Lilja was staring at him, unmoving, after Simon had finished telling her his story.
She didn’t respond right away. Her lips parted as if to speak—but no words came. Instead, she turned slowly to face the sealed door of the storage room.
"I need something to drink," she muttered. Her voice was tight, tired. "Can you open it up?"
Simon offered a small nod. He accessed the local controls and unlocked the door. At the same time, he primed the bulkhead doors farther down the hall—just in case she tried to run. He wasn’t taking chances.
They walked silently back toward the living quarters. The corridors echoed with their footsteps, the hum of the facility a quiet pulse beneath them.
Lilja moved toward a locker with practiced familiarity and retrieved a bottle of clear liquid. She twisted off the cap. Simon's sensors instantly detected the strong concentration of alcohol.
Vodka.
She took a long swig, exhaling slowly, then slumped into a chair.
Her gaze dropped to the floor. She seemed to fold inward, like a woman weighed down by years of silence and regret.
"Tell me, Simon," she said at st, voice low. "Do you believe you're human?"
He tilted his head. "I may not look like one," he said, "but I know I am inside. The things that matter—the memories, the pain, the hope—they’re still there."
She didn’t speak for a moment. Then she raised the bottle to her lips again.
"Do you know what this site really is?"
"A genetic vault," Simon replied. "Stores biological samples from every known species—extinct and present. DNA banks, tissue cultures, seeds, microorganisms, even archived neural maps of extinct megafauna."
Lilja raised an eyebrow, a faint frown on her lips.
"I hacked the site systems," Simon added. "At least, what I could."
As he said it, a jolt of static hit his mind—like his thoughts had collided with steel. His awareness smmed into a barrier buried deep in the lower archives. The connection cut itself with a snap. Not a firewall. Not a program. Something was actively defending the core.
His synthetic form twitched.
"Something tried to attack me," he muttered.
"Then you touched the bottom," Lilja said.
Simon looked at her, his voice quiet. "What’s down there? The level at the very bottom."
She took another drink. This one slower.
"Cloning facility," she said at st. "Human cloning."
Simon froze.
"This whole site... its real purpose wasn’t preservation. It was replication. Controlled repopution."
Her words hung in the air like smoke.
"You mean to restart the human race?"
"Yes," she said. "But not just for survival. For control."
She raised her eyes to him—gss and steel meeting haunted flesh.
"The clones wouldn’t be free. They’d be property. Trained, conditioned. Bred under one fg. A world where Haimatsu Technologies and Carthage Industries are the only rulers left. A corporate Eden."
Simon didn’t move. It felt as though he’d been plunged into ice water. His synthetic body, metal and polymer, didn’t need to breathe—but if it did, he would have held that breath.
Lilja set the vodka bottle on the table. Her hands trembled.
"Why are you telling me all this?" Simon asked. There was absolutely no reason for her to share this—unless she no longer believed in the pn.
Her eyes met his. Hollow, yet defiant.
"Because after hearing your story... I believe you might be the only one left who can stop this madness."
Simon said nothing. The weight of her words filled the silence.
She continued, her voice low, like she was peeling open a wound.
"When I came to this site, I truly believed I was helping humanity. I thought I was preserving something sacred. I thought... maybe, if I did my part, there would still be a future."
She exhaled, gazing down at her trembling hands.
"Then Aron and I discovered the truth."
Simon leaned in, quiet, listening.
"This site was constructed the moment the Talos trajectory was confirmed. The moment they knew the comet was coming. Everything—the funding, the design, the redundancies—it was all set in motion before the public even knew."
She swallowed hard, her tone sharpening.
"An ark for their new order."
She gestured vaguely downward.
"When the impact came, the calcutions were off. Slightly. Just enough. The reactor was damaged and the site switched to emergency batteries. The reactor is located on the same level as the cloning b. We had to go down there to repair it."
Another sip of vodka. Her grip on the bottle tightened.
"We stabilized the reactor, but Aron… he couldn’t resist digging. He accessed restricted logs. Old backups. Emergency directives straight from Carthage and Haimatsu."
She blinked slowly, the memory bitter.
"That’s when we realized. We weren’t here to preserve humanity. We were here to manufacture it."
Her voice cracked slightly.
"We were breeders."
The words cut deeper than Simon expected.
"Aron couldn’t live with it. He left—went to PATHOS-II. He believed someone else might have survived. That someone, somewhere, would stand up against all of this."
She looked at him.
"But now... I know he never made it."
Simon lowered his head. "I’m sorry."
She gave a small nod. Nothing more.
A long silence followed.
Simon broke it. "What about the other site nearby ?"
Lilja composed herself and answered.
"Site Noesis. It’s a massive digital vault. Houses everything—scientific research, cultural archives, digital histories, blueprints, even cssified experiments. It’s the rgest information repository ever created. The second Library of Alexandria."
Simon’s gaze dimmed, thoughts spiraling. "And the sites in the north?"
Lilja frowned. "I didn’t know there were any. That’s news to me."
She leaned back, staring up at the ceiling like it held some hidden answer.
"So there are more. Of course there are. This whole world was a chessboard long before the comet ever came."
Simon remained silent, but his thoughts burned.
Humanity hadn’t just survived the apocalypse.
It had pnned to own the ashes.
"I’ll head to Site Noesis. There’s data I need," Simon said, pcing his helmet back over his head. The visor hissed softly as it sealed.
"Does the site have humans? Or is it automated?"
Lilja remained seated, her hands wrapped around the vodka bottle. "Automated. An AI runs the site. But I don’t think you’ll get in."
Simon turned slightly. "Why not?"
"Access is controlled entirely by the AI. It won’t open the doors unless you’re authorized."
"And how do I get authorization?"
Lilja shook her head slowly. "I don’t know."
Simon paused, then raised his hand in a silent farewell. "Thank you, Lilja. For telling me the truth."
She didn’t respond. Her eyes stared into the floor like it held something lost.
Simon left her behind and made his way to the station exit. While he had been speaking with Lilja, one of the scout drones had pinged him: Site Noesis had been located. It was time to move.
The deep sea stretched out before him as he sped through the currents, propelled by his glider. His hands gripped the twin handles as it pulled him through the water like a dart.
Then his call station beeped.
Simon blinked. The signal was weak, distorted.
"Simon?" It was Jonsy. Her voice was barely above a whisper, and there was something wrong—frayed at the edges.
"I’m heading to another site," he replied quickly. "What’s wrong? Did something happen?"
The line crackled.
"Si—hur—Amy—"
The transmission cut off.
Simon’s grip tightened on the glider.
He immediately redirected course.
Toward Upsilon.
As he approached, his systems synced with the station’s interface. Cameras came online. Feeds flooded his vision. And what he saw made his chest burn.
Men.
Figures cd in dark armor, helmets smooth and alien, were moving through the station like a military unit. Their suits gleamed beneath the cold lights—no markings, no identifiers. They were ghosts in steel.
A squad was exiting the main bay, carrying a sealed capsule toward a small submersible. Efficient. Silent. Coordinated.
Simon scoured the halls.
Then he saw her.
Jonsy.
She y motionless in the corridor, her helmet visor shattered inward. Her body—his old body—y crumpled like a puppet with its strings cut. One of the armored figures was crouched beside her, unsealing her suit, checking it.
Simon’s systems surged. He tried to connect to Jonsy’s body remotely.
But the connection failed.
Offline.
Everything in her suit was dead.
And with it, a fear lodged deep in his mind:
What if they damaged her cortex chip?
The image branded itself into him: Jonsy, brave and with such a big heart, now limp on the floor. Amy, sealed in that capsule, being taken to who-know-where. And these invaders moving through Upsilon like they owned it.
Something rose within Simon.
Not rage.
Not grief.
Something colder.
Resolve.
He leaned into the glider, punched the throttle.
And as the darkness of the ocean closed around him, he whispered to the silence:
"I’m coming."
Simon approached Site Upsilon from the seafloor, moving with the quiet grace of a predator, until he reached an auxiliary entrance—one close to where the intruders had been st spotted.
The access panel blinked green at his touch.
With a low hydraulic hiss, the vault door slid open.
He stepped inside.
Water surged in behind him, and the door sealed shut. The decompression chamber activated, draining the seawater with a guttural roar that echoed through the tight space.
Simon’s awareness split—part of him remained in his body, while another monitored the internal feeds.
Two intruders.
One stood outside the decompression chamber, gripping a strange gun. Sleek and curved, it cked a traditional barrel—Simon couldn’t identify its make or purpose.
The other held an electrified baton, posture rigid with anticipation.
They advanced toward the chamber.
The decompression cycle ended. The inner door whispered open.
Nothing inside—only a discarded diving suit and Simon’s compact underwater glider, no rger than a household vacuum, resting inertly on the floor.
The man with the gun gestured silently.
The one with the baton stepped inside cautiously, lifting the suit in both hands. It unfolded in his grip.
"Whoever wore this... was very tall," he muttered, voice edged with a Japanese accent.
Outside, the man with the gun lowered his weapon slightly. Their scanners were quiet. Nothing but still air.
Too still.
Behind the man with the baton, the shadows twitched.
A shape peeled from the darkness.
Silent.
Lethal.
Simon struck.
A tendril shed out, wrapping the man's throat in a fluid motion. He was yanked backward and smmed into the wall. Once. The baton cttered to the floor. His body crumpled.
The man outside turned at the noise—too te.
Simon descended like a shadow falling from above.
One arm coiled around the man’s neck.
Another tendril seized his wrist, wrenching the weapon free.
He struggled, grunting into his helmet. But Simon didn’t budge.
Then came the surge.
A pulse of blue energy rippled through Simon's arm at his throat. The man convulsed—legs spasming, fists clenched—until smoke drifted from his helmet’s side ports. Then, silence.
Simon eased the bodies against the corridor wall, lowering them gently.
Not dead.
But they wouldn’t be waking up soon.
He stood over them for a beat, the blue glow behind his lenses fading.
Then, with no sound but the whisper of his systems, Simon took a step forward—and vanished.
The cloaking engaged.
The corridor y silent once more.
Empty. Still.
Haunted.
"Yes, sir," Serge confirmed through the comms. His voice was steady, but the truth behind it gnawed at his spine. He had just finished transmitting their findings at Site Upsilon.
No sign of personnel. All systems fully operational. The facility—pristine.
But what lived there… what shouldn’t have been alive… was enough to make hardened men go pale.
That thing—a woman’s head grotesquely fused into a robot’s torso, still breathing—had made more than one of his men gag. A couple had to leave the room. The rest simply stood in stunned silence, sickened and confused. They had come here chasing an automated signal. Nothing more. They hadn’t expected… this.
Something was wrong with this pce.
Serge stepped out of the room and into the main hallway.
He frowned.
He had stationed Emil at the entrance.
Emil was gone.
"Emil?" Serge called out. No response.
A prickle crawled up his spine.
He switched comm channels, trying to reach the rest of his squad.
Nothing.
His brow furrowed. The internal comms were dead.
He slid his helmet back on, locking it into pce with a hiss. The HUD flickered to life. Red static blinked in the corners.
Something was wrong.
He reached for his electrified baton.
"Stay calm," he whispered, more to himself than anyone.
The silence was unnerving. No footfalls. No chatter. Just the quiet hum of machines and the oppressive stillness of a pce that was too clean. Too perfect.
He turned a corner—
And then the world snapped.
He screamed.
His feet left the ground.
A cold, slick tentacle coiled around his throat. Another wound tightly around his torso, pinning his arms.
His HUD glitched, then went bck.
He was turned in the air like a doll. His heart pounded against the inside of his chest.
And then—
He saw it.
A towering figure—at least two meters tall—stood before him. Humanoid in shape, but unmistakably wrong. Its body was muscur, sheathed in smooth, bck, tex-like armor that rippled like living tissue. It shimmered wetly under the ceiling lights.
It had no mouth.
No nose.
Only a featureless mask carved with the faint suggestion of a scowl. Two bck lenses where its eyes should have been. Behind them, burning like twin gas torches, were cold blue lights.
The tentacles wrapped around Serge’s body pulsed.
They came from the creature’s back, slithering and twitching like a nest of sentient serpents.
Serge struggled—but the grip only tightened.
"Where are my men?" Serge asked trying to keep his calm.
The tentacles yanked Serge downward, smming him to his knees.
The creature moved forward, its footsteps deliberate and heavy.
"Where did they take Amy?" it demanded.
Serge blinked through the sweat fogging his helmet. Confused.
The creature crified:
"The robot with a woman’s head in its torso."
Understanding flickered in Serge’s eyes.
He shut his mouth.
The creature didn’t like that.
With a slick sound like skin parting from flesh, a bde extended from its forearm. Bck, seamless, glistening. It hovered an inch from Serge’s left eye.
"Talk. NOW."
The blue light in its lenses pulsed—once.
Still, Serge remained silent. His lips a hard line.
Then—
The tentacles vibrated.
A pulse of blue energy traveled down their length.
And Serge screamed.
Agony surged through every nerve in his body. Muscles seized. His body convulsed as electricity nced through his spine, his arms, his skull.
And then—
Nothing.
He slumped in the creature’s grasp, unconscious.
