EYES OPENING
He found himself standing in a void. It was an endless, pressurized expanse of blackness—no floor, no ceiling, and no horizon, much like the dark, watery psychic plane Eleven once traversed. He looked down and realized he was entirely naked, his pale skin the only thing visible against the absolute dark.
He turned in a slow, stumbling circle, his eyes searching for a wall, a door, or a guard. There was nothing but the void.
"Am I dead?" he whispered, his voice sounding thin and hollow in the vacuum. "I'm finally dead. Those fuckers finally killed me."
A jagged, hysterical sense of relief washed over him. He slumped downward, sitting on the invisible surface beneath him.
"At least I won't have to go through those tortures anymore," he muttered to himself.
He pulled his knees to his chest and stared into the nothingness. In the silence of the black room, his mind drifted back. He began to think about everything he had endured—the needles, the cold, the screams of the others, and every waking second he had spent inside the facility since the day they took him.
Four years.
It had been four years since the world ended for him. Before the cells, before the shaved head and the gray overalls, he was just a clueless twelve-year-old. He remembered the warmth of a shelter—not sterile like the facility, but cramped and smelling of woodsmoke and unwashed bodies. He remembered his parents, two people who had spent every waking hour trying to scrape a life out of the dirt for him.
They had told him the stories of the Old World. They told him about the Great Disaster a century ago—the "Zombie Apocalypse." It was a word that felt like a myth until you saw the things behind the fences. They told him how, twenty years after the first outbreak, humanity had finally developed immunity. People thought the nightmare was over.
Then one day a PULSE came.
No one knew where it came from, but it had shaken reality itself. The immunity stayed, but the world broke. Areas that had been cleared for decades suddenly crawled with the undead again, as if reality had folded in on itself to bring the monsters back as if they had always been there. Many lives where lost.
But that was not the only change, strange phenomena begunt o happen to all sixteen year olds. They started to develop strange abilities which was termed awakening. They told him that's all they knew and that the military had sprung from no where and had sent away the sisteen year olds who had experienced the phenomena in the name of quarantine to prevent another apocalypse.
Even though public knew it was for their own selfish gains it did help instill order, but with the emergence of order there will be those who oppose it. HETRAM, They weren't soldiers; they were ghosts, a notorious terrorist organization that saw the apocalypse as an opportunity for evolution. They didn't want to save humanity; they wanted to merge it with the very thing that was trying to eat it. They wanted an Awakener with the soul of a zombie.
He started to remember the time his shelter ws raided by this group. They burnt their cottages plundering resources, slaughtering people especially adults like pigs in a slaughter house. They took away adolescents and he was one of the unfortunate ones, as he was dragged away he saw the scene of his mother being felled in the desperate attempt to save him. The screams of people scrambling away for their lives and the cottages which had been set ablaze by the attackers.
The scenes blurred after that. He remembered waking up in a small, cold cell. He remembered the first time that industrial alarm rang, and the doors opened to reveal a hundred other unfortunate kids, all with the same hollow look in their eyes.
He remembered the "training." It was a sanitized word for a meat grinder. They were pitted against machines—mechanical objects that knew no exhaustion and felt no pity. If you were slow, you bled. If you were weak, you disappeared.
Thetrue nightmares begun when he turned fifteen. The machines were replaced with the "Crazed"—the mindless, undead beings. They were shoved into arenas with nothing but their bare hands and the desperate need to survive. That single day, half of his age-group had been torn apart, their blood staining the concrete floors of the facility.
By the time he turned sixteen, he was no longer the boy from the shelter. He was a weapon that hadn't quite fired yet. He remembered looking at the new batch of twelve-year-olds brought in just days before his final integration. He had watched their darting, terrified eyes and felt nothing. Not even pity.
Now, sitting in the dark, he closed his eyes.
"Four years," he whispered again. "And it's over."
As he sat there, lost in the wreckage of his past, the absolute blackness of the void began to bleed.
A dark, reddish-purple substance—a thick, creeping aura—started to seep into the space. It didn't have a source; it simply manifested, crawling through the vacuum like ink dropped into water. The sudden emergence of color in a world of nothingness jerked him out of his stupor. He stood up, his tall, pale frame a stark silhouette against the creeping murk.
He moved toward it. It was the only thing with color, the only sign of change in this eternal silence. But as he drew near, the substance seemed to sense him. It didn't just drift; it lunged.
The aura latched onto his limbs, thick and viscous. He struggled, striking out at the empty air, but there was nothing to grip, nothing to push against. The reddish-purple mass began to engulf him, slowly climbing up his legs and over his torso. He could only watch in a mixture of horror and fascination as the thing claimed him, covering eighty percent of his body in its dark, pulsing light.
Back in the physical world, the researchers were oblivious to the psychic struggle. They stood in the cavernous laboratory, their eyes glued to the flickering monitors showing the state of the twenty figures in the tanks containing the green fluids. The head researcher watched the digital display as the timer approached the final seconds.
00:00:03
00:00:02
00:00:01
The clock hit zero.
Unbeknownst to Subject 088, that was the moment his reality fractured.
In the void, just as the reddish-purple substance was about to swallow him whole, a wave pulsed through the black expanse. The world stuttered. The activity of the aura froze, its creeping tendrils suspended in mid-air. Time itself seemed to have been put on a tether.
Then, a large, translucent blue screen hovered directly in front of his face.
Before his mind could even begin to process the symbols glowing on the screen, the space around him shattered like glass. The void, the creeping purple rot, and the suffocating silence all broke apart.
Subject 088 disappeared, pulled through the cracks of the breaking dimension along with every distraction of the dark.
....................................….
The head researcher's eyes remained fixed on the violet storm surging across the monitors. "He's too deep," he muttered, his voice cold and impatient. "We can't run diagnostics on a mind that's locked in a self-sustaining loop. Fetch the ACD. We're pulling him out now."
The subordinate hesitated for a fraction of a second. "Sir, the neural spikes are already at critical levels. Forcing him awake with the Anti-Coma Device could"
"I didn't ask for a risk assessment," the researcher snapped. "Get it."
Two technicians hurried to the back of the ward, returning with a heavy, industrial-grade chassis. The ACD (Anti-Coma Device) looked less like a medical tool and more like an instrument of siege. It consisted of a high-frequency conduction halo lined with jagged, crystalline electrodes and a series of thick, insulated coils that hummed with a low-grade ozone scent.
They positioned the halo over Subject 088's shaved head. The electrodes hovered just millimeters from his skin, aligned with the specific neural clusters that were currently firing in that "combat-sim" loop.
"Initiate neural jumpstart," the researcher commanded.
The machine roared to life. It didn't just vibrate; it shrieked. Arcs of concentrated, artificial electricity—vibrant blue and jagged—leaped from the electrodes, biting into 088's scalp. The current jolted through his frame, bypassing his nerves and striking directly at his brain stem.
The boy's body reacted with a singular, violent spasm. His back arched off the slab, his muscles snapping so taut they looked like they might tear from the bone. The smell of scorched air filled the room as the sparks danced across his pale skin, forcing his biology to reject the safety of the coma. Every time he tried to slip back into the void, the ACD hammered him with another surge, a brutal, electrical hook dragging him toward the surface of consciousness.
For an hour, the room was a chaotic display of strobe lights and the rhythmic crack-snap of high-voltage discharge. Subject 088 lay in the center of the storm, his long frame vibrating under the relentless assault.
Suddenly, the subordinate at the monitors raised a hand. "Stop! Look at the waveform!"
The head researcher leaned in. The chaotic, violet spikes had shifted. They were no longer looping; they were lengthening, smoothing out into the jagged, aggressive peaks of a waking mind. The "storm" was beginning to organize into intent.
"Terminate usage," the researcher ordered.
The ACD powered down with a dying whine, the cooling fans whirring as the blue sparks faded. Subject 088 slumped back onto the bed, his chest heaving in ragged, heavy gasps. The severe angles of his face remained still, but the monitors showed the truth: the "deep coma" was gone. He was no longer a statue.
The head researcher moved to the glass, his breath once again fogging the pane as he waited for those grey, hooded eyes to finally open.
"He's awake," the subordinate whispered, his voice trembling. "He's just... not moving yet."
Subject 088's eyelids fluttered, feeling as heavy as leaden weights, before they slowly peeled back. The first thing that hit his retinas was a searing, clinical white. It was flat, sterile, and endless.
Have I moved to an all-white space? he wondered, his thoughts sluggish and thick. The memory of the pressurized black void and the shattering of that reality was still fresh. Where is the thing that tried to engulf me?
He waited for the reddish-purple aura to bleed into this new white world, but before he could process the silence, a shape interrupted the void above him. A blurry, pale oval drifted into his line of sight. For a heartbeat, he felt a surge of cold dread—he thought the dark substance had transformed, taking on a shape to finish what it started.
Then, his vision snapped into focus. The blur resolved into skin, eyes, and a mouth.
He didn't see a monster; he saw something far worse. He saw the face he loathed more than any other in existence.
It was the head researcher. The man's face was a map of cold, calculated cruelty. His skin was unnaturally sallow, stretched tight over high, sharp cheekbones that gave him a skeletal appearance. His eyes were the most haunting feature—pale, watery blue, and entirely devoid of warmth. They didn't look at 088 as a boy or even a prisoner; they looked at him with the chilling, obsessive hunger of a scientist examining a successful culture in a petri dish.
A thin, surgical mask hung around the man's neck, revealing a mouth set in a thin, bloodless line that now twitched upward into a predatory smirk. Deep lines were etched around his forehead and eyes, not from age, but from years of squinting at data streams and watching children die.
"Welcome back, 088," the man whispered, his voice sounding like dry parchment rubbing together.