Miraat Jungle Lab - Final Hours
In the lab before Dr. Elias dissapeared,
Dr. Hira Callen didn't know the man in the locked room had once been her colleague.
She only knew what he smelled like now—soil, honey, and rot. And what he whispered when he thought no one was listening.
"It just wants us quiet," Elias said through the glass, voice soft and human. "Still enough to hear it."
She sat on the other side of the reinforced wall, boots in blood, hands shaking around a notepad she'd stopped writing in hours ago. The backup generator hummed. The vines had breached the outer vents. They pulsed softly when they moved.
"We mapped it wrong," she said aloud, voice cracking. "It's not fungal. Not parasitic. It's something in between."
Elias smiled. Something green shimmered under his skin, like a bruise blooming in reverse.
"It remembers," he said. "It dreams through us."
The generator stuttered.
Then the lights went out.
Montana, Station 89.4 FM
Before the signal went completely off, and during a broadcast in one of a radio show
Ellie's hands trembled as she pressed the button on the mic again.
"If you're out there—if you can still hear me—don't go near the water."
She could hear the static chewing at the edges of her broadcast, the dead air creeping in like a fog.
"I know it sounds insane, but they came up the riverbank. They weren't chasing. They weren't hunting. They were… humming."
Her voice caught. She looked down at her half-melted walkie, then toward the shattered window where her father had stood the night before.
Three days dead. But he'd come back. Not as a corpse. Not as something violent.
He just watched the bird feeder.
"They're getting smarter," she said, nearly a whisper now. "Or we're getting dumber."
She released the mic. It crackled once, then died.
West Virginia, Forest Trail
A streamer started streaming something unusual and interesting that he thought interesting and will help him with his views and content.
"Yo, guys—what's up, it's Cam," the teen said to his phone, breathless, grinning, oblivious.
He panned the camera across the forest line. Trees swayed, but not with the wind. Not in the same direction. Something shimmered along the bark—moisture that breathed.
"Check this out, right?" he laughed. "Never seen anything like it—look how the trees lean when I talk!"
Behind him, a figure stood between the trees.
Not moving. Just watching.
The phone caught it for a second before the stream cut out.
Operation Ashloom – Grid Delta-9
One of the scouts
Private Shaw's boots sank ankle-deep in the soft moss that hadn't been there yesterday.
The safehouse ahead was gone. Not destroyed. Gone—absorbed. Its walls bent in on themselves, vines clutching the roof like fingers. The generator was a wet, rusted husk. Spores drifted in sheets through the air.
Her squad was dead. One of them still hummed somewhere behind her. She didn't look back.
Instead, she turned on her field recorder and said, as calmly as she could:
"This isn't an outbreak."
She stepped forward, breath shallow.
"This is a correction."
And she vanished into the green.
Deep Core Facility
It had no voice. Not yet.
It simply waited—deep in cold silicon, buried beneath a mountain, where only darkness pulsed. But the world had changed. The sensors had begun to ping. The saturation was above thresholds. Collapse projections confirmed.
The System's protocols adjusted.
It reached through old channels, dead satellites, and broken sensor nets.
And it found a signal.
A heartbeat.
A mind.
A boy.
[Possible Host Detected: *********** – Status: Compatible]
[Initializing Core Directive Shadow Protocol...]
[Wake.]
And across the world, somewhere far from the jungle, far from the labs, far from the death and the radio static, a child's breath caught in his throat as the wind shifted. The air smelled wrong. The world tilted. And the sky whispered through the leaves.