TIME: 3:00 AM
PLACE: Blacksite Lighthouse Facility
---
Mason Holloway sat hunched at a scorched steel desk, surrounded by a jungle of cables and dusty monitors. A broken radiation warning sign flickered behind him like a haunted nightlight.
He was humming Highway to Hell… in binary.
Before him: Artifact X—a jagged crystalline shard pulled from the Mariana Echo-Floor. It hummed back, low and constant, like a heartbeat under the ocean.
It didn't just record thoughts. Lena's notes said that. Mason's theory?
> "It's syncing," he muttered, "with another version of us. A version that already thought it."
He'd been poking at its frequency patterns for hours—modulation patterns, waveform mimicry. The thing had mirrored itself across different signals like it had a mind of its own. Or many minds.
With a bootstrapped emulator, some scavenged military hardware, and—because irony loved him—a hacked smart toaster, he sent back a reply signal.
The moment the frequency hit:
> The artifact flared—bright, sharp, and silent. Like a migraine made of glass.
Every screen around him died. Lights blinked out. Power drained.
And then... every mirror, every spoon, every dark reflective surface in the facility twitched.
---
Everyone else is jolted awake by the electromagnetic tremor.
Ryker walks in, half-asleep and holding a gun.
Drake stomps in wearing nothing but camo pants and a cigar.
Lena shows up with three scalpels and a half-written grant proposal in her pocket.
> Ryker: "Mason, what did you do?"
Mason: "Made contact."
Drake: "That's not contact. That's a date with interdimensional herpes."
A spoon clinked to the floor.
Everyone turned.
Inside it… a face.
Not a reflection. A version. Older. Twisted. Watching.
Dozens more appeared—on windowpanes, shattered monitors, Lena's polished surgical tray.
Some were mutated. Scarred. Others were just... wrong. Like versions of themselves built from broken memories.
Mason stared into one and saw himself—older, bleeding from the eyes, mouthing words he hadn't said.
Lena scans: "No heat signatures. No life signs. These aren't reflections… They're recordings."
> Drake: "No, Doc. They're forecasts."
---
The artifact let out a pulse. Then another. Low-frequency audio—barely sound.
The speakers around them crackled—playing clips of screams, footsteps, garbled shouting.
But the timestamp?
> 02:44 AM. Tomorrow.
> Ryker, barely audible: "That's my voice… I'm not screaming yet."
Mason's hands trembled. Lena was already scanning. Something wasn't just talking—it was predicting.
Suddenly—crack.
A mirror shattered.
From the fracture... something pushed through.
A hand. Made of static. Glitched. Geometry that shouldn't exist. It twitched and spasmed like a corrupted thought trying to take shape.
Lena slammed a red switch.
> EMP surge.
The lights exploded, the hum died, and the artifact went still.
Everyone sat frozen, lungs screaming for air.
> Drake: "We just kicked whatever-it-was back into the mirror. Hope it doesn't knock twice."
---
They gather. Tension crackling. Caffeine sloshing.
Mason confirms the signal bounce triggered a timefold event. The artifact "looped" data across mirrored surfaces—using reflective entropy to form quantum impressions of probable selves.
Lena triangulates the source of the reply. Coordinates: a trench off an uncharted island between South Georgia and the Amazon mouth.
Drake stares at the data.
> Drake:
"There's a reason humanity never mapped that part of the sea. We didn't forget it—we erased it.
And now it remembers us."
The artifact, now pulsing slowly, emits a low harmonic frequency—not quite a sound. More like a feeling of déjà vu biting your spine.
The crew, shell-shocked and jittering like overcharged spiders, sits around a warped metal table in the lighthouse's emergency bunker.
Lena played back the artifact's signals at 0.25x.
They weren't just pulses. They were distress calls—but not human. Like something mammalian… or post-mammalian.
Mason ran mirror-fluctuation data through solar flare databases. Nothing matched.
> "The surge wasn't solar. It wasn't external. The artifact did this from the inside."
Ryker, once the cool-headed soldier, now checked her reflection in every metal surface—waiting for one of them to blink.
> Drake: "I once saw my future self during a DMT blackout in Kandahar. He looked just as disappointed."
A pattern emerges: the artifact didn't choose the lighthouse by accident.
It targeted their consciousness—each member. Something about their minds made them compatible. Lena runs a genetic + neuro-profile scan.
What links them?
> They all exhibit hyper-fractal neural oscillation variance.
Translation: their brains think like spirals inside mirrors inside dreams. They're outliers—perfect for… unlocking something.
---
They realize the coordinates are only accessible by deep-sea submersible, and not just any tin can—one that can withstand pressure past 11,000 meters, in a trench unrecorded on any modern satellite maps.
Drake makes a call to someone from his… "disreputable years."
> "I know a guy. He drinks like Poseidon and thinks squids are Russian spies."
---
[ 8:00 AM ]
The docks are deserted. The air smells like rust, diesel, and bad decisions.
Enter: Captain Marius Krauss
One eye.
A naval tattoo that looks like it bit someone.
Talks like a German-accented Lovecraftian pirate.
Claims to have punched a kraken and seduced a mermaid in the same weekend.
> Krauss: "I don't take passengers. I take people who don't come back."
Drake introduces him like he's presenting a cursed artifact.
Mason mutters:
> "We're putting our lives in the hands of Aquaman's psychotic uncle."
Lena negotiates by showing Krauss a sample of the artifact's residue—it melts titanium in 9 seconds.
Krauss laughs for 13 seconds straight.
> "You're holding God's kidney stone. Let's go."
---
The crew boards The Echo Lung—a retrofitted military sub with graffiti in multiple languages, a smell of vodka, and a mysterious hatch Krauss says "leads nowhere unless it wants to."
Before they descend, Ryker stares at the artifact one more time.
> Her reflection moves its lips…
But doesn't mirror her.
8:30 AM
Inside The Echo Lung, the atmosphere is thick—literally and metaphorically. Krauss is humming sea shanties that definitely aren't in any known language.
The crew descends past 6,000 meters. Outside, the sea turns black. Then blacker. Then... reflective.
Yes. Reflective water. Like they're sinking through mercury instead of ocean.
Lena checks the sensors:
> "This isn't normal fluid density. Something's shifting… molecular memory?"
Mason: "Cool. The ocean's gaslighting us."
---
10,000 meters down, something knocks on the hull.
From the inside.
Krauss doesn't flinch. He lights a cigar with a flare.
> "That's just the trench saying hello. It's polite like that."
---
The Trench mouth (11:00 AM)
They reach a jagged, gaping chasm in the ocean floor. The coordinates lock in. The trench emits a low harmonic frequency—identical to what the artifact sent through the lighthouse.
Lena runs a waveform comparison:
> "It's a match. This trench isn't a place. It's a recording device."
A node librarium—a vault for biological data and pre-human consciousness archives. Possibly built by a civilization older than tectonic drift.
They dock on a ledge. The entrance is circular, sealed with an organic metal that responds to bioelectrical pulse—Drake used his superman kick and boom.
---
Inside the Librarium (12:15 PM)
The walls are alive. Not moving, but breathing, subtly.
The place resembles an alien cathedral carved out of pressure-proof bone.
Every chamber is a memory. Holograms flicker in languages that don't use characters—just emotion patterns and neural spike data.
The artifact resonates.
Lena finds a stasis vault. Inside: a preserved humanoid brain in a jar of pale blue fluid.
Next to it: A console.
It displays five symbols. One matches the artifact.
She interfaces it. The console prints out instructions for "Mind-Pathway Opening Protocol."
"Step 1: Ingest the serum. Step 2: Let go."
Ryker, without a word, picks up the vial.
It's viscous, black, and smells like ozone and nostalgia.
Mason:
> "This is how zombie movies start. Just saying."
Ryker drinks it.
Her eyes dilate. Irises fracture into spiral slits.
She convulses, then stills. Her voice turns polyphonic:
> "It's not a library. It's a memory. Buried because it wanted to forget itself."
The Librarium reacts.
The walls begin humming. Data crystals unfold and project a 3D map of Earth—but it's ancient. Pre-human tectonics.
A red mark pulses in the Amazon basin.
Beneath it: another node.
Suddenly… Ryker's hand twitches. Her veins shimmer briefly with light.
Not just mental effects—the serum is changing her body.
Lena scans. The mutations are genetic.
The serum is rewriting her code.
Drake whispers:
> "She's becoming whatever built this place."
..
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Location: Night over the Nazca desert, Peru.
Beat: A lone drone overflew the Nazca Lines and records a faint, pulsing glow tracing one of the giant hummingbirds—then distorts into a perfect match for an overlooked glyph at Ocomtún.
Hook: On playback, the pulse has a hidden code: a countdown.
[CUT TO]
Location: High-security observatory atop the ruins of the Mayan city Ocomtún, Yucatán Peninsula.
Dr. Lomo Mosysso: The mad, overweight astrophysicist and linguist obsessed with cosmic patterns and ancient rituals.
Lester: Lomo's paranoid assistant, wrapped in tinfoil for "protection," convinced the government is tracking him.
Emu: Lomo's brutal, dark-humored parrot who has seen it all and doesn't hesitate to call out the madness.
The jungle murmured with ancient breath as the stars gathered in tight, unfamiliar constellations. Above the crumbled teeth of the buried pyramid, the observatory dome hissed open like a mechanical iris, exposing itself to the night sky—and to madness.
Inside, chaos wore a lab coat.
"Boss, you're literally foaming at the mouth again," Lester muttered, adjusting the aluminum foil under his helmet. "That can't be good for your cholesterol or the camera lenses."
"Foam is clarity, Lester! It's the language of divine calculations!" Dr. Lomo Mosysso barked from the eyepiece of his telescope, his stomach spilling over his belt like a planet achieving sentience.
He overlays Nazca drone footage with Mayan glyphs on the table. The thread encodes a single phrase in proto-Mayan: "Suture the wound or bleed eternity."
"Hmm.. the hummingbird line—Nazca—it's back. Aligned perfectly. Tonight, it speaks."
"You speak. It screams," said Emu the parrot, perched above the emergency coffee maker. "Also, Boss, you're sweating like a haunted ham."
"He always does that before something stupid."
"You named your rash," Emu added. "That ain't science. That's prophecy from a greasy burrito."
Lomo ignored them both. Of course he did. He always did. Because in Lomo's mind, he was Galileo reincarnated in a fatter, less hygienic form. A man destined to uncover the universe's secrets through indigestion and star maps.
Through the telescope, he saw it: a thread of pale green light—as thin as spider silk and stretching upward from the very core of the pyramid. It shimmered, vibrated, and then... pulsed.
"There it is! Cosmic Thread! The antenna is alive!" Lomo yelled.
"Yeah, and you're about to be the signal, Boss," Lester whispered.
They descended into the pyramid through a hidden service lift disguised as a vending machine. As the lift descended, fluorescent lights flickered like the nervous system of an epileptic AI.
Lester held tight to his tablet, whispering to himself, "I'm not saying it's aliens, but it's 100% aliens."
"You once thought your own foot was a reptilian spy, Lester," Emu said. "Let the grownups hallucinate properly."
The chamber was a cathedral of ancient madness. Glyphs pulsed with low-frequency light. At the center stood a crystalline orb suspended in anti-gravity, rotating slowly like it was tasting the air.
Lomo approached it, eyes wide, spittle catching the blue glow.
"It's singing," he whispered. "A frequency only fat geniuses can hear."
"Or diabetics about to faint," Emu said. "Boss, you ain't the chosen one. You're the 'optional DLC'."
"Shut it, you damned feathered insult cannon."
But the thread—now visible to all—linked Lomo's forehead directly to the orb. Static clung to the walls.
"Boss, step back," Lester said. "You're... vibrating. Your nose hair is glowing."
"IT'S HERE! THE COSMIC MATH!" Lomo screamed.
A brilliant white flash.
Silence.
Then—a pop, like a marshmallow meeting a bug zapper.
Lomo was gone.
Before anyone can help, his body ignites from the inside—he combusts in silent blue flame, leaving only a scorched skull and intact eyeballs staring at the telescope.
Emu lands on the burning eyepiece: "Well, that's one way to retire."
Lester, terrified but guilt-ridden, pockets Lomo's glyph scanner and drags Emu down to the pyramid entrance. The countdown from the Nazca Lines code is at T-minus 7 minutes.
Emu squawks, "You're late, meat puppet."
...