The change began quietly.
Not with screams, or alarms, or broken connections like the days before—
but with a pulse.
A soft, rhythmic throb moving through hospitals, clinics, emergency shelters, and every biotech hub that still flickered with emergency power after the global shutdown. At first, the pulse was written off as residual interference, a side effect of the worldwide EMP that had fried nearly every machine.
But the doctors noticed something strange almost immediately.
Machines that should have been dead… twitched.
Monitors with cracked screens pushed out faint lines of green light.
Refrigerated medical cabinets hummed weakly.
Diagnostic nanite reservoirs—supposedly inert—began to glow with internal luminescence.
And beneath it all, a frequency no one could quite hear, but everyone could feel, trembled like a heartbeat inside their skulls.
Humanity thought they had starved the monster.
They thought shutting down the world would stop him.
