind outward like a net. Psychokinesis swept the structure like sonar.
Rooms echoed back with silence, until he found it , the elevator shaft, sealed and locked with an outdated clearance code.
No need for keys.
In a flicker of light and air, Soren vanished~
~and reappeared 100 meters underground, where time had not dared to touch.
The room glowed.
Rows of humming consoles blinked awake like startled eyes. The underground facility was pristine, still operational, still alive.
It was a preserved sanctum.
And in its center~
"...What the hell?"
Two figures turned sharply at his arrival. Weapons instinctively drawn. Eyes locked onto his.
Steve Rogers. Natasha Romanoff.
Their faces shifted from shock to caution in an instant.
"Soren Macaluso?!" Natasha narrowed her eyes. Her pistol lowered a fraction.
"You just teleported into a classified bunker?"
Soren blinked, equally stunned. "You're here? I thought this site was abandoned."
Steve stepped forward. "We followed a trail, encrypted signals, rerouted SHIELD pings. We're being hunted."
"Figured this place might give us answers."
"Hunted by who?"
Steve hesitated, glancing at Natasha. She spoke first. "By SHIELD. Or what's left of it."
"Not everyone got the memo about HYDRA falling."
Soren's brow furrowed. "Then you don't know about Dr. Zola?"
Steve raised an eyebrow. "Zola? I haven't heard that name in years."
"We came looking for a ghost network. Not a man." Natasha's tone sharpened.
Soren gesturing at the blinking terminal nearby.
"He's not a ghost. He's still here. Zola upload his mind. This place… it's one of the backups."
"And I think it's still active."
꧁𓊈𒆜༺⚜༻𒆜𓊉꧂
PhantomDream