He signed his name with a tremor that he hoped no one had noticed.
It was faint, just a ripple at the edge of his grip - but in a place like this, where even the walls breathed with precision, nothing went unseen.
The clipboard flicked back into the arms of the attending drone, which floated away without a word, its halo of biometric sensors flickering with greens and blues. A soft tone pinged through the room: "consent recorded." The procedure was officially scheduled, nerves irrelevant.
Jaren Solas took off his pre-surgery cover as he stood. Beneath the fabric, from the skin of his elbow to his shoulder, had already been prepped - shaved, sterilized, marked with the faint grid lines used for a neural graft. It was real, he reminded himself. This was happening, and that was supposed to be good.
"You'll be fine," came a voice to his left. Calm and measured, too practiced to be comforting.
The attending physician - Ascendent, no doubt - glided forward with that same weightless confidence all of them seemed to carry. Her coat was sleeveless, woven from some self-cleaning polymer that glistened like static. Her eyes were soft, but modded. He could tell from the subtle shimmer in the irises. Depth-scanning overlays, he guessed. Probably could see the heartbeat in his neck.
"It's a simple graft," she said, smiling as if she'd said it a thousand times. "A basic neural graft to interface with future arm modifications to better connect with your augmented spine. No different than getting a vaccine. You'll be asleep for the worst of it, and afterward... "
"I'll be better," Jaren said automatically. "Faster, calmer, more efficient." He didn't know where he'd read the line. Probably on one of Praxelia's ambient ads.
The doctor nodded faintly, clearly satisfied. "Exactly."
But as she spoke, Jaren noticed the flicker in the overhead lights. Not a full outage, just a stutter. As though the building had hiccupped. None of the staff reacted, but maybe they were used to it. Perhaps it was part of the rhythm.
He tried to let it go.
They walked him down the corridor, which was seemingly piped with an orchestra of ambient sound that simulated wind through pine trees. Another classic Ascendent touch. Nature, prepackaged - delivered intravenously through nostalgia.
He entered the surgical chamber with slow steps, each one rebounding a little too clearly in his ears. He tried to think of anything but the machines; sleek, silent, all silver arcs and carbon arms. He tried not to look at the chair at the center. Reclining, exposed, anatomical.
As he lay down, the metal was already warming to his body temperature. A nice touch, luxury meant to calm the nerves. It didn't.
"You said you were nervous earlier," the doctor said, now masked, her voice filtered through a gentle aural modulator. "That's normal. We like to think of the neural mesh not as an intrusion, but as an invitation. A handshake to your future self."
Jaren chuckled. Thin and cracked, he asked, "That some kind of Ascendent thing?"
"It's a truth thing," she replied, prepping the syringe. "It's the future. And it's very polite."
The sedative burned faintly as it entered his system. Not painful. Just...present. His limbs began to drift, vision blurring at the edges. His heart slowed.
But before the ceiling gave way to sleep, he saw it again.
A flicker.
This time, the lights didn't recover. There was a delay in the anesthesia sequence. The robotic arm on his right - meant to administer the graft paused mid-air. Not like a machine waiting for instruction, but more like a confused waiter forgetting where the tray should go.
A strange sound followed, not mechanical. Not organic - a hum, low underneath his ears. Then, a voice not from the staff, but from somewhere in the walls, spoke in what sounded like an Ascendent command-line that had burst. Jaren couldn't understand it, but he felt it behind his eyes.
"I - I think something's... " he tried to sit up, but the chair refused to release. Straps clicked down automatically. Restraint and safety protocol, unfortunately standard. The doctor didn't flinch. But Jaren saw it in her eyes. That moment where certainty cracked.
"System override?" she said, turning toward the console. "Level-three system failure? No contingency? "
No response.
He began to feel heat.
Not pain yet.
Just warmth. Spreading from the back of his neck.
"Stop," he said, voice rising. "I didn't - I don't consent - "
His vision pulsed red. Not externally, but inside. Like his optic nerves were being overwritten with code he couldn't read. His heart rate tripled. An alarm began to scream, but it sounded wrong: too low, too slow, as if someone had dropped the pitch of the world.
The last thing he saw was a nurse sprinting toward the emergency panel. Then her body arcing backward as if pulled by invisible hands.
The graft activated.
Explosion.
Not fire.
Sound.
Light.
Then silence.
Deep below the public levels of Praxelia - an adjacent sister metropolis to Sovereign City - the R&D facilities upper echelons pulsed with soft white light; engineered calm for a place where the consequences of failure were often lethal.
Lucius Ward stood before a console, his arms clasped behind his back, gaze steady on the dockets of biometric data unraveling across a suspended holopane.
His engineer - a gaunt man named Kreel - flicked through the same telemetry with trembling fingers. "We lost all twelve subjects," he said quietly. "Including the attending staff. When we attempt a neural graft on the subject, their mesh has premature synchronization with the systems responsible for housing our mainframes Echo lattice, despite the dampeners. It literally plugs them into our hardware. That shouldn't even be possible."
Lucius didn't speak.
Kreel pressed on, voice sharpening. "I told you the graft wasn't ready. Echo's mainframe link doesn't stabilize fast enough. They... the connections bleed, sir. From the inside. Some of them screamed before they lost verbal function. Others just... stopped."
The images danced like ghosts: cortical spasm maps, heat fractures, arterial rupture patterns from twelve subjects. Behind him, Kreel paced.
"I warned you," Kreel said, voice taut, eyes sunken from too many sleepless weeks. "I said the prototype wasn't ready. The mainframe sync in particular is unstable at the cortical level, every attempt forces a cascade failure in the patients limbic system."
Lucius remained still.
Kreel flung a data slate onto the nearest surface. It clattered with an obnoxious rebound. "Do you understand the scope of what just happened?"
Lucius exhaled slowly. Not weary - patient. "They volunteered," he said softly.
"They volunteered to evolve," Kreel snapped. "Not to be erased."
More silence.
Lucius turned, slowly. The lighting caught the silver arc of his facial plating, throwing half his expression into gleaming abstraction.
"They gave their lives for something greater than survival," he said. "They were part of this proving ground."
Lucius stepped toward the center console, hand brushing its edge. The readouts reconfigured, filtering through encrypted overlays. Strategic feeds. Public channels. PR assets. He paused before beginning again.
"Spin it on the purists. Say they sabotaged our clinics. After what we've seen this year? They're primed for it. Besides, they've been too quiet lately. You can say they corrupted the mesh interface. That they weaponized our own technology against us. They need a reminder of what chaos looks like. What happens when 'purity' resists progress. This... incident, tragic as it was, offers them that reminder."
"They were Ascendents," Kreel shot back. "And now they're fuel for propaganda. Do you really expect the public to believe it was a Purist attack?"
"They'll believe what they need to believe," Lucius replied. "A tragedy is only as useful as its framing."
"You're going to use this to escalate," Kreel said quietly. "As if the Human Threshold Accords weren't enough."
Lucius nodded, gaze cold and calculating. "Exactly one year since the Accords were signed, and already the world's divided by math. Tick below the percent line? You're a citizen. Tick above it?" He smiled faintly. "You're policy."
Lucius paused, voice low. He looked over his shoulder, one eye reflecting the mesh-embedded readout still blinking FAILURE in a dull crimson loop.
"As for escalation? No," he said. "I'm going to use it to accelerate."
He tapped twice on the interface. A new data file queued - classified under Echo Protocol, Tier 3.
"Assign Nova Cale to lead diagnostics on the graft stabilization trials," he said. "She cracked the cascade issue last quarter, but we didn't deploy her method. Do it quietly, I want to see how she handles pressure."
Kreel hesitated. "She's not high-clearance. Not even Ascendent tier."
Lucius didn't blink. "Then it'll be her baptism."
Kreel's voice was hoarse. "You're going to feed her to the experiment, aren't you?"
Lucius smiled. "No, Kreel. I'm going to let her understand it. The way I understand it."
Even deeper underground on the other side of the city, the hum of the fabrication console was steady, but Nova's jaw was not.
"This data's garbage," she muttered, tossing a diagnostic slab onto the table. "Run it again."
Her lab partner, a wiry older tech named Haen, rolled his eyes. "That's the third re-run. The results are consistent."
Nova pointed to the neural lattice schematics. "Consistently wrong. The reactive mesh is spiking on biofeedback, which means it's either broken or someone doesn't know what they're building."
Haen scowled. "Or maybe the math's above your pay grade."
Nova's eyes sparked. "Or maybe you're scared I'm right and Ward picked the wrong engineer to supervise his miracle."
The silence that followed made its own gravity.
Nova grabbed her tools and turned back to the bench. "Let's test it again."
She changed her inputs, and began the test runs again, but the mesh didn't respond. Not to the recalibrated node sequencing. Not to the temperature changes. Not even to the soft curses Nova muttered under her breath, which she was starting to believe had more scientific merit than half the automated suggestions the console kept spitting out.
She squinted at the reactive mesh laid out across the scaffold: thousands of microscale fibers suspended in a fractal grid of alloy tracery, each one designed to channel not electricity per se, but intention. All part of Ward's neural graft augment, clearly still experimental. Manufacture intention. Or that was the theory, anyway. Neural prediction. Subconscious sync. Cognitive osmosis.
Right now, it looked like a glitch wrapped in silver thread.
"You calibrated the relay tolerances backwards again," Haen said from across the bench, not looking up. "The input signal's getting bounced into the pattern buffer instead of the lateral cascade."
Nova didn't even flinch. "No, I didn't. That was your patch, remember? You pushed for a feedback loop before verifying that the cascade was connected."
He frowned, stepped around her shoulder. "Yes, but that was because I ran the stabilization at default like the computer suggested."
"Which would be fine," she snapped, "if we were still working with the previous lattice array. But this mesh changes phase at the quantum level, so the buffer's interpreting any fluctuation as feedback."
"So... turn it off?"
Nova gave him a look. "Yes, let's disable the one thing that makes it revolutionary. Brilliant. I'll be sure to name the Nobel after you."
Haen grunted, stepping back. "I'm going on break."
"Don't come back until you've read the schematics. Twice."
The lab door hissed closed behind him, and for a moment, there was nothing. Just Nova and the mesh.
She leaned over it again, brow furrowed, breath held. The interface pulsed under the lens like it was breathing. Even inert, the material felt... aware. Not sentient, just unsettling.
She tapped into the console's override. Began isolating the signal scatter on microsecond intervals. One by one, she disabled every extraneous routine. Reducing the product back down to its basics. Trimmed noise. Rebuilt the load sequence from scratch.
Then on impulse, she added a modification that wasn't in the specs.
A frequency she remembered seeing once. Not in a manual, but rather in a dream. Perhaps a memory. Its hard to tell the difference when half your brain is talking to an empty room.
The mesh fluttered, then stopped. No anomalies.
She froze.
Nova stared at the scaffold, watching the threads align in real time, glowing faintly as they adapted to the newly mapped carrier frequency she'd introduced - a modulation vector, custom-forged and entirely unverified. The mesh had never behaved like this. Not after five cycles. Not after fifty. It shouldn't have worked.
But it had.
The resonance held steady. No signal collapse. No polarity drift. The predictive sync - the one that always failed - was not only stable but refining itself, drawing cleaner inputs from her feedback loop than anything that was in the standard calibration suite had recommended previously.
She hadn't just duct-taped a workaround. She'd solved it.
The patterns from the buffer were integrating into the mesh in a way the Ascendent templates had never accounted for; layering, adapting, syncing at the quantum level with zero bleed. Zero.
She ran the test loop again. Once. Twice. Ten times.
No decay.
Nova sat down slowly, like someone who wasn't sure gravity still worked.
She tapped the console to start logging the new sequence into the database. Timestamped, source-coded, annotated with her operator ID. The auto-save flickered for a moment before confirming upload.
Confirmed.
Mine, she thought.
The breath that left her body was quiet, almost reverent. Not just a fix. Not just a lucky anomaly. A working solution. A cornerstone for the neural graft to finally stabilize in real-world conditions. She stood there for a while, just watching the mesh breathe under its containment field.
"You're not conscious," she murmured. "But you're closer than you were an hour ago."
The glow of the mesh reflected faintly in her eyes. For the first time in months, she felt something besides frustration pulsing beneath her ribs.
Pride.
The kind no one would probably notice.
"The bastard's going to love this," she said under her breath, smiling wryly. "If he even knows I exist."
She doubted Lucius Ward had ever stepped foot in this lab. But she had read his papers. Every broadcast. Every transcript. She'd even freeze-framed one of his interviews to analyze the reflection in his metal cheek, just to get a closer look at what kind of console he was using.
Nova knew he hadn't designed the mesh himself. Visionaries rarely did. They sketched dreams and threw them to the ones like her, buried beneath the weight of them. But this - this - was a result he'd want to hear about.
And it had her name on it.
She sat down at her bench, alone again. The silence of the lab was no longer oppressive, it was earned. The calm after so many, many storms. Her tools lay where she'd left them. The stims still sat untouched in her drawer. The cold synth-coffee at her side tasted like recycled coolant, but she drank it anyway.
For the next hour, she tinkered in silence, cross-referencing the new waveform alignment, double-checking tolerances, layering backups.
Every five minutes, the mesh pinged back: STABLE.
After a while, Nova leaned back in her chair and let herself drift. Not to sleep; she didn't trust that much comfort - but to memory. She thought of her first circuit board, built out of desperation in a community school with parts older than her shoes. She thought of her brother's modder friends, the ones who used to trade bootleg code and grilled soy cakes under blown-out streetlights. She thought of her father, once, briefly, and then chose not to.
Instead, she stared at the ceiling and whispered:
"One hurdle down."
Then, quieter:
"Only about a thousand to go."
The lab was quiet again. Just the hum of containment fields and the faint tick of her coffee's reheat cycle. Nova leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes, the retinal haze of too many hours with light fields still ghosting in her vision. She gave the ceiling a lazy glance and muttered:
"System. Check messages."
The ambient display pulsed awake - soft blue against dark steel. A synthetic voice responded, warm but indifferent. "One new message received. Flagged priority: internal channel."
Nova straightened slightly. Internal? "Sender?" she asked.
"Kreel Varn. Senior Systems Engineer, Tier 3."
Her brow furrowed. Kreel? She hadn't interacted with him directly since her onboarding cycle. He usually hovered somewhere three floors above, invisible and omnipotent like the rest of the core engineers. "Dictate message," she said.
The system hesitated. That was rare. "Unable to comply. Message flagged for secured clearance, content classified due to sensitive criteria."
Nova's chair creaked as she sat up fully. "Seriously?"
"Seriously," the system replied, without irony.
She scowled. "Override with engineering credential Cale-Nova-One-Zero-Four."
"Override denied. Insufficient rank."
Of course.
Intrigued now, Nova gave the room one last glance, like someone checking the street before crossing a quiet intersection - then shoved herself across the floor on her chair with a kick. The wheels hummed softly on the concrete as she glided over to the wall-mounted terminal.
The console recognized her approach and spun to life. She keyed in her local access ID, then tapped the message icon. There it was. A black envelope icon, outlined in gold filament.
Sender: Varn, Kreel
Subject: Profile Flagged for Review – Tier Consideration
Encryption Status: Internal Only
She tapped to open it.
Nova,
Your personnel profile was surfaced during our Q3 review sweep, tagged for meritorious assessment under the Ascendent Core Aptitude Framework. Preliminary review cites your diagnostic handling on lattice instability and augmentation-phase cascade modeling.
Pending approval, this recommendation could result in tier elevation. Before forwarding my full endorsement, I'd like to meet in person to assess alignment and readiness.
Please report to Lab E-17, sublevel 4, at 0700 standard. Come prepared to discuss your recent findings.
— Keel Varn
Nova stared at the screen for a long moment, lips pressed into a thin line. A promotion? Or a test. Either way, someone had finally looked her way...and she wasn't sure yet if she liked that.