By December, nothing had happened publicly—and that was precisely the problem.
Inside federal buildings where the windows did not open and the clocks never matched, systems began to overlap in ways they were never designed to. Not alarms. Not alerts. Friction.
It started, as these things often did, with a spreadsheet.
At the FBI's Strategic Analysis and Intelligence Center in Quantico, a junior analyst named Mark Delaney was tasked with reconciling three unrelated datasets for an end-of-year internal audit. The assignment was routine: close out anomalies, flag redundancies, prepare a summary no one above him would read closely until January.
Dataset one: domestic extremist group disruptions, Q3–Q4. Dataset two: unexplained technological incidents flagged as "non-attributable." Dataset three: financial irregularities involving emergent digital assets.
They were not supposed to touch.
But Delaney noticed something odd. A timestamp overlap. A geographic overlap. A pattern that wasn't clean enough to be a coincidence but wasn't loud enough to be evidence.
One line item read:
SEVENTH SONS COMPOUND — Federal Entry Post-Event
Another, filed under a different division entirely:
UNIDENTIFIED ARMORED INDIVIDUAL — HIGH-RESISTANCE ENGAGEMENT
The third dataset contained a single footnote, buried under transaction graphs and compliance jargon:
RQ Coin — anomalous off-platform utilization spike
Delaney frowned, leaned back, and did the one thing analysts were trained not to do.
He cross-referenced.
At Langley, the CIA's Office of Advanced Threat Assessment had its own quiet December problem.
They called it the "Noise Without Signal" issue.
Across several regions—none of them traditionally linked—CIA field stations were reporting rumors. Not intelligence. Not actionable chatter. Rumors.
A man who couldn't be killed. A suit that shrugged off bullets. A currency that existed everywhere and nowhere. A technology company whose founder no one could place.
None of it met collection thresholds. None of it could be sourced.
But when Deputy Director Elaine Porter reviewed the weekly classified brief, she noticed something unsettling: the same phrases appeared in unrelated reports authored by people who had never spoken to each other.
"Singular capability."
"Non-state actor."
"Outside known frameworks."
Porter circled the phrases with a red pen and wrote one word in the margin.
Convergence.
Homeland Security came at it sideways, as they always did.
At DHS headquarters, an interdepartmental working group had convened under the bland title: Emergent Systems Risk Review – Q4. It included representatives from Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, Treasury liaisons, and a rotating chair who looked permanently exhausted.
They weren't hunting a person. They were hunting instability.
RQ Coin had shown up on their radar not because of ideology or crime—but because of logistics. Small ports. Independent freight operators. Temporary labor exchanges. Transactions too clean to be criminal, too opaque to be regulated.
One DHS analyst put it bluntly during the meeting.
"This thing behaves like a currency that doesn't want recognition."
No one laughed.
The collisions began quietly.
An FBI memo requesting clarification on a "technologically anomalous armed engagement" landed on a CIA desk already working a parallel thread labeled Unattributed High-Resistance Actor.
A DHS financial risk assessment cited a digital asset whose originating platform was listed as a "massively multiplayer interactive environment."
Each agency assumed the others were already handling it.
They were wrong.
By mid-December, a joint call was scheduled—not officially, of course. It appeared on calendars as a "coordination check-in."
The call included:
Two FBI section chiefs
One CIA deputy director
A DHS undersecretary
Several analysts who had not slept properly in weeks
The tone was professional. Polite. Strained.
"We're seeing overlap," the FBI representative began. "Nothing conclusive."
CIA's Porter responded evenly. "Define overlap."
"Same actor profile appearing across unrelated domains."
Silence.
"Define actor," DHS asked.
Another pause.
"That's… the problem," the FBI admitted.
In a secure room beneath Quantico, Detectives Grace Van Pelt and William Lee sat with their captain, staring at a frozen frame from the country club surveillance footage.
It was clear. Painfully so.
The image showed Derek Morgan mid-motion, body angled, expression calm. Too calm. Young. Focused. Efficient.
"You're telling me this kid neutralized five armed men," Van Pelt said, keeping her voice even, "and we're just… done?"
The captain didn't look at her. "You're being reassigned."
Lee leaned forward. "Sir, with respect—this doesn't track. That footage alone—"
"Is no longer your concern."
"Why?" Van Pelt pressed.
The captain finally looked at them, and when he spoke, his voice dropped.
"Because this is no longer an LAPD matter."
"Then whose is it?" Lee asked.
The captain hesitated.
"That information is classified."
Van Pelt exhaled slowly. "That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting."
They were dismissed five minutes later.
Neither detective left immediately.
Back in Bel Air, Derek Morgan read reports.
He always did.
Not the headlines. Not the speculation. The margins. The footnotes. The compliance language that revealed panic through over-precision.
An internal Blackfire memo noted an unusual uptick in regulatory "curiosity." Nothing actionable. Just questions that asked too much while pretending to ask nothing at all.
Raven Corporation's legal team flagged a series of benign inquiries from federal offices that did not normally overlap.
Derek closed the file and leaned back in his chair.
He wasn't surprised.
He had known this moment would come—not because of the violence, but because of the absence of chaos afterward. Systems expected noise. When none came, they leaned closer.
He did not intervene.
He never appeared.
Delegation was insulation.
At CIA headquarters, the phrase singular actor appeared again—this time in a draft risk memo circulated quietly among senior analysts.
The memo did not name Derek Morgan.
It didn't need to.
Assessment:
We may be observing the emergence of a non-state individual or entity capable of exerting disproportionate influence across technological, financial, and kinetic domains.
Preliminary conclusion:
If hostile, current countermeasures are insufficient.
The memo was marked DRAFT — NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION.
It stalled at approval.
Not because it was wrong—but because no one wanted to sign it.
The FBI ran simulations.
None of them worked.
Armor models failed under stress assumptions that had already been exceeded. Tactical doctrine assumed suppression through volume of fire. The footage contradicted that assumption entirely.
One analyst said it aloud in a closed room.
"This isn't armor. It's immunity."
No one corrected him.
At DHS, a quiet note was appended to an infrastructure briefing.
If RQ Coin continues current adoption trends, regulatory frameworks may prove reactive rather than preventative.
Someone highlighted the sentence.
Someone else removed the highlight.
By the last week of December, the task cells had begun to overlap so frequently that the collisions were no longer accidental.
A CIA officer attended a DHS meeting she wasn't officially assigned to. An FBI analyst received a Treasury report he hadn't requested. Jurisdiction blurred.
The systems didn't panic.
The people inside them did.
On a cold December night, Derek stood in his Bel Air living room, city lights stretching beyond the glass.
He reviewed one final report.
Not about him.
About everything else.
Reality Quest guild hierarchies were stabilizing. RQ Coin volatility had smoothed. The Kentucky facility was operational under full isolation protocols.
The world was adapting.
Slowly.
He turned off the screen.
Outside, an unmarked car idled for a moment longer than necessary—then drove away.
Derek didn't look.
He already knew.
The friction had begun.