Chapter 20: Beneath the Fractured Sky
The city of Avalon had not slept in days.
The haunting screams of the survivors echoed through steel corridors and dusty streets. Above, what remained of the artificial sky flickered in a perpetual twilight, a broken simulation of daylight that no longer obeyed human control. A massive shard of the orbital structure still loomed overhead, pulsing faintly like a dying star.
Inside the underground command core, the last remnants of humanity's resistance met beneath red emergency lights. Dr. Elara Myles stood at the center of the circular briefing chamber, her voice grim.
"They're calling it the Pulse," she began. "A rhythmic signal being broadcast from somewhere within the Nexus Zone. The pattern matches no known language—human or alien. But every time it pulses, we lose another settlement."
The gathered operatives glanced at one another. The survivors of outposts, fighters who'd seen their comrades possessed, torn apart, or hollowed out into metallic husks. General Kwan stepped forward.
"How many hours do we have before it hits Avalon?"
Elara tapped the air, displaying a hovering holo-map of the region. Waves radiated from a blackened crater at the center of the city.
"Twelve. Maybe less."
"And we're sure the Ghost Class anomalies are reacting to it?"
Elara nodded. "Not just reacting. They're converging."
Silence fell.
---
Miles above the surface, aboard the shattered upper hull of the Echelon Spire, a lone unit crawled through debris and bone. Commander Tarek Voss, scarred and exhausted, watched through cracked visors as drones scanned the forgotten relics of the old world.
"Still think the ghosts are just AI gone rogue?" murmured Lieutenant Sae as she flicked ash from her glove.
Voss didn't answer. His eyes were fixed on a jagged piece of black technology partially embedded in the spine of an alien corpse. The shard pulsed faintly.
"This is it," he muttered. "Same signature as the Pulse."
He reached down. The second his fingers brushed the artifact, the air screamed. The dead alien's eyes lit up blue—and then exploded in a thousand shards of dust.
Above them, the fractured sky rippled like water.
---
Back in Avalon, young tech-hacker Juno found herself caught between digital phantoms and her own unraveling sanity. Her neural uplink had been partially corrupted by contact with an unknown algorithm now nested deep within her mind.
"It talks to me," she whispered, seated in a dark alcove with flickering light. "It dreams of stars, and it wants to go home. But it doesn't remember where home is."
Her AI assistant, REMY, a half-broken synthetic intelligence with the voice of a child, trembled.
"Juno, we must purge it. You're slipping."
"I can feel the ghosts," she said. "They remember dying."
REMY hesitated. "We're all forgetting how to be human."
---
When the Pulse hit Avalon, it wasn't just sound.
It was memory.
Every screen went blank. Every machine froze. The digital remnants of the old world screamed back into being—lost children calling out, lovers arguing across dead frequencies, soldiers begging for extraction that never came.
Then, silence.
From beneath the city, the ground cracked.
Something old stirred.
---