Rain pelted the glass as if trying to get in.
Inside the dim laboratory, Gabriel stood alone. The lab lights flickered above him—one of them always did. He could've fixed it weeks ago, but something in him had given up on small battles.
He adjusted the visor strapped over his eyes, running the final simulation. The screen glowed with streams of neural data, brainwaves overlayed with code. Humanity's first working prototype for cognitive quantum transference.
His life's work.
A chance to digitize thought. To cheat death—not through medicine or cybernetics, but by turning consciousness into a waveform. It was theoretical. Dangerous. Unfunded. No one else believed in it.
"You don't even believe in yourself," he muttered under his breath.
The rain blurred the skyline outside. Towering buildings. Neon lights. A planet drowning in noise.
He had worked two jobs to fund this project. Lived in this lab. Slept on the floor. Skipped meals.
And now, in the moment he was finally ready to test it, the screen displayed three words that froze his heart:
"ENERGY SURGE DETECTED."
The Flash
The lights went out.
For a second, the world was silent.
Then came the explosion.
The lab cracked in half. Glass shattered. Fire bloomed in the corner like a blooming rose of flame. Gabriel's body flew backward, crashing into the steel column that supported the mainframe.
Crack.
He couldn't feel his legs.
The air reeked of burning plastic and blood. Alarms screamed. A high-pitched frequency buzzed in his ears.
Am I dying...?
His hands trembled. He reached for the console—some part of him still trying to finish the sequence. Still clinging to the belief that he could control this outcome. That his life wouldn't end here, in a forgotten lab, drowned in failure.
But the screen was melting. The floor beneath him began to collapse.
The End of Earth
He lay there—fragile, broken—watching fire eat the world he tried to save.
Memories rushed in. His parents. The professors who doubted him. The news reports mocking his "mad project." The hunger. The loneliness. The silence of being the weakest man in the room, always.
And yet… there was no fear in his chest.
Only a whisper.
"Is this all I'll ever be?"
As the steel beam above gave way, and the weight of the machine he built came crashing down—Gabriel closed his eyes.
"I just… wanted one more chance."
The Final Thought
A flicker of light danced in the wreckage—brief, almost unnoticeable. The machine, damaged but still active, surged with unstable energy.
Code spilled from its dying circuits.
A fragment of Gabriel's consciousness—his will, his final thought, that desperate whisper for another chance—was caught in the quantum web he had built.
As his body died…
Something else awoke.