Michael stared at his screen, his expression flat, the glow of twin monitors reflecting off his glasses. On one, a spreadsheet application filled the display with columns of numbers; on the other, an interface streamed live data from the particle accelerator.
He felt tired. Irritated. Probably the nicotine again.
He scrunched his eyebrows, trying to force his concentration onto the monitor. He was supposed to be comparing the results from the accelerator with the distributions in his spreadsheet, checking for any deviations from the expected model. Instead, his thoughts kept slipping, like they were trying to leak out the sides of his skull.
Technomancer ReGenesis: Chapter 1 Explosion
With a quiet sigh, he took off his glasses and massaged his temples, closing his eyes.
"Argh," He muttered, the small outward show of frustration oddly rare for him.
If he couldn't focus on real work, he might as well do something low-effort. He opened Alacritty, his terminal, and his fingers moved automatically across the keys:
```
sudo pacman -Syu
```
Arch Linux. His operating system of choice.
He was an elitist about tools as much as anything else. Gentoo might have been more "pure" in the eyes of the hardcore, but the convenience trade-off wasn't worth it. Arch had the AUR—flexible, powerful, and still demanding enough to filter out the truly incompetent. It was the sweet spot between masochism and laziness.
The update prompts began scrolling in the terminal. While the system churned through mirrors and packages, the restlessness in his chest only grew.
He needed a cigarette.
Most of the LHC complex was strictly non-smoking, but his office came with a narrow balcony. One of the few perks he actually valued.
He pushed back his chair, rose, and crossed the office. The glass door to the balcony slid aside with a soft hiss when he thumbed the handle. Cool air rushed in, brushing against his face and tugging lightly at the hem of his lab coat.
Outside, it was mid-autumn. The sky was partially cloudy, an unbroken field of grey pressing down over the distant hills. The whole firmament looked washed out, like someone had desaturated the world.
He pulled a cigarette from the left pocket of his jacket, set it between his lips, and flicked his lighter. The flame flared, a brief warmth against his fingers. He inhaled deeply, letting smoke fill his lungs, then exhaled in a long, slow stream.
"Ahh," he said aloud, more to the empty air than to himself.
He knew smoking was bad for the lungs. Everyone did. Smoking increased the risk of lung cancer; the warnings were plastered on every box, every ad, every public health announcement. That part wasn't in dispute.
What annoyed him was how the media treated it as the pure distillation of moral evil, like a cigarette was one step away from original sin.
Discouraging the masses from smoking made sense. Statistically, they weren't careful, and they weren't exactly running complex cost–benefit analyses on their habits. But smoking actually had benefits, and pretending it was a one-dimensional villain grated on him. Maybe the cons did outweigh the pros in aggregate. He simply found it useful—especially in his line of work.
And if it shaved a few years off his life expectancy? He couldn't bring himself to care.
Nicotine actually has some benefits: it can increase neuroplasticity, which is associated with learning and memory. It binds to nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, modulating acetylcholine release in the brain and tightening up focus. For most people, that was trivia. For him, it was a tool: a controlled adjustment to his own cognition, traded for a long-term health penalty he had already accepted.
Drugs in general hit him oddly. Stimulants like nicotine sharpened him, but sedatives and anesthetics tended to behave "paradoxically" on him—one doctor's term, not his. Once, during a trial run for a minor procedure, the sedative had sent his heart rate down instead of up, his EEG pattern shifting into something the attending physician had called "interesting" before deciding it was probably an artifact. It had been filed away as "rare but benign variation." He'd kept the note from that report, mostly because it amused him.
Periodic medical checks were part of thOnce again thank you guyse job, especially with the radiation exposure risks at CERN and his past work with the Department of Defense. Blood work, brain scans, neurotransmitter panels—they all generated reams of data. His reports always had a few stray anomalies here and there, strange little deviations that didn't fit cleanly on the neat bell curves the doctors liked. They shrugged and labeled them "individual variation." He labeled them "noise" and ignored them.
He took one last slow drag, then brought the cigarette down to the ashtray bolted to the railing and crushed it out with practiced precision. The air smelled faintly of smoke and cold concrete.
He slid the door shut behind him and walked back to his desk.
Settling into his chair, he put his glasses on again and leaned toward the monitors. The spreadsheets, graphs, and distributions snapped into sharper focus. He began working through the discrepancy line by line, riding the faint stimulant buzz, when the glass door to the hallway slid open.
"Dr. Faraday, I see that you are still busy at work," a sweet, high-pitched voice chimed playfully.
Michael looked up.
A woman approached—blonde hair, blue eyes, a red scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. White long-sleeved blouse, jeans. She wore a bright, teasing smile that probably worked on a lot of people.
"Shouldn't we get lunch?" she asked, fluttering her eyes in an exaggerated, coquettish way.
"Elea, I'm sorry," Michael said, tone cool but not unkind. "I was just looking into this. The simulations don't seem to match the distribution. If we can figure out what's wrong, we might have a real breakthrough. Maybe even a paper."
"Or we just might have another hardware error," Elea sighed, rolling her eyes. "Remember that time? All over the news—'neutrinos faster than light'—then whoops, faulty calibration."
She shook her head, then leaned in closer, the teasing smile returning.
"Michael, I think that can wait," she said, her voice dropping into something softer, more playful. She stepped in, pressing her body lightly against his shoulder, her perfume cutting through the recycled air of the office. "Come on. Lunch."
Inwardly, Michael's annoyance spiked. He hated being interrupted mid-problem.
Outwardly, his expression barely changed.
Elea Bergman was a colleague he'd slept with more than once. For him, it was purely physical, an arrangement of convenience. She was useful in certain contexts—companionship when he didn't want to think too hard—but right now she was noise in the data. He had no interest in whatever unspoken conversation she wanted to have about "them."
He didn't know exactly what she thought of him—fling, potential something-more, or just a puzzle she hadn't solved yet—but whatever expectations she might have, they slid off him like water off glass. There were acquaintances, but no friends. Bodies, but no bonds.
He had long since distanced himself from everyone. It wasn't for lack of trying; he had attempted, in his own way, to reach out, to connect. But it always felt as if something inside him refused to move—a locked door that would not yield, no matter how hard he pushed.
Maybe it was the eidetic memory.
From a young age, everything stuck to him: voices, faces, words—every careless insult, every awkward pause, every humiliating moment. Nothing faded. Even insignificant utterances embedded themselves like splinters.
He remembered everything, and that had consequences.
Most interactions felt shallow. Conversations revolved around work, collider schedules, paper drafts, trivial daily logistics. No matter how long he spent with people, nothing of them seemed to sink in beyond the factual surface. He could pity orphans, misfits, broken things, but he never quite managed to empathize with the colleagues standing directly in front of him.
Even among the other high-functioning obsessives at CERN, there was a gap. They burned out, snapped at each other, fell into office politics and petty rivalries. He watched it all like someone observing a simulation that ran on rules slightly different from his own.
It wasn't that he was incapable of emotion. He could feel anger, pity, frustration, even flashes of warmth. But whenever other people were involved, his feelings flattened out, as if some internal system defaulted to low power. The only time he felt genuine passion was when he was wrestling with a problem he cared about—and problems rarely included people.
"I'll just catch up later," Michael said, offering Elea Bergman a faint, practiced smile. "I really want to finish this."
"Oh, come on, please," pouted, withdrawing slightly but still hovering close.
Before he could respond, another figure eased into the doorway.
"Uhm, excuse me," a thin, hesitant voice said.
Michael and Elea both turned.
A man stood at the threshold, clutching a folder to his chest. He looked younger than them, shoulders slightly hunched, eyes flickering nervously between the two physicists.
"Pardon the intrusion, Dr. Faraday," he began. "I've been meaning to talk to Dr. Bergman about the results for the paper she's working on. The door was open, so I—uh—I just came in. I apologize if I interrupted you two."
Elea lingered, still half-turned toward Michael, as if she hadn't fully processed the newcomer's presence.
Michael seized the opportunity.
"Dr. Bergman," he said, deliberately formal, "it looks like Dr. Meyer needs you."
His voice shifted subtly, cool and precise. Normally he didn't insist on titles at CERN, but formality was a convenient tool when he wanted someone to leave.
"I think you should discuss the results in detail," he added, smiling up at her as if graciously granting permission.
Meyer's timing was inconvenient, but acceptable. Pawns were most useful when they moved themselves.
"Fine," Elea huffed.
She recognized the dismissal and it grated on her. It was always like this—work before anything else—but today it stung more than usual. She'd planned to finally corner him about what exactly they were to each other.
"Fine," she repeated, sharper this time. "But you owe me lunch."
She pivoted toward Dr. Meyer.
"Dr. Meyer, let's go to my lab," she said, tone brisk now. "We can discuss it there. I'll clear my schedule after lunch—it wasn't that important anyway." She let out a puff of air. "In the meantime, I'll have lunch at the cafeteria. Maybe you can accompany me, since Dr. Faraday is so unwilling."
Her gaze flicked back to Michael, waiting—hoping—for some sign of regret, interest, anything.
Michael had already turned back to his monitors, eyes scanning lines of data. He gave no reaction.
Elea glared at the back of his head, then spun on her heel and stomped toward the door, muttering under her breath. Dr. Meyer, bewildered and visibly tense, hurried after her.
"Th-thank you, Dr. Faraday. I'll be on my way," he stammered as he left.
"Oh, Dr. Bergman," Michael said mildly, without turning, "please close the door on your way out."
There was a resounding slam as the glass door slid shut.
"Urgh, that Michael Faraday," Elea's voice echoed faintly down the hallway before fading away.
Michael James Faraday.
That was his name; the one the social workers wrote on the intake form, the one teachers mispronounced during roll call, the one he eventually found in a library book about another man who bent electricity to his will. That coincidence was the reason he got into physics in the first place. Looking up what his name meant had led him to the original Faraday, and curiosity about that man's work had quietly taken over his life.
He'd been raised in an orphanage. His earliest memory wasn't of the building itself, but of asphalt—cold and rough against his cheek—as he woke up alone on a street, throat raw from crying. Strangers' faces floated above him: a police officer, a paramedic, a woman with a clipboard. They asked questions he couldn't answer. No one ever came forward to claim him. From that day on, the only thing he could say about himself with any certainty was his name. Everything before that moment was a blank; everything after was built on those three words.
He tried to refocus on his work, but his attention was already fraying again. The nicotine buzz was thinning, and the ghost of the encounter with Elea lingered at the edges of his thoughts, irritating and irrelevant.
He tabbed away from the control interface and opened another workspace: his ICQ client, running inside a locked-down environment.
The first message that popped up practically screamed at him in text:
LolOLOLlol. Just got my hands on Ghidra. Those n00bs at the Legion of Doom, don't know shit, i planted a rootkit on one of the machines in nsa. Don't expect clearance though. I just got it on a user. alahphobia13 acting all l33t and shit. If we weren't planning something big I would have drawn a dick on his wallpaper for the lulz.. h4x0rManLo1
Michael rolled his eyes.
The conversation couldn't be traced easily, of course. He had all the network traffic pinned down on his own server, routed out through TOR, with an extra layer of PGP encryption wrapped around the ICQ messages. Belt-and-suspenders. Not that it truly mattered. He wouldn't go to jail anyway; he was, after all, still protected by the Department of Defense as a dormant operative.
Still, standard practice was standard practice. Keep a low profile. Always cover your tracks. That was why he was viewing this inside TailsOS.
He leaned back, studying the message again. The idiot he was social-engineering thought he'd found a weak NSA machine to infiltrate and was bragging about planting a rootkit on it. In truth, the target box was a honeypot—a trap deliberately made easier to break into than the rest of the infrastructure.
Besides, Ghidra—the reverse-engineering software developed by the NSA—was scheduled to be publicly released in a few months anyway. Whatever build h4x0rManLo1 had "got his hands on" probably came with its own backdoor baked in.
He had history with the Department of Defense. He'd been employed there as a non-combatant; his main role was weapons research, but he'd also been pulled into cybersecurity work during his tenure. On paper, research and cyber security were vastly different fields. In practice, his double major in Physics and Computer Science made him useful in both, so they'd let him operate as a kind of roaming consultant: part researcher, part security specialist. From time to time he still reported anything out of the ordinary. Technically, he was still on their payroll.
Weapons research had never particularly bothered him. Someone was going to design better ways to kill people; it might as well be someone who understood the cost in precise, quantifiable terms. Morality was one variable among many.
Michael hadn't learned to break into systems for fun. He'd done it for one reason: to gather information about his parents.
In his earlier years he had used every tool and clearance he could get to look for them. He dug through records and databases that weren't meant to be touched. It was as if they never existed. No birth certificates, no missing-persons reports, no redacted files in the corners of government archives. Nothing. The absence itself was anomalous, and that perplexed and infuriated him in equal measure.
"Argh!!" Michael growled, the sound ripping out of him before he could smother it.
The search for his parents was one of the very few topics that could still drag real anger to the surface. If he ever found them, he didn't imagine a tearful reunion; he imagined telling them, calmly and in detail, exactly how much he had suffered at the orphanage. How irresponsible they were. How their decision—or whatever had happened—had crystallized into a permanent fact in his life.
He wanted someone to blame, faces to attach the fury to. Instead, all he had were blanks, two silhouettes he could only invent.
His eidetic memory didn't help. He remembered the orphanage too well: the peeling green paint in the hallway, the sour mix of disinfectant and old food, the way the other kids' laughter always seemed to turn sharp when it swung in his direction. He remembered the bullying, the way they pushed the quiet boy who "remembered everything" just a little harder than the others.
And he remembered Edward Shilling.
Edward, who shared contraband comics with him under the blankets, who was the closest thing he'd had to a friend. Edward, whose name was called one afternoon by a social worker in a too-bright floral blouse, suitcase already waiting by the office door. Michael could still hear the cheap plastic wheels of that suitcase rattling over the cracked linoleum as Edward was led away.
After that, Michael shut everyone out.
He lay low, carefully copying what passed for normal: speaking when he was expected to, laughing at the right moments, pretending not to understand things that were obvious to him. Acting dumb and ignorant made his blood boil, but it made him invisible. The only time he allowed himself to push was in high school, when grades and entrance exams became tools—necessary leverage to force open the doors to the universities he wanted.
Now, as the anger ebbed, the familiar emptiness settled back into his chest, cold and clean. He exhaled slowly. He had left the DoD after doing everything in his power to extract information about his birth and his parents, and finding nothing. If it wasn't for physics—if he hadn't had something to aim that obsessive focus at—he genuinely didn't know what else he would be doing.
He thought about going out for another cigarette, but decided against it. His lungs ached faintly; his head felt heavy.
He tried to work again, forcing his eyes back to the monitors, but the numbers blurred. Words floated without anchoring. His fingers hovered over the keyboard and then stopped.
"What's happening to me?" he wondered. "Focus," he commanded himself, voice tight. "Why can't I lock in? I stopped caring about this garbage a lifetime ago. Why is it surfacing now?"
He shook his head, as if he could dislodge the fog. It felt different from simple exhaustion or a nicotine crash—like someone had quietly reached into his skull and turned the gain down on his senses.
When he looked up, he noticed a yellow indicator light glowing steadily on a panel near the far wall—a small, almost easily missed detail.
The LHC was active.
Weird.
He hadn't heard about a scheduled run today. No beam-time booking, no shift notes. Nothing that should have triggered that light.
He frowned, a prickle of unease sliding down his spine. Maybe he'd missed a memo. Maybe there was a late-scheduled test. Or maybe it was some glitch in the sensor system. It wouldn't have been the first hardware error to cause a stir.
His thoughts slipped again, scattered by the growing heaviness in his limbs. His eyelids felt wrong, heavier than they should. His body felt a half-second out of sync with itself, like his movements were being transmitted through a laggy connection.
He turned back to his screen, willing his mind to latch onto the work, but his eyes just stared blankly at the rows of data.
The world tilted.
There was a sound then, a deep, impossible crack that seemed to come from everywhere at once—like metal screaming and air collapsing and glass shattering, all folded into a single moment.
Then came the pain.
White-hot, absolute, flooding his consciousness before he even had time to process fear.
And then there was nothing at all.