Chapter 1: Dead Man's Wake
Blood in my throat. Wrong blood. Wrong throat.
My lungs spasmed — a wet, broken sound that didn't belong to me — and I choked sideways, coughing copper across a metal surface. Pain detonated in my chest, white-hot, branching through ribs I'd never owned. Every nerve ending screamed in a language my brain didn't speak yet.
"Cole! Cole, stay with me!"
Hands on my shoulders. Latex gloves slick with red. A face above mine — dark skin, salt-and-pepper stubble, eyes pulled wide with the kind of exhaustion that lives behind caffeine and adrenaline. He pressed something against my chest. More pain. I tried to scream and produced a gurgle.
Cole.
The name rang hollow in a skull I was still learning to inhabit. Behind it came a flood — personnel records, a cramped bunk, the hum of an FTL drive — memories that weren't mine pouring through cracks in a dying man's mind. Lieutenant Marcus Cole, logistics officer, Colonial Transport Cybele. No wife. No kids. A mother on Picon who was already ash.
I'm not Marcus Cole.
Another memory surfaced, different in texture. A couch. A television screen. Edward James Olmos in a military uniform, barking orders on a bridge I shouldn't recognize. The Twelve Colonies of Kobol burning in high-definition while I ate leftover pad thai.
My name is Wade Hargrove, and I watched this show.
The medic — Dr. Yusuf, the name materialized from Cole's dying synapses — jammed a needle into my arm. Fire raced through the vein. My back arched off the table.
"Pressure's dropping," Yusuf muttered. Not to me. To the nurse beside him, a woman whose scrubs were more red than green. "Get me another unit of—"
The ship lurched. Overhead lights flickered, died, surged back amber. Something enormous groaned through the hull — metal bending in ways metal wasn't meant to bend. A cabinet burst open. Surgical instruments rained across the deck like silver confetti.
I was dying. I could count it — the organ shutdown had a rhythm, a cascade. Kidneys dimming. Liver struggling. Heart stuttering against shrapnel that had no business being inside a human chest. Two pieces. One lodged against my left lung, the other buried somewhere in the meat of my right shoulder. Cole had caught a hull breach with his body. Brave and profoundly stupid.
Fifty billion people just died. And I'm going to join them on a medic's table inside a TV show.
Blue light.
Not from the overheads. Not from the emergency strips. It bloomed across my vision like a loading screen from a game I'd never played — cold, digital, impossible. Text resolved through static bursts, stuttering and corrupted:
[AN██ALOUS P█TTERN DET██TED]
[NON-N██IVE CONSCIOUS██SS — CONF██MED]
[CIVIL██ATION PRESERV██ION PROTOCOL — INIT██LIZING]
The pain changed. Didn't vanish — nothing that clean. It shifted, like someone had taken the volume knob and cranked it from eleven down to a manageable eight. My heartbeat steadied. One beat. Two. Three. The cascade slowed.
More text, fighting through corruption:
[HOST BODY: CRITICAL]
[SYSTEM STATUS: FRAGMENTED — 23% FUNCTIONAL]
[EMERGENCY STABILIZATION — ENGAGED]
[WARNING: THIS WILL HURT]
It did.
Something inside me moved. Not muscle. Not bone. A presence — mechanical, alien, purposeful — wrapping itself around damaged tissue like scaffolding around a crumbling building. The shrapnel in my lung shifted a millimeter. The bleeding around it stopped. Not healed. Just... held.
I gasped. Clean air. One full breath for the first time since I'd opened eyes that weren't mine.
Dr. Yusuf froze. He checked the monitor, smacked it with his palm, checked it again.
"That's not possible."
His gaze dropped to me. To the color returning to skin that had been gray thirty seconds ago. To the readings on a screen that should have been flatline.
"Cole? Can you hear me?"
I swallowed blood. Found words buried under someone else's vocal cords.
"Yeah." My voice came out wrecked — scraped raw, barely a whisper. "I hear you."
Yusuf stared for three more seconds. In the bed next to mine, a woman screamed. Across the medical bay, a child was crying. The ship groaned again — another impact — and the lights stuttered red.
Yusuf made his decision. He grabbed his kit and moved to the screaming woman.
"Don't move, Cole. You just came back from the dead. I'll be back."
He wouldn't be. Not for hours. Every bed in the medical bay was full, and more casualties lined the corridors. I could see them through the open hatch — bodies on stretchers, bodies on the floor, bodies that had stopped being bodies. The air tasted like copper and smoke and chemical fire suppressant.
Think. What do you know?
I knew this story. The broad strokes, at least — binge-watched on a sick weekend, revisited clips on YouTube, read too many wiki articles. The Cylons had attacked the Twelve Colonies. Nuclear fire. Fifty billion dead. A handful of survivors running in a fleet led by an old battlestar and a dying schoolteacher.
The system — whatever it was — flickered more text across my vision:
[SYSTEM DESIGNATION: COL██IAL SOVER██GNTY SYSTEM v0.7]
[PROTOTYPE — FRAGMENTED REC██ERY MODE]
[PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: CIVILIZATION PR██ERVATION]
[SECONDARY DIRECTIVE: HOST SUR██VAL OPTIMIZATION]
[HOST COMPATIBILITY: 73.2%]
A system. In a Battlestar Galactica fanfiction.
A laugh clawed up my throat and came out as a cough. Blood on my lips. The system status display guttered like a candle in wind, blue text smeared with digital snow.
Here was what I had: a body that was held together by alien technology and stubbornness. Memories of a dead man's career. Knowledge of a fictional universe that was now profoundly, terrifyingly real. And a broken AI whispering about civilization preservation while the civilization in question was a smoking graveyard.
My hands wouldn't stop shaking. I pressed them flat against the gurney and willed them still. They kept shaking. The tremors weren't from injury — they weren't from pain or blood loss or shock. They were mine. Wade Hargrove's hands, shaking inside Marcus Cole's skin, because fifty billion people had just been murdered and the weight of knowing it had been coming — the weight of having watched it, for entertainment, with a beer and leftover takeout — pressed down on my chest harder than any shrapnel.
The ship lurched again. Another impact. The lights flickered red, and medical bay alarms joined the chorus of distant screaming.
Get up.
I couldn't.
Get up, Wade. You have meta-knowledge. You have a system. You have maybe the only advantage any human in this fleet will ever have. So get the frak up.
My fingers curled around the gurney rail. The metal was cold and slick with someone else's blood.
Overhead, the intercom crackled. A voice — rough, commanding, cut through static and distance — spoke words I'd heard before, in a different life, from a television speaker:
"All civilian ships, this is Battlestar Galactica. Set condition two throughout the fleet. Rendezvous coordinates are being transmitted on the emergency channel. Jump when ready. I say again — jump when ready."
Galactica. Commander William Adama. The old man. The last wall between humanity and extinction.
I pulled myself upright. Pain detonated through my torso — the system held, barely, blue text flashing warnings I couldn't read through the static — and I swung my legs off the gurney. My boots hit the deck. Cole's boots. My boots now.
Survive the next hour. Learn this man's life. Don't say anything impossible.
The jump clock on the wall read 00:02:14.
I stood.
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