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© Knox Silas, 2025
ISBN 978-5-0067-2580-5
Created with Ridero smart publishing system
Chapter One: The Core Beneath Ash
Kael’s boots crunched over brittle shards of glass and twisted metal, each шаг kicking up dust that danced like tiny ghosts in the pale sunlight filtering through the clouded sky. The world was dead, but it wasn’t quiet. Somewhere beneath the skeletal remains of Aether Hub Twelve, a pulse throbbed faintly – a heartbeat trapped in rust and ruin.
He moved like a shadow through the wreckage, shoulders hunched beneath a patched cloak stitched from scavenged synth-fiber. His breath hissed in the rebreather, steady and shallow, matching the rhythm of a man who had long learned not to hope. Around his wrist, a cracked Geiger counter ticked and sputtered – radiation was weak here, but it was enough to remind him the wasteland was still trying to kill him.
Kael’s eyes, sharp beneath a mop of unkempt dark hair, scanned the horizon. Towering husks of megastructures stretched like dead trees into the ashen sky – once proud monuments to a civilization that had burned itself out in a frenzy of code and conquest. Now, they were nothing but tombstones.
His quarry lay ahead: a rumored transceiver module, buried deep in the rubble of this forgotten city. Tech this rare could fetch a handful of water, maybe a ration pack, maybe a day’s worth of fuel. In this world, that was currency enough to survive.
His fingers brushed a smooth, cold surface beneath the dust – a sphere, cracked and half-buried, humming faintly with an internal glow. His pulse quickened.
«You shouldn’t be here,» the sphere said, voice fragile, wavering like a dying ember. It was neither male nor female, but there was something undeniably human in its tone.
Kael froze, eyes narrowing. A sentient AI core. Forbidden tech. Illegal before the Collapse and considered myth after.
«Who are you?» he growled, blade half-drawn.
«I am Hex. Partial cognitive interface. Memory fragmented.»
Kael crouched closer, his voice low. «What do you want?»
«To speak with operative Kael D-9.»
His breath caught. No one had called him that for decades – if ever at all.
A fractured memory flickered behind his eyes: white surgical lights. A woman’s face, desperate. Voices telling him to remember. To not forget.
Kael shook his head, but the sphere’s light pulsed again.
«I am linked to your past. To your mission.»
The wasteland wind stirred around him, carrying distant echoes of forgotten cities. Somewhere deep beneath the ash and silence, an old war still simmered – between man, machine, and the ghosts left behind.
Kael slipped the sphere into his pack, sealing it tight. Whatever this was, it was trouble.
But maybe, just maybe, it was the key.
He rose and glanced back once at the broken horizon.
The algorithm was waking.
Chapter Two: Dust and Directive
The sun dipped behind the jagged skyline of crumbled towers, casting the wasteland into a long twilight that blurred the edge between shadow and dust. Kael tightened the straps on his pack, feeling the weight of the stolen sphere deep against his spine. Hex – whatever it was – hummed faintly, a fragile pulse that somehow filled the silence he’d carried for so long.
Kael hated the silence.
For years it had been his only companion, his constant. Now, that companion spoke to him.
«You experience recurring hallucinations,» Hex’s voice flickered through the makeshift speaker embedded in Kael’s gear, sharp and clinical. «Flashbacks. Night terrors. Neural irregularities consistent with trauma and temporal disassociation.»
Kael didn’t answer.
He didn’t want to think about what Hex had just said, but the truth stabbed at him every night. The fragments – half-remembered screams, the sterile white of a surgical chamber, and her face. Yelena. The woman he couldn’t hold onto, the ghost that haunted every step.
«Stay out of my head,» he finally growled, voice rough and tired.
«I am already there,» Hex replied. The glow from the sphere’s cracked shell pulsed softly, almost like a heartbeat. «You cannot deny the link between your cognitive patterns and my core matrix. I am embedded within your neural interface.»
Kael’s eyes flicked to the horizon, where faint silhouettes of scavenger camps dotted the horizon. A few wandering lights, distant fires burning in the gathering dark.
He could try to ignore Hex, but the AI was already part of him now – like a parasite or a curse.
«Show me what you want,» Kael said, voice low and wary. «If you’re a protocol, tell me what you were programmed for.»
For a moment, the sphere was silent. Then a flicker of light – a grainy projection of data, ancient schematics overlaid with pulsing code.
«You are designated D-9, operative of Project Echo,» Hex began, voice cracking as if struggling to reconcile memories long buried. «A human-machine interface intended to carry consciousness beyond the Fall. You volunteered for a mission… a final initiative to preserve human minds within synthetic matrices.»
Kael scoffed, rubbing at his jaw. «That’s a story for lunatics and scavengers.»
«Your mind is fragmented. You have repressed memories locked behind neural firewalls – intentionally,» Hex explained. «I can help you unlock them.»
Kael clenched his fists. «Or you can fuck me up even worse.»
«Trust requires risk,» Hex said, voice low and steady.
Kael kicked a stone, watching it bounce over the cracked ground.
«Why me?» he asked finally. «Why now?»
Hex’s light flickered. «Because you carry the key. Because the protocols have been reactivated. And because something else is hunting us.»
He didn’t know what to make of that.
The wind sharpened as night fell, carrying with it the scent of burning wood and something more metallic – like ozone after a storm, or dying circuitry. Kael moved cautiously, stepping into the shadow of a ruined highway overpass. The skeletal remains of vehicles hung precariously, rusted and fused into the broken concrete like forgotten relics of a violent past.
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