The lab had no name. No walls bore banners of empire or house. No one entered through its gates unless they had already given up their souls. It existed not on a map, but in the shadow of stars—buried beneath the lifeless crust of a black dwarf planet orbiting Amalthea's outer colonies.
Inside, the children didn't scream anymore.
They had forgotten how.
Rows of containment tubes pulsed with dull orange light. Within each one, a child floated—pale, hairless, skeletal. Tubes snaked into their spines. Wires embedded in their skulls. Nutrient slush pumped through their veins in perfect rhythms designed to mimic hunger, rage, and pain in calculated cycles.
They were not people. They were prototypes.
And the one in pod C-07 had stopped dreaming weeks ago.
---
The scientists called him Code Seven.
He didn't have a name, only a designation—the seventh viable subject in the third generation of the STRIKER initiative. A manufactured soldier. An artifact mule. A living coffin designed to survive just long enough inside the Infinite Planes to haul something valuable back into the real.
He was never supposed to think.
Never supposed to choose.
But something shifted in the dark that day.
Not in the lab.
In the Planes.
---
It began as a silence deeper than the sterile hum of the machines.
A weight settled on Code Seven's chest—ancient and absolute. Not an alarm. Not a failure in the monitoring systems. But a presence. Like an eye opening where no eye should exist. Like the space inside the pod turned inward and downward, and the void stared back.
He didn't know what the Infinite Planes were.
But the Infinite Planes knew him.
---
One of the attendants, a lesser Amalthean scientist with faded implants and a jittery demeanor, noticed the change on the monitors first.
"Sir," he called to the lead researcher. "Pod C-07... the readings are wrong. His neural lattice is syncing with a... non-local pattern."
The lead, Doctor Harelth, strode over, eyes sunken from sleepless decades. He stared at the data.
---
The numbers meant nothing to Code Seven.
But he felt what followed.
A whisper across the soul—not sound, but recognition.
And then—
The lights shattered.
Alarms never sounded. They didn't have time to.
All the containment pods remained sealed.
Except one.
C-07.
---
He stepped out.
No weapon.
No plan.
Only a body engineered for endurance, reflexes sharpened by thousands of silent torture cycles, and instincts older than speech.
Three guards rushed toward him, plasma batons humming. The first died before he understood Code Seven had moved. The second caught a jab in the throat, the third collapsed beneath his own weapon—twisted and impaled by the boy he thought was brain-dead.
The scientists screamed. Some begged. Most ran.
Code Seven didn't chase.
He moved without thinking—through the tunnels, past the whirring cores and blind surveillance lenses. He didn't know the path. But the Planes did. They wanted him gone.
Because they had marked him.
---
He reached the airlock just as the blast doors tried to seal. His hand, slick with blood, jammed the panel open. Cold vacuum howled inward. The stars screamed. But before the void could claim him—
The air folded.
The world bent.
And reality tore.
He fell through.
---
There were no words. No prompt. No sound.
Only a presence. A whisper.
"What do you seek?"
He didn't know the voice.
But the answer came without thought.
"Freedom."
The space around him twisted—ancient and endless. A force older than creation wound itself around him like a noose and a crown.
And the voice asked once more:
"Then what shall the Infinite call you?"
A choice.
The only one he'd ever been given.
"…Seeker."
---
The Infinite Planes accepted.
And the real universe forgot.
---
He dropped.
There was no sensation of wind or fall—just the endless plummet of space folding into itself. And then... stillness.
The Infinite Planes were not a place. They were a presence pretending to be one.
And now, it watched him.
Seeker stood at the edge of a silent expanse—gray ground, black sky, stars that didn't twinkle. The air was thick, not with gas, but with something heavier. Something ancient. Something awake.
His bare feet touched the soil of the First Threshold. Around him, obsidian stones floated gently above the surface, turning slowly in defiance of gravity. Far off in every direction, jagged monuments stabbed upward—ruins of something not built by hands. He wasn't alone. The Infinite Planes was never empty.
But it was always waiting.
A figure stirred beyond the dust-veiled ridge. Hulking. Deformed. Not entirely natural. One arm dragged behind it, longer than the other by meters. No eyes. Just holes. It sniffed the air with a tongue like a vine. Its body flickered between form and shadow.
It had once been someone. Someone who failed.
Now, it was part of the Planes.
And it smelled a newborn.
---
Seeker crouched low, muscles tense. No training. No knowledge. Just instincts and pain-engraved reflexes. He gripped a jagged shard of obsidian from the ground, knuckles white.
The thing screamed.
The Planes did not flinch.
Seeker ran.
The Infinite Planes was vast beyond imagining, but its nature was not linear. Distance bent. Time collapsed. As he sprinted through the broken wastes, the sky flickered—blue for a second, then green, then red-black. Cracks opened in the earth with no warning. Gravity shifted mid-step.
The entity followed without effort.
Not running.
Just appearing.
Again.
And again.
And again.
---
Seeker ducked into a chasm carved by an invisible force. The walls pulsed. Inside, symbols older than death glowed faintly. He touched one, and it whispered in no tongue he knew, yet he understood.
"This one died seeking fire beneath stone. You may not take what was his."
He stepped back. The symbols dimmed.
Even the ruins remembered.
This was no dungeon. No playground. No trial.
This was a graveyard of wills.
---
He turned—and the creature stood at the mouth of the chasm, blocking the only way out.
It stepped forward.
The Infinite Planes did not help him.
But it watched.
---
He knew only pain, only struggle. Nothing in him should have known how to fight. But somewhere deep, burned into the bones engineered for war, something awakened. The shard of obsidian spun in his hand. He ducked under the first swipe—fast, too fast—and jammed the edge into the thing's side.
It didn't bleed.
It roared. A noise like ripping metal and drowning screams.
It swung again. He leapt back.
He bled.
Twice.
Then three times.
A rib cracked.
But he didn't stop.
---
In the final moment, he grabbed the thing's tongue mid-lash, looped it around its malformed neck, and pulled with everything the labs had beaten into him.
It screamed one last time, and the scream turned inward.
The Infinite Planes shuddered.
The entity crumbled.
Not into dust.
Into silence.
---
Seeker collapsed beside the corpse. His hands were shaking. Not from fear—but from the rush. From the whisper that came again.
Not in sound.
But in truth.
[You are marked by struggle.]
[You are acknowledged.]
There was no fanfare. No light. No reward.
Just acknowledgment.
And a sensation that something had taken a step closer.
Something listening.
Far above, in a part of the Infinite Planes no mortal had ever reached, beings who did not speak and had no faces paused.
For the first time in a thousand years, something new had arrived.
Something Seeker.