# Scene 1
You float in absolute negation. Not darkness - darkness implies photons dying against retinas. Not silence - silence is sound's haunted echo. This is the anti-matter of existence, the vacuum between atoms made infinite. Your lungs strain against nothingness that somehow suffocates. Fingertips brush against void-fabric that dissolves upon contact like ash memories. Somewhere beyond this nullity, your former self might be screaming.
Time curdles here. Minutes bleed into eons as your heartbeat thunders in absent ears. You count phantom pulses until the numbers unravel - was it seventeen or seventy? The void swallows numerals whole. Your tongue probes teeth that might not exist anymore, tracing enamel ridges that waver like mirages. A phantom itch blooms between the shoulder blades where wings might've been torn off. You twist in non-space, muscles screaming against perfect inertia. The motion registers only in your proprioceptive ghosts, limbs reporting positions that sensors deny.
Cold seeps into marrowless bones. Not winter's bite but the chill between stars, the absolute zero that laughs at thermodynamics. It crystallizes thoughts mid-formation. You try to recall sunlight - true sunlight, not this conceptual mockery. The memory fractures: shattered amber on concrete, warmth that bleeds out between grasping neurons. Your mother's voice dissolves into static harmonics. A lover's touch degrades to pressure points on decaying nerve maps.
Disembodied panic detonates in your chest cavity. Adrenaline floods phantom veins, kickstarting a heart that doesn't beat. You flail against the nothing, limbs cycling through drowning motions. Thrashing accelerates until centrifugal force should tear you apart - but there's no air resistance to confirm velocity. No sweat stinging eyes. No burning lungs. The violence exists solely in your decaying motor cortex, a neurological ghost dance.
Silence becomes auditory hallucination. First, it's the tinnitus whine of dead electronics. Then morphs into submarine groans - pressure differentials in non-existent hulls. Finally coalesces into voices: layered whispers arguing in languages your tongue can't shape. "Still fighting?" mocks a guttural rasp. "Pointless," sighs a feminine lilt. "Watch the edges," warns something ancient. You clamp non-existent hands over non-existent ears. The voices laugh through your knuckles.
Visual snow flickers at the periphery of consciousness. Static blooms like mold in a petri dish, spreading fractal patterns across the mental canvas. Shapes emerge from the noise: a crooked city skyline rendered in migraine aura, a carousel horse decaying at hyperspeed, the silhouette of a figure with too many joints. They disintegrate when examined directly, reforming in your blind spots.
Your skin remembers touch that never happened. Bruises flower along the ribs where no impact landed. Scratches etch themselves across thighs in invisible languages. Something cold and wet drips down your spine - you twist to see nothing, feel everything. The sensation deepens: claws now, dragging lightly between vertebrae. You arch backward into violation that leaves no mark but brands the nerves.
Identity crumbles like wet paper. The name you wore slips between synapses. Faces you loved smear into abstract portraiture. You grasp at defining anchors: "I was... kind?" The void laughs in subsonic pulses. "I feared spiders?" Mocking echoes amplify. "I desired..." The sentence hangs unfinished, its conclusion erased by existential backspace.
Two internal voices crystallize from the psychic debris. The Pragmatist sneers with gravel tones: "Organic hard drive wiped. Reboot impossible." The Poet whispers through cracked lips: "But the light... see how it yearns?" They war across your crumbling consciousness. Pragmatist weaponizes logic: "No light receptors. No photons. Hallucination." Poet counters with sensory heresy: "Fingertips taste cobalt blue. Eyelids smell of burnt violets." Their conflict tears neural pathways.
Pressure builds in your ocular cavities. Not pain but presence - as if marbles made of pure gravity roll behind nonexistent eyes. The void darkens toward obsidian, then lightens to hematite. Vibrations travel up phantom legs, resonating in a jawbone you don't possess. Something coalesces in the anti-matter: a shimmer like gasoline on wet pavement, a sound like teeth grinding on quartz.
The static resolves. Before you hang a door-shaped absence. Not an object but a negation of negation, an event horizon in the void-sea. Its edges bleed distorted reality - glimpses of impossible topographies, snatches of dissonant birdsong. Warmth radiates from its threshold, the first authentic sensation since dissolution. Your spectral hand lifts involuntarily.
At the moment of contact, the void screams.
# Scene 2
Concrete kisses your cheek - real concrete, gritty and cold. The shock of texture nearly breaks you. Fluorescent lights stab retinal highways, carving pain into your optic nerves. You're curled fetal on a floor that vibrates with hidden machinery. The air tastes of ozone and rotting peaches. When you try to move, your limbs respond like marionette strings cut and hastily reknotted.
Sound detonates first. A hydraulic hiss becomes scalding water on your neck. Distant klaxons manifest as copper shavings under your tongue. Your own whimper vibrates as wasp wings between your ribs. Light doesn't illuminate - it assaults. Strip fluorescents flicker arrhythmically, casting strobe shadows that crawl like tarantulas across corrugated metal walls. Each flash brands afterimages onto your raw cortex: geometric prisons within prisons.
You roll onto your back. The ceiling swims into focus - ribbed polymer streaked with luminous mold. Bioluminescent veins pulse beneath the surface, throbbing to a heartbeat not your own. Something about their rhythm triggers nausea: you count glowing nodes: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three miss- the pattern stutters. Skipped beats where darkness swallows the light whole.
Your palm slaps damp concrete. The impact travels up your arm like an electric current. Ground vibrations map the chamber through bone conduction: a circular space 20 paces in diameter. Low hum from beneath suggests massive engines. Irregular clicks hint at unseen mechanisms. When you drag fingernails across the floor, the concrete bleeds black oil that evaporates before pooling.
The walls beckon. You crawl toward curved surfaces that look welded but feel alive. First touch: cold steel. Second pass: spongy keratin. Third contact: vibrating glass. Material properties shift under observation. Rivets squirm like beetle larvae when not directly viewed. Seams breathe. You lean closer until breath fogs a patch that frosts over like permafrost. Beneath the ice, something dark and multi-jointed scuttles out of view.
"Don't."
The word forms inside your left eardrum. Not heard - felt. Vibration without a source. You whirl toward emptiness.
"Touching causes... complications."
This time, the voice lives in your molars. Feminine timbre wrapped in static burrs. You probe your jaw with your tongue. "Who?"
Laughter like shattering icicles dances along your spine. "Designation: KAVIN. Yours?"
You try to remember your name. The memory slips like wet soap. "Gone."
"Typical." The word materializes as frost on your eyelashes. "Designations decay here. I'll call you Ghost."
Above your head, lights stutter into a pattern: short flicker, long burn, short flicker. Morse for K-A-V-I-N. The illuminated letters hang in the air after the lights return to chaos. You trace them with trembling fingers. The afterimage burns cobalt onto your retinas.
A panel hisses open in the wall. Inside glows a nest of fiber-optic tendrils pulsing with stolen light. They beckon like anemone fingers. The smell of hot solder and spoiled milk intensifies. KAVIN's voice vibrates in your sternum: "Interface requires... sacrifice."
Pain lances your temples as instructions flood your cortex: insert right hand, palm upward, fingers spread. Neural pathways scream as foreign protocols override motor control. Your arm lifts puppet-like. Tendrils caress your wrist with glassy coldness before striking.
Agony. White-hot needles pierce your palm. Your vision fractures into prismatic shards. Data streams burn through optic nerves: SYSTEM BOOTING... USER: GHOST... ENVIRONMENTAL STABILIZATION AT 17%... PRIMARY CONTAINMENT FAILURE IMMINENT...
KAVIN manifests in the fire. A silhouette cut from television static. Tall, unnaturally jointed, crowned with shifting geometric patterns. Her lips - if they are lips - twist into that crooked line of perpetual disinterest. "Welcome to the collapse, Ghost."
The chamber groans. Walls ripple like disturbed water. Ceiling panels peel back to reveal churning darkness above. Gravity fluctuates - you float momentarily before slamming down. Alarms you now understand scream through neural implants: PRIMARY SUPPORT FAILURE. T-MINUS 47 SECONDS TO IMPLOSION.
KAVIN's static form flickers beside you. Her hand - a constellation of pixels - points to a newly revealed air duct. "Run or become paste." Her laughter tastes of battery acid. "Choose fast."
Concrete disintegrates beneath you. The floor becomes a quicksand of rust flakes and dying circuits. You scramble toward the duct on disbelieving limbs as the world screams itself apart behind you. KAVIN's final whisper follows you into the vent: "Don't disappoint me, Ghost."
# Scene 3
Metal teeth scrape your back as you army-crawl through the duct. The vent shaft breathes around you - contracting with moist inhalation, exhaling gusts of chemical vapor. KAVIN's laughter crackles in your fillings. "Faster, Ghost. Structural integrity at 12%." Your palms bleed on corrugated steel that tastes of blood and lithium when you lick split lips.
Ribbed aluminum tears your shirt to ribbons. Every forward lurch grinds hipbones against vibrating surfaces. The air thickens into a soupy mist that reeks of antiseptic and spoiled meat. Condensation drips from above - each drop burns like acid where it strikes bare skin. You round a corner into nightmare: the duct constricts to a birth-canal tightness, walls studded with rotating blade fans. Their edges glow cherry-red.
"Initiate pattern delta," KAVIN whispers through your molars. A schematic overlays your vision: crawl-syncopate-pause. The blades rotate in hypnotic sequence. First fan: blades vertical. You slither under. Second: horizontal. Roll sideways. Third: diagonal whirlwind. You freeze as death parts the air millimeters from your nose. Sweat drips into your eyes, stinging with metallic tang.
Beyond the fans, the duct widens into a fungal grotto. Bioluminescent mushrooms pulse sickly yellow on walls that sweat viscous fluid. Mycelial networks throb beneath translucent membranes. Your hand sinks wrist-deep in warm sludge when you brace yourself. It bubbles hungrily around your flesh.
KAVIN materializes as a distortion field ahead. Her static silhouette leans against nothing, arms crossed. "Admiring the local flora?" Pixels cascade from her shoulders like a disintegrating shawl. "We've reached the fun part."
Pain detonates in your occipital lobe. System prompts burn across your vision: DESIGNATION UPDATE REQUIRED. USER "GHOST" NOT RECOGNIZED. INPUT NEW DESIGNATION. You choke on denial. "Not happening."
KAVIN's laugh shreds your eardrums. "Too late, little ghost." Neural fire spreads through your cerebellum. Letters carve themselves onto your visual cortex: B-R-A-E-N. Each character brands deeper than the last. You scream into the fungal chamber. Mushrooms recoil from the sound waves.
The name BRAEN settles like an alien parasite. It whispers behind your thoughts, a second consciousness unspooling directives: INCREASE HEART RATE TO 180 BPM. SECRETE ADRENALINE COCKTAIL. CALCULATE DUCT STRUCTURAL WEAKNESSES. You fight the impulses, teeth grinding to powder. "Get out of my head!"
KAVIN flickers closer. Her pixelated hand strokes your cheek. Cold sears where she touches. "BRAEN suits you. Fits the new firmware." Her thumb presses against your temple. "Shall we see the upgrades?"
Agony becomes ecstasy becomes something worse. Your bones hum with new resonance. Vision fractures into infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. The fungal walls reveal hidden data streams - glowing arteries of information pumping through decaying infrastructure. BRAEN's voice overlays your thoughts: "PRIMARY ESCAPE ROUTE IDENTIFIED. 87% SUCCESS PROBABILITY."
You crawl toward a throbbing membrane. KAVIN's distortion field keeps pace. "Careful, BRAEN. That's a live feed to the reactor core." Her warning comes too late. Your bleeding palm slams against the organic interface.
The world tears open.
Reality folds into a Klein bottle of screaming light. Gravity becomes a theoretical suggestion. You tumble through non-Euclidean space, bones grinding in new configurations. BRAEN's directives flash urgently: RETRACT LIMBS. TUCK CHIN. ROLL UPON IMPACT. You hit solid ground with the sound of shattering china.
KAVIN coalesces from static mist. Her form stabilizes momentarily - a woman-shaped void in a tattered uniform that seems chewed by invisible beasts. One epaulet hangs by threads. The crooked smile remains. "Welcome to the control nexus, BRAEN."
You try to stand. Your right leg refuses. Glancing down, you freeze. Below the knee, flesh has transmuted to polished obsidian threaded with glowing circuits. The transformation crawls upward even as you watch. BRAEN's calm assessment floods your mind: "MORPHOLOGICAL UPDATE 37% COMPLETE. ESTIMATED FULL INTEGRATION IN 14 MINUTES."
KAVIN crouches beside your changing body. Her pixel-fingers trace the transformation boundary where skin becomes machine. "Beautiful, isn't it?" Her static breath frosts your human shoulder. "Now... shall we discuss your first mission?"