The child did not scream.
That detail unsettled them more than the data.
Subject Forty-Seven lay restrained on the composite alloy table, wrists and ankles locked into magnetic cuffs calibrated for adult muscle density. His body was thin, underfed, and scarred with the faint geometric marks of prior procedures. The restraints were excessive.
They knew it.
They used them anyway.
White light flooded the chamber from recessed panels, eliminating shadow. The air was filtered, ionized, and chemically neutral. The facility existed three kilometers beneath the Earth's crust, insulated from seismic noise and electromagnetic interference. The room had been designed to remove uncertainty.
It failed.
Carter stared at the ceiling without blinking.
Electroencephalographic projections hovered above him, their readings spiking erratically, then stabilizing at levels no human brain should sustain without structural collapse.
"Neural coherence remains intact," said a technician, voice tight. "He's… adapting."
Dr. Halvorsen didn't look away from the data. "He shouldn't be capable of adaptation. The matter induces catastrophic cellular rejection in eighty-nine percent of subjects. The remainder die from neural overload."
"And him?"
Halvorsen hesitated. Scientists hated hesitating.
"And him," he said slowly, "isn't reacting physically at all."
At the center of the chamber floated the alien matter.
It was suspended within a multilayer containment field, its shape refusing stable geometry. It did not glow. It distorted. Space around it bent subtly, as though mass itself deferred in its presence.
Carter felt it.
Not as heat.
Not as sound.
As pressure.
As awareness.
The matter did not enter him.
It aligned.
His heartbeat synchronized with it. Each pulse carried information—direction without language, intent without command.
He understood, dimly, that this was not power.
It was access.
"Subject shows no external mutation markers," someone said. "Physical metrics unchanged."
The director exhaled. "Then the Genesis Protocol failed."
Carter heard the words.
Genesis.
Protocol.
Failed.
Failure implied expectation.
Expectation implied design.
"Prepare disposal," the director ordered. "We cannot risk residual contamination."
A hand moved toward the termination console.
Carter's heart rate did not spike.
Instead, something inside him clarified.
The restraints were not barriers.
The walls were not boundaries.
Distance was an assumption — one he no longer accepted.
Space folded.
No light.
No sound.
No warning.
One moment the table was occupied.
The next, it was empty.
Carter hit metal hard enough to tear skin.
Cold air burned his lungs as he gasped, rolling instinctively across jagged debris. Above him stretched real sky — deep, vast, uncontained.
A junkyard.
Industrial refuse. Forgotten machines. Broken systems.
Appropriate.
Inside his chest, something remained.
Not the alien matter itself.
Its residual architecture.
A constant awareness of mass, distance, and flow. He could feel gravity as a gradient, space as something malleable rather than fixed.
He staggered into shadow as distant sirens wailed.
Behind him, reality smoothed itself out.
The facility would find no body.
They had discarded a failure.
They had misidentified a foundation.