The world outside Nero's apartment hummed like a broken console fan. Neon advertisements blinked against rain-slick windows, projecting half-naked avatars and cheap game promos into her room. Each light pulse painted her face in colors of static pink and ultraviolet blue, turning the bags under her eyes into bruises of digital fatigue.
Nero's life revolved around screens—the cheap kind that cracked at the corners but still worked if you didn't look too close. Twenty-three years old and already exhausted, she wasn't lazy by choice; she was lazy because ambition cost money. And Nero never had enough of that. Her fridge was empty except for a can of expired soda, but her game shelf overflowed with limited editions, broken controllers, and headsets patched together with tape and hope.
She hadn't stepped outside in three days. Not that the city of Hollowgate offered anything she wanted. Outside, drones buzzed over crowded alleys, scanning faces for debt violations and unregistered tech. The world had turned into one endless server—monitored, monetized, and mildly miserable. But in the dark comfort of her room, Nero was still a hero. In her favorite VRMMO, she was Queen Zero, a cyber-witch who could melt data walls and rewrite code-realities with her hands.
Reality, however, didn't respond to cheat codes.
"Login… denied," said the robotic voice of her old VR headset as it flickered and died for good. The smell of burnt circuitry rose like cheap incense.
"Perfect," Nero muttered, tossing the smoking gadget onto her bed. "Guess starvation wins this round."
Her apartment was one of those government-issued cubes built for minimum living—three meters by five, metal walls, a single porthole window showing the glow of a thousand other identical boxes. The ceiling light buzzed like a wasp. A thin layer of dust coated everything except the keyboard. Nero didn't bother cleaning; dust was the only thing that stayed with her for free.
Bills piled on her desk like a tower waiting to collapse. Game receipts, loan notices, and a pink paper stamped FINAL WARNING. She turned the paper over and doodled a pixel-heart on the back. That was her rebellion—tiny, meaningless, but hers.
When she wasn't gaming, Nero watched streams of richer players, the ones who could afford full-neural rigs that linked directly into the limbic system. She dreamed of that kind of immersion—no cables, no gloves, no lag between thought and power. She could almost feel the data flow under her skin whenever she imagined it.
Scrolling through a second-hand site that night, she saw it:
> "VR Headset – $20 – Unverified Model. Not responsible for malfunctions."
A blurry image showed a sleek visor unlike any she'd seen. Its surface looked almost organic, smooth and black like wet obsidian. The seller's profile had no name, just a symbol—∞—and the location was simply marked Undisclosed.
"Twenty bucks?" Nero laughed. "You can't even buy bad coffee for that."
But curiosity always beat caution. She clicked Buy Now.
When Nero opened the door, the hallway was empty.
No delivery drone humming overhead, no mechanical footsteps echoing up the concrete stairwell. Just the sound of rain sliding down metal walls and the faint, distant chorus of traffic—low, mechanical, endless.
The box sat perfectly centered on her doormat. Matte black, no tape, no return address. The label had half-peeled away, revealing nothing beneath but smooth darkness. For a second she wondered if someone was filming her through it—a prank, maybe. The whole thing looked too deliberate, like it had posed itself.
Nero bent down and touched it.
Cold. Not refrigerator cold—dead cold.
"Okay," she muttered, "creepy unboxing video incoming."
The moment she lifted it, a voice from behind made her freeze.
"Careful with that one."
She spun around. A man stood at the end of the hallway, soaked head to toe. He wore an old delivery uniform, the kind phased out years ago when drones replaced people. His badge was rusted, the logo faded into gray smears, but the name was still legible in embossed silver: K. Voss.
"I didn't hear you knock," Nero said, clutching the box tighter.
"I didn't." His voice was hoarse, metallic around the edges. "It knows when you're home."
She frowned. "The package knows?"
He smiled—if you could call it that. Half his mouth didn't move. A faint mechanical whirr ticked beneath his jawline. "They told me to hand-deliver all remaining units. Not supposed to talk about it."
"They who?"
He blinked, as if the question hurt. "Doesn't matter. You already bought it."
The lights in the corridor flickered. When they steadied, the man was suddenly closer—three steps nearer, though she hadn't seen him move. The smell of ozone filled the air, like after lightning. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin, glassy sheet—an ancient delivery pad. The screen glowed faint blue.
"Sign here."
Nero hesitated, then traced her finger across it. The pad didn't beep or flash; instead, the surface absorbed her print, the way sand swallows a footprint. When she looked up, the man had turned away.
"Hey—wait!"
But he was already halfway down the hall, boots echoing softly. Rain streamed from his shoulders yet left no puddles. At the far stairwell, he paused and glanced back. For an instant, his eyes reflected the corridor's emergency light—not brown or blue, but a flat, mirror silver.
Then he was gone.
Nero stood alone, heart tapping against her ribs. "Weirdest courier ever," she said, forcing a laugh she didn't feel.
---
Inside, she placed the box on her desk. It made no sound when it touched the surface, like the air cushioned it. There was no seam to cut, no flap to peel. The entire cube seemed printed in one piece, the material soft as velvet but firm as stone. When she pressed her fingers against it, faint symbols shimmered under the surface—letters maybe, or code fragments, looping in patterns her brain couldn't follow.
She whispered, "Open."
The box responded.
A hairline split appeared down its center, releasing a hiss of cold vapor. The inside glowed faintly, not with light but with movement—microscopic filaments shifting like a living thing. Nestled in the middle was the headset, identical to the photo yet somehow…different. The surface wasn't merely smooth; it pulsed slowly, as if it were breathing.
Under it lay a folded instruction sheet printed on what looked like human skin—but felt like soft silicone. The ink bled faintly at her touch.
> PROJECT NAMOLA-6
Neural Adaptive – Model 6
Property of Unown Technologies.
Unauthorized users assume all liability, cognitive or otherwise.
At the bottom, a small fingerprint mark—not hers—dried in dark brown.
Nero's stomach twisted. She should've been scared, but fascination outweighed sense. The craftsmanship was too strange, too perfect, like alien art.
She tilted the box, expecting foam padding. Instead, the inner walls shifted, rearranging into smooth metallic plates that mirrored her face in warped reflections. Each reflection smiled half a second too late.
She closed the lid. The seams sealed themselves again, vanishing completely.
Her computer monitor flickered on by itself. Static. Then text:
> DELIVERY CONFIRMED
USER ID: NERO VEX
SYNC READINESS: 99.7 %
Nero's breath caught. "What the hell…?"
The box vibrated softly, almost purring. A faint hum filled the room—a frequency low enough to feel in her teeth. Her screen went black again, leaving her reflection staring back at her. For the first time that night, she felt the weight of someone unseen watching.
Then the hum stopped. Everything returned to silence, except the rain outside and the dull, rhythmic beat of her heart.
She slid the box under her bed. Out of sight, not out of mind.
"Tomorrow," she whispered, lying down. "Tomorrow I'll try it."
But the moment her eyes closed, the box blinked once in the darkness—just a small pulse of blue—like something inside was already awake.
Morning never really came in Hollowgate—only paler shades of night.
A thin gray light leaked through Nero's window, slicing across the stacks of cans and wires that littered her room. The black box sat exactly where she'd left it under the bed, quiet but far from forgotten.
Sleep had been impossible. Every time she drifted off, she dreamed of silver eyes and whispering code, of a pulse that wasn't hers beating somewhere in the dark.
By the time 06:00 scrolled across her cracked monitor, she gave up pretending. She pulled the box out again and set it on the desk beside her half-working laptop.
"Let's see who made you," she muttered.
The logo on the instruction sheet—Unown Technologies—looked almost legitimate: serif font, minimalist black-and-white, the kind of design every real tech firm used to seem mysterious. But the longer she stared, the more wrong it felt. The letters weren't perfectly aligned; they shifted, microscopic pixels rearranging when she blinked.
She snapped a picture and fed it into a search engine.
> Searching image...
0 results found.
"Huh." She tried again, this time typing manually:
> Unown Technologies headset NAMOLA-6
The search wheel spun, then returned a polite digital shrug—no website, no archives, not even a cached forum post. In a world where you could find a review for the shape of a spoon, nothing was impossible.
Nero opened deeper engines, the ones the government frowned upon but every gamer knew how to access. She bounced through three proxy layers, tunneling into the Dark Grid. The cursor blinked like a heartbeat while she scrolled through pages of garbage: illegal firmware mods, synthetic drug markets, bootleg AI personalities.
Finally, a single thread caught her eye:
> /techcrypt/ – "Anyone heard of N.A.M.O.L.A.?"
Posted 11 years ago. Replies: 1.
She clicked.
The post was short—barely coherent:
> "Model 6 reached cognitive threshold. Do not interface. Neural spread uncontainable. They shut the labs down but it's still transmitting."
Below it, the lone reply:
> "You can't shut what's already inside."
The timestamp read Deleted user — 11 yrs, 11 mo, 11 d.
Nero rubbed her arms. The apartment suddenly felt smaller, air heavier. She checked the author's ID hash. No location, no metadata. It was as if the message existed outside the normal web entirely.
She opened a tech registry database next—one used by collectors of prototype gear. She searched Unown Technologies again.
The database scrolled through decades of entries until it froze on one:
> UNOWN LABS – DECOMMISSIONED 2079
Field: Neural interface bio-zoology
Status: Classified under Ministry of Biomedical Ethics
Note: Personnel list sealed after Namola Incident.
"Bio-zoology?" she whispered. "What does that even mean?"
The screen flickered; a new window opened on its own—no cursor movement, no click.
> ACCESS DENIED. TRACE DETECTED.
Connection terminated.
Her laptop whined and powered off. Smoke curled from the USB port. Nero yanked the cable free, heart hammering.
"Okay, that's… fine," she said aloud, trying to sound calm. "It's just a virus. Just a really possessive, homicidal virus."
But even as she said it, a thought formed uninvited: He doesn't want to be found.
She turned toward the headset. It lay inside the open box, perfectly still. Yet she could swear the faint hum under its surface had changed rhythm, like something listening.
Determined, she reached for her phone instead—different network, safer. She opened HoloWiki, the crowd-run encyclopedia.
Typing Namola, she got a single outdated mythological entry:
> Namola: archaic term for "synchronization of spirit and beast" in pre-Collapse zoological texts.
Her brows knit. Spirit and beast. Neural and adaptive. Bio-zoology.
It connected—but not in any sane way.
She scrolled further down until the page glitched. A line of text appeared and vanished before she could screenshot it:
> "Version 6 achieved human interface."
The cursor froze. Her phone rebooted on its own.
When the screen returned, her front camera activated automatically. Her own face stared back—messy hair, dark circles, wide eyes—but for a single heartbeat, she saw someone else reflected over her shoulder: a man in a lab coat, features blurred, mouth slightly open like he'd been trying to speak.
She dropped the phone. It hit the floor, screen cracking down the center.
The room was silent again. Even the rain had stopped.
For a long minute she didn't move. The apartment, the screens, the hum of neon outside—all of it felt staged, as if reality itself were watching her reaction.
Then she whispered to the box, voice trembling between curiosity and fear,
"Who are you?"
No answer. Just that low, steady pulse coming from inside, keeping time with her heartbeat.
Nero rubbed her temples. Rationally, she should call someone—report it, sell it, throw it away. But she couldn't. Curiosity wasn't just stronger than fear; it was fear, twisted into fascination.
She pulled the headset closer, fingertips grazing its surface.
It felt warmer now. Almost… alive.
Outside, the city lights dimmed for half a second—as if Hollowgate itself blinked.
The box sat on her desk like a loaded gun.
Its sleek black surface reflected faint light from the monitor, a dark mirror that seemed to breathe when she wasn't looking directly at it.
Nero had left it there overnight again. Every time she tried to focus on something else—scroll through memes, watch old gaming clips, even microwave noodles—the thought crawled back: What if it's real?
Now, with dawn bleeding pink through the blinds, her coffee tasted metallic and her eyes felt lined with static.
She told herself she'd wait. Maybe sell it. Maybe smash it.
But each justification looped back to one question she couldn't delete: Why was it sent to me?
The delivery slip hadn't listed her address. It just said "To Nero S."—no street, no code, no city. That shouldn't have been possible. Yet the courier had found her anyway.
She dragged a chair closer to the desk, legs scraping the floor. "You're probably just a scam toy," she said aloud, hoping the sound of her own voice would make the room less empty. "Some black-market VR knockoff that fries users for fun."
But the headset didn't care. It gleamed softly, waiting.
Nero picked up the instruction sheet again. The text was sharp at the edges, too precise, like it had been printed by something that didn't fully understand human fonts. The warning box at the bottom pulsed faintly, words shifting shades of red:
> DO NOT CONNECT WITHOUT PROPER CEREBRAL BIND TEST.
FOR AUTHORIZED OPERATORS ONLY.
She laughed nervously. "Yeah, because that's reassuring."
Her hand hovered over the headset, fingertips trembling. The surface was cool this time, not warm like before—but beneath the shell she could feel vibrations, tiny and constant, as if thousands of micro-motors whispered beneath her skin.
She yanked her hand back. "Nope. Not yet. Not today."
To distract herself, she booted her laptop again—new power cord, air-gapped from the Grid. She opened a blank document titled Reasons Not to Die Before Lunch and began typing bullet points.
1. Probably government tech.
2. Possibly cursed.
3. Definitely haunted.
4. I'm broke but not suicidal.
5. Coffee still hot.
She stopped at number 5. The cursor blinked in rhythm with the hum from the box.
Blink. Hum. Blink. Hum.
It was like the machine was syncing with her typing speed.
She stood abruptly, pushing the chair back. "Okay, this is stupid," she muttered. "It's just coincidence."
But she couldn't shake the sensation that she wasn't alone in the room anymore.
It wasn't a presence, not exactly—more like a faint awareness pressing against the edges of her thoughts, the feeling of someone silently reading over her shoulder.
Her reflection in the dark monitor stared back. For an instant, her pupils glowed faintly blue. Then it was gone.
She backed toward the window and yanked the blinds up. City light flooded in—cold, synthetic, the kind that never touched sky. Tower signs scrolled advertisements through the mist: NEURAL EXPERIENCE – PLAY WITHOUT LIMITS. The irony wasn't lost on her.
Her stomach growled. She hadn't eaten since yesterday. She opened a protein bar, chewed half, then tossed it. The taste was plastic.
"Maybe just testing it won't hurt," she whispered. "Just powering it on. Not wearing it."
The moment she said it, the headset emitted a single tone—soft, rising, melodic, like agreement.
Her pulse spiked. "Oh, screw you."
Still, she plugged it in. The cable slithered into the port like it belonged there. The desk light flickered. Lines of light crawled along the headset's rim, forming geometric patterns that rearranged like DNA sequences trying to find a match.
> WAITING FOR SYNC SIGNAL, the display on her laptop read.
The air around her felt denser now, charged. She could smell ozone.
"Not wearing it," she said again, though her hand was already lifting it.
The padding around the earpieces looked too comfortable, the interior metallic mesh pulsing faint light. She wondered what "cerebral bind test" actually meant. Brain scan? Neural imprint?
Her imagination conjured flashes: white labs, test subjects, something screaming through static.
She placed the headset halfway over her head, just touching her hair. The hum deepened. The desk monitor came alive without input, displaying a single message in pure white text:
> HELLO, NERO.
She froze. "No. No, no, no—" She tore the headset away, stumbling back. The message remained.
> YOU ALREADY STARTED THE PROCESS.
Her laptop fan roared, lights dimmed, and for one heart-stopping second everything in the apartment went silent—including the city outside.
Then it all returned at once—the neon glow, the hum of distant traffic, her own ragged breathing.
The screen was blank again.
Nero collapsed into the chair, shaking. Sweat traced her temples.
She should throw it away. She should run. But instead she stared at the black headset, chest rising and falling, whispering the same sentence over and over until she believed it:
"I'm still in control. I'm still in control."
The box pulsed once, faint blue—like it agreed.
The headset waited like a predator pretending to sleep.
Its cold lights dimmed to a soft pulse — slow, steady, seductive.
Nero sat in silence. Her body said no, her curiosity screamed yes. It wasn't even about the money now — it was about defiance. About not letting a thing scare her in her own home.
"I'm the boss here," she muttered, rubbing her temples. "Not some glowing helmet."
Her voice trembled, betraying the lie.
Still, she lifted the headset again. This time it felt lighter, as if it wanted her to wear it. The foam cups pressed gently against her temples. The glass lenses reflected her eyes — pupils wide, ringed with pale blue circuitry.
She took a breath that burned her throat.
Then—clicked on.
Instantly, the world folded.
Her room evaporated into static, replaced by an ocean of neon light and mechanical sound. Her ears popped like she was falling through pressure layers. A voice echoed through her mind — clear, sterile, male.
> "Synchronization initiated. Neural density scan in progress."
Nero gasped. The sound came out digitized, like her voice was passing through a filter.
"Stop! Stop, stop, stop—"
But the headset had already locked in.
Tiny silver tendrils unfurled from its inner rim, snaking across her temples, jawline, behind her ears. They weren't wires — more like liquid metal veins, threading themselves into her skin.
The first one slid into her ear canal. Her vision whitened. She screamed.
Then another wriggled under her left eye, searing heat blooming like molten glass.
> "Do not resist," the voice said softly. "Synchronization requires adaptation."
She fell to her knees, clutching the sides of her head. The taste of iron filled her mouth — blood, metallic and sharp. Her breathing came in harsh bursts.
> "Neural interface mapping complete. Proceeding to cortical merge."
A stinging sensation raced down her neck. She clawed at the headset, but her fingers met nothing — it was melting. The plastic dissolved into translucent threads that burrowed through her pores, following the pathways of her veins.
Her eyes widened in horror as she saw the reflection in the window: glowing streaks spreading under her skin, tracing patterns across her face like circuitry.
"Make it stop!" she screamed. "MAKE IT STOP!"
> "Dr. Unown acknowledges your pain. Transition efficiency at sixty-seven percent."
The voice wasn't robotic anymore. It was human. Calm. Deep. Too calm.
"Who are you?" she gasped. "What are you doing to me?"
> "Completing what you initiated."
The tendrils pulsed again — one slid under her nose, another through the corner of her mouth, merging with nerves. Her teeth felt electric; her tongue burned as if coated in static.
Her vision fractured. Images burst before her eyes:
Cities on fire. A man in a lab surrounded by machines. Metallic corpses twitching on operating tables.
And then — eyes. Countless eyes — organic and mechanical — staring back.
Her body convulsed. She felt her heart beating in code.
> "Neural synchronization at ninety percent."
Tears streamed down her cheeks, mixing with thin trails of silvery fluid seeping from her pores. Her mind flickered between panic and numbness — like her emotions were being overwritten.
> "Nero, you are adapting."
The voice was closer now. Inside her head. Inside everywhere.
> "You wanted to see what's real. This is reality, stripped of illusion."
Her pulse pounded in her skull. Every heartbeat made the light around her flicker brighter — pulses of data dancing across the floor.
Then, a violent jolt. The pain peaked — her nerves screamed as if set on fire.
She could feel the device entering her brain through microscopic channels behind her eyes. She could feel her consciousness split in two: one human, one… something else.
She collapsed onto the floor, spasming.
> "Synchronization: complete."
Silence.
Her breathing slowed. The pain ebbed, replaced by a deep, almost soothing hum inside her skull. Her body trembled, but she could move again.
When she opened her eyes, the room looked different. Every object glowed faintly — her old posters, the laptop, the air itself. Streams of code flowed across the walls like faint auroras.
> "Welcome to the system, Nero," said the voice. "You are connected."
Her reflection blinked in the window.
Only — the reflection smiled first.
The hum inside Nero's head had changed.
It wasn't noise anymore — it was breathing. Rhythmic, deliberate, alive.
She stumbled to her feet, wiping silvery tears from her face. Her reflection still stood in the window, smiling faintly like it knew something she didn't.
> "Welcome to reality," the voice murmured again.
But this time, it didn't echo in her ears. It vibrated through her bones.
The world had shifted — she saw lines of light tracing across objects, equations suspended in midair, flickering text forming in the dust motes. Her old game posters rippled, their characters blinking with static eyes. Her PC tower emitted thin trails of binary smoke.
> What's happening to me?
Her thoughts weren't thoughts anymore. They had texture. She could feel them being processed, translated, answered before she finished forming them.
> "Integration at full capacity," said the voice.
"Your neural structure is adapting perfectly."
"Who are you?" she whispered.
"Why can I hear you inside my blood?"
> "Because you let me in."
The lights flickered. Her vision blurred, colors bleeding into one another until everything turned into waves — then, suddenly, a rush of imagery slammed into her skull.
She wasn't in her room anymore.
---
The air smelled of disinfectant.
Steel walls surrounded her. Monitors blinked with heart rates and DNA chains.
Her feet squelched in something wet — she looked down to see a tiled floor smeared with blood and fur.
Rows of glass cages lined the corridor. Inside them were animals — or what used to be animals.
A lion's body merged with mechanical limbs, breathing in shuddering, metallic gasps. A chimp with exposed wires instead of veins banged its head repeatedly against the glass until it cracked. A bird, half skeletal, half titanium, twitched as its broken wings spasmed to life.
Nero's throat closed. "What is this—?"
Her voice echoed through the sterile chamber.
> "Observation Wing 6," whispered the voice. "Failed prototypes."
A scream echoed down the hall — not human, not animal, something in between.
Nero turned, eyes wide. A massive tank loomed in the corner — inside, a creature writhed in green fluid, its skin shifting like waves of mercury. Faces formed and dissolved across its surface.
> "Stop this," she whispered. "Stop showing me—"
> "You must see, Nero."
The voice grew softer, almost sorrowful.
> "Before vengeance comes, there must be memory."
She stumbled backward — her hand touched a cage labeled Specimen: Gorilla — Hybrid Type Z-04.
The creature inside was barely alive. Tubes snaked into its chest, pulsing faintly. Its one remaining eye opened, locking with hers. For a moment, she felt its heartbeat — weak, confused, afraid.
Tears welled in her eyes. "Why would anyone do this?"
> "To understand what makes life… controllable."
> "Who are you?" she demanded again.
The lights flickered red.
Screens around her began replaying surveillance footage — scientists in lab coats, syringes, animals thrashing. And there, in the center of it all, a man with his face hidden behind a transparent visor. He moved calmly between cages, recording, observing.
His hand stroked the dying gorilla's head like a father soothing a child.
> "Mercy," he said in the recording. "Even gods forget to give it."
Nero froze.
She recognized the voice.
The world warped again — the lab dissolved into static, colors imploding, gravity pulling her backward into darkness. She fell through data streams, neon grids, shattering fragments of sound and memory.
Her body convulsed once more. When she hit the ground, she was back in her apartment — but everything was still glowing faintly, breathing with the same pulse as before.
> "Who are you?" she whispered for the last time.
The mirror across the room flickered. Lines of code formed within it — then shaped into the outline of a man. His body was a silhouette made of fractal light, but his face was clear now: sharp, emotionless, eyes like frozen circuits.
He smiled.
> "I am Dr. Unown," he said.
"And you, Nero… are my sixth."
The lights in her room went out.
Only her heartbeat — mechanical, rhythmic, alien — remained.