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The blackout came like a whisper.
No thunder, no warning — just a quiet snap, like someone cut the cord between reality and its rhythm. At 2:17 a.m., the East Sector dimmed to nothing. Neon signs blinked out mid-sentence. The hum of power grids vanished. Even the stars above the steel-blue skyline seemed to retreat behind static clouds.
In a crumbling building on the city's edge — where rust bled from metal and windows breathed dust — Xion lay on a thin mattress surrounded by scattered circuit boards and half-assembled tech.
He blinked.
His room was silent now, like it had been vacuum-sealed from the world. No hum from his fan. No blinking red light on the charging dock. Even his smartwatch had gone still.
Except for one thing.
An old VR headset — the kind scraped from scrapyard trash and held together with taped wires and stubborn hope — glowed faintly blue from across the room.
That glow… pulsed. Slow. Like a heartbeat.
Xion sat up, his brows furrowed. That headset hadn't worked in weeks. He'd tried charging it, rewiring it, even smashing it against the wall once. It refused to turn on. But now, during the city-wide blackout, it looked alive.
He reached for it slowly.
The plastic was cold — colder than it should've been — and as his fingers brushed the side, the device hummed beneath his skin. His chest tightened. A strange feeling rose in his gut. Like gravity had shifted sideways.
Then came the voice. Not through sound, but directly in his mind.
"Access point detected. Pattern integrity unstable. Syncing…"
Xion dropped the headset — or tried to. His hands wouldn't let go. Something had gripped him — or rather, connected to him.
His breath caught.
The screen flickered once.
Then everything changed.
---
White.
Not light. Not brightness.
Just… white.
Endless. Empty. Overwhelming.
And within it — fragments. Images. Data. Code.
Spinning, unfolding, expanding. Equations he'd never learned appeared in his mind with ease. Languages he'd never read whispered their meanings. Circuit blueprints, cellular structures, energy formulas, all racing through his brain faster than thought.
Then came the sensation — not pain, not pleasure — something deeper.
Awakening.
It was like his mind had been asleep all his life… and only now, it had opened its eyes.
"Neural lock lifted."
"Cognitive filter removed."
"Processing unrestricted…"
Then—
Silence.
---
Xion's eyes snapped open.
He was lying on the floor, back arched against cold metal. The headset had fallen beside him, smoking gently, its circuits fried. Outside, the blackout still held, but his vision was… different.
Sharper.
He could see things — the dust floating in the air, the flicker of light from a dead screen's reflection, the micro-vibrations in the walls from wind pressure. His hearing picked up the far-off hum of a backup generator several blocks away. Even his sense of time felt slower — or maybe his mind was just moving faster.
He sat up slowly.
No dizziness. No confusion.
Just clarity.
He glanced at the fried headset. It looked dead now — a relic. Whatever had happened, it wasn't inside that plastic shell anymore. It was inside him.
His fingers twitched. His thoughts streamed. Not just thoughts — blueprints, theories, solutions to problems he hadn't even asked yet.
He reached for a notepad and started drawing. Symbols. Graphs. Layered designs of a neural booster made from parts he already owned. A pulse modulator that could stimulate memory recall. It flowed out of him like instinct.
I understand… he thought.
But he didn't understand how.
Not yet.
---
By 3:00 a.m., Xion had taken apart half of the junk in his room and reassembled it into something new — something impossible. A device no one had ever built, but now sat in his hands, humming softly.
He activated it.
For a brief moment, his entire body tingled — not in pain, but in connection. His thoughts became deeper, layered like a thousand windows open at once, and yet completely under control.
He didn't panic.
He smiled.
And then he saw it — on the edge of his vision — a faint scrolling line of code, not on a screen, but in his mind's eye. Information streamed freely, like the air around him had become a living database.
The world wasn't just full of machines.
The world was a machine. And he had just found the master key.
---
Across the city, something stirred.
Somewhere deep beneath government towers, a red light blinked. In a dark room lined with monitors and silent men, a signal pinged.
Unauthorized activation. Unknown source. Cognitive signature: Unclassified.
A silent alarm triggered a protocol.
A name. A face. A location.
Xion.
---
But he didn't know that yet.
He stood by the cracked window, staring out at the motionless city, unaware of the attention he had drawn.
He wasn't thinking about danger.
He was thinking about what to build next.
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End of Chapter One.
Word Count: ~809 words
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