The hall opened into the medical bay.

  To his right stood an examination chair, its backrest slightly elevated, the once-pristine white cushioning cracked and stained with old grime. The wall behind it was a glowing whiteboard, casting a sterile, artificial light that made the room feel hollow. Mounted on the board were X-ray scans, their dark skeletal images revealing grotesque malformations—twisted, elongated limbs, ribcages warped like coiled metal, skulls stretched into unnatural, inhuman shapes. Bodies malformed by structure gel.

  Beside the chair, a pair of sinks stood unused, their porcelain basins stained with rust and dark, flaking residue. The smell of old disinfectant still clung to the air, a sharp contrast to the scent of something long dead.

  To his left, two medical beds rested against the wall, their sheets crumpled and speckled with ancient bloodstains. The far end of the room housed a decompression chamber, its reinforced glass smeared with handprints—someone had pounded on it from the inside. The darkened control panel flickered weakly, the screen cracked, its data unreadable.

  Simon’s gaze dropped to the dried bloodstain on the floor.

  It lingered there for a moment, before he walked away and exited through the door leading to a narrow hall.

  He stepped into a hexagonal chamber.

  The room was vast, balconies wrapping around its edges, leaving the middle open like a great hollow pit. The upper floor was visible from where he stood, and above it, a glass dome. Long, swaying algae clung to its edges, their ghostly tendrils drifting in the slow, silent current.

  His gaze locked onto the containment room in the middle of the chamber.

  The walls of the chamber had been consumed by structure gel—its cancerous masses growing outward, thick tendrils twisting through breaches in the containment’s reinforced glass. The gel had hardened over time, its black, glistening surface cracked like dried tar.

  Simon’s fingers twitched involuntarily.

  He could still remember the fear that gripped him the first time he stepped into this chamber. The sight of Johan Ross standing inside that tiny, empty room, appearing from nowhere like a specter from a nightmare. A gaunt, top-heavy figure, his posture hunched, his movements jittery and unnatural. Thin, writhing tendrils poured from his mouth like the appendages of a deep-sea predator, twitching with each word he spoke.

  "You need to stop it."

  Then, he had vanished.

  Not disappeared—vanished.

  Simon had learned later that it wasn’t teleportation but electrical field manipulation—Ross had bent light around his form, making himself unseen, a ghost slipping through the wreckage of PATHOS-II.

  "That scared the shit out of me." Simon muttered under his breath, stepping closer to the containment room.

  Ross had been different from the others.

  Even after death, even as a monster, he had retained his mind, his purpose. The only one among WAU’s creations that was truly sane—if such a thing could be said of a man trapped in a twisted, inhuman shell.

  Ross had fought to stop the WAU, to end the nightmare it had become. He had succeeded through Simon, through the uncalibrated structure gel that was deeply fused to Simon’s body.

  Simon remembered the fear gripping his heart when he took his arm out of the WAU heart, its sphincter mouth, and looked at the stump of his left hand. And then Ross had walked to him, telling him that Simon needed to die so WAU couldn't learn how to fight against the uncalibrated structure gel. Just as he was about to kill Simon, a worm monster had burrowed through the wall of the Alpha Site and devoured Johan.

  Simon sighed.

  The chamber had four doors—one to the left, one to the right, one directly behind the containment room, and one before him.

  Simon turned left.

  He stepped into a laboratory.

  To the left side, various medical devices lined the wall, their screens dark, their buttons coated in dust. Two autopsy tables stretched before him, oriented horizontally, one after the other. The metal trays beside them held long-dried surgical instruments, their surfaces dull with corrosion.

  Simon’s cameras focused on the cages beside the nearest table.

  Three small enclosures—their metal bars coated in a fine layer of dust—held dead rats, their bodies shriveled, mummified by time. Their fur had fallen away, leaving behind only papery skin stretched tight over fragile bones.

  A fourth rat lay motionless on a metal tray, its body dissected, its insides a hollowed cavity. Its ribcage was split open, its innards removed long ago.

  Simon turned his gaze to the storage room to the left.

  Through the large window in the door, he could see rows of glass tanks, their interiors clear with preserved fish—mutated by structure gel.

  Some looked almost normal—just slightly wrong, with small, dark growths that pulsed faintly with a dim blue glow, scattered across their scales like a creeping disease.

  Others were grotesque distortions of sea life.

  A fish with bulging, lidless eyes, its jaw unhinged, stretched open far beyond natural limits, revealing rows of needle-like teeth. Its throat had been reshaped into something resembling a lamprey’s spiraled maw.

  Another specimen, eel-like in form, had multiple dorsal fins, its body thick with unnatural musculature, its once-fishlike head now sporting fleshy tendrils that coiled like grasping fingers.

  A creature with no discernible head, only a gaping, puckered orifice where its face should be, the rim lined with translucent spines.

  A once-ordinary anglerfish, now bloated, its bioluminescent lure stretched into a tangled mass of glowing tendrils, like some kind of deep-sea jellyfish fused with its skull.

  Simon exhaled slowly, the artificial simulation of a breath.

  Then, he started to gather some devices for his next step.

  "This should work," Simon said as he examined his creation. The device resembled a small speed gun, its frame crude but functional. He pressed the trigger. The head of the device split open, a sharp needle emerging from within before retracting seamlessly, the mechanism sealing shut once more.

  He aimed it at a dead rat on the table and pressed the trigger again. The needle pierced the shriveled flesh and then withdrew, the head sealing once more.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  "It seems to work just fine," Simon murmured, scrutinizing the device one last time before turning away.

  Leaving the laboratory, he headed toward the locker room.

  The air inside was stale, thick with the scent of decomposing rubber and aged metal. He moved toward the small chamber where his old self still sat—where the first copy of Simon Jarrett had remained in the pilot seat.

  He lifted the corpse’s right arm. Pressing the device against it, he pulled the trigger. The needle punctured the cold skin, slipping effortlessly into muscle tissue before retracting.

  Simon looked at the small readout. "Imogen Reed," he murmured, naming the DNA sample he had just acquired.

  His next destination was the clean room. The door ahead bore its name in faded black letters.

  A section of the short hallway leading inside was a sterilization chamber. The soft hum of automated systems droned in the background, but Simon bypassed the decontamination cycle and stepped through the inner doors.

  The room was spartan in design. On the left wall, two computers rested atop old workstations, their screens dark and lifeless. In the center, a sturdy rectangular platform sat beneath two robotic arms, their joints frozen in time. Hardened structure gel clung to the table in dark, tumor-like growths. Nearby, abandoned measurement instruments lay scattered, once used to study the gel’s spreading, cancerous behavior.

  Beyond the platform stood a freezer, its large glass window fogged with condensation. Inside, two cylindrical glass-and-metal containers rested side by side. There had been a third container—the very source of the uncalibrated structure gel that had remade his body.

  His gaze drifted to the right, toward the shower stall..

  Inside the glass-walled cubicle, a decapitated woman sat slumped against the tiled wall, her lifeless shoulders sagging. Bits of her head littered the drain, dissolved by the continuous drip-drip-drip of water that still leaked from the overhead fixture. Time had not been kind—moisture had accelerated the decay, her skin marbled with dark patches of rot.

  Simon stepped toward the shower, his fingers brushing against the cold glass. A metal bar inside had been used to block the door from opening, rusted over from years of exposure.

  Activating the magnets in his synthetic hand, Simon pulled the bar away. It fell with a clang, rattling against the tile. He pushed the door open.

  Moving closer, he pressed the DNA extractor to her arm and pulled the trigger.

  "Lisa Cameron," he muttered, storing the extracted sample in the secure compartment on his back.

  Simon turned his attention to the biosafety cabinets ahead.

  Beyond the glass door, three small containment chambers sat in eerie stillness, their large observation windows revealing the horrors within.

  Simon stepped inside and moved toward the cabinet on the right.

  His sensors detected movement.

  "He’s still alive," Simon murmured, opening the chamber.

  Inside, a rat twitched slowly, its tiny body split open and fused to a small battery in its abdomen ,wrapped in dark structure gel.

  Simon exhaled, pressing his fingers against the rat’s frail body.

  The gel reacted.

  It shifted—reforming, moving deliberately rather than mindlessly sprawling like WAU’s usual mutations. The rat’s flesh realigned, its gaping wound sealing as the structure gel knit its form back together.

  The only sign of its transformation was a hunched growth on its back, a small battery now encased in a slick, black carapace of structure gel, its abdomen encircled by a dark band that gleamed like wet latex.

  The rat squeaked, rising onto its hind legs. Beady black eyes stared up at Simon, unblinking. Watching.

  Simon would have smirked now, if he could.

  "I’m gonna make you a little submarine so you can come with me. What do you say, little buddy?"

  The rat chirped and scurried onto his shoulder, nestling against his collar. Simon rubbed the lower part of his helmet, marveling at the strange, resilient thing he had just created.

  For the first time in ages, he had something alive beside him.

  Even if it was just a rat.

  Simon exhaled.

  With all the data WAU had gathered on structure gel, he could now create stability—unlike the mindless mutations it had left in its wake.

  "To think that WAU could have done this from the start…" Simon murmured. But WAU hadn’t cared about comfort—it had been fixated on human survival, no matter the cost.

  Simon’s focus sharpened as his mind reached out to the rat.

  He felt its presence—a small, pulsing consciousness linked to his own, just as he had felt the abyssal creatures after connecting with the Solipsist Queen.

  Shaking the thought away, Simon left the room and returned to the medical bay.

  He stopped at the decapitated, malformed body of the mutated woman. With the DNA extractor, he gathered another sample.

  Her name was added to the list.

  Simon adjusted his grip on the device. "There should be a couple more corpses around."

  And he would find them whether they were still 'alive' or not.

  Simon headed to the door beyond the containment chamber and into a short hall. To his left and right, the hallway ended with stairwells—one leading down to the ground floor, the other spiraling upward.

  But his gaze remained fixed on the door in the middle of the hall. The glowing letters of the plaque above it read: HYDROPONICS.

  He stepped inside.

  A putrid stench hit him like a wave.

  "The smell," Simon muttered as his sensors registered the overwhelming rot in the air. A mixture of decay and stagnant water, thick and cloying, clung to every surface.

  "I’ve already been here once. Why didn’t I shut down the olfactory sensors?" he scolded himself.

  Even his little rat companion was affected—the small creature covered its snout with tiny paws, chirping in discomfort.

  The room was filled with empty, algae-coated tanks. Once, these had been filled with water, supporting sponges where legumes had once flourished. Now, only remnants remained—dried-out roots, brittle husks, the last traces of a dead ecosystem.

  Simon walked to the cabinets. He opened them one by one, shifting through the abandoned supplies.

  Then, his fingers froze.

  "Yes," he whispered, his cameras locking onto containers filled with seeds. Some were shriveled, beyond saving—but others still looked viable.

  He picked up the best-preserved ones, turning them in his hand. If humanity had any future, it would need food. And now, at least, he had something—a lifeline. A chance.

  After carefully storing the seeds in a secure compartment, he closed the cabinet doors and made a mental note of their location. If the surface held nothing, this would be his only option.

  Simon exited the room and turned toward the stairwell leading upward.

  Then, he heard it.

  A metallic sound. A sharp edge dragging across the floor.

  Simon froze.

  His audio sensors sharpened, amplifying the noise. A slow, deliberate scrape. Like something testing the ground, feeling for movement.

  His eyes flicked toward his rat companion. The small creature didn’t need any prompting—it scurried onto his back, slipping into a compartment built into his armor. The storage hatch sealed tight, locking the rat inside, protected.

  Simon straightened.

  Slowly, deliberately, the ceramic blade in his right arm slid out—silent and lethal, its edge gleaming in the dim light.

  He walked ahead, toward the sound.

  And listened.

  He stopped just before the door leading out of the stairwell. His stance shifted, steady, calculating.

  Simon raised his left arm, and from his palm, the worm camera slithered out, its flexible, synthetic body moving fluidly as it snaked ahead. The tiny lens rotated, scanning the area in smooth, methodical sweeps.

  A tight hallway stretched beyond the doorway. To his left, the passage had been completely sealed—hardened structure gel had grown over the walls and floor like cancerous scar tissue, its glossy, black surface cracked and rigid.

  The path ahead was blocked as well, leaving only a narrow opening just large enough for something very small to slip through.

  Then, the camera stopped.

  It found the source of the sound.

  The creature stood in the dim corridor, its twisted form shuffling forward in a slow, uneven gait. The tattered remains of an orange Tau jumpsuit clung to its body, hanging loosely over flesh that had been horrifically warped by structure gel.

  Much like the mutated woman Simon had encountered earlier, this abomination bore the unmistakable signs of WAU's crude reconstruction—a once-human form now held together by organic patches and mechanical grafts, its body an eerie mockery of life.

  A jagged shrapnel wound split its torso, the torn flesh barely concealing the mass of dark, pulsing tendrils that coiled beneath. The gel-infested metal fragments jutting from its skin suggested a brutal death—one the WAU had refused to accept, reassembling the corpse into something that could move again, though not without consequence. Its body was a patchwork of open sores, metal plates, and synthetic sinew, all fused together in a haphazard, grotesque amalgamation.

  Its face was an even worse sight. A large section of its skull had been crushed and rebuilt, one eye socket replaced with a cluster of luminescent nodes, glowing faintly like deep-sea bioluminescence. The jaw was partially unhinged, as if broken and never properly reset, leaving its mouth permanently twisted into a slack, gaping snarl. Several tubular growths protruded from the side of its head, pulsating in rhythm with the gel coursing through its veins.

  One arm hung limply at its side, stiff and mostly useless, but the other—the one WAU had deemed salvageable—was reinforced with exposed tendrils of structure gel, forming thin, spidery extensions that twitched with unnatural precision. The right leg, partially crushed, had been "fixed" with a makeshift splint of fused bone and metal, resulting in its awkward, dragging movement.

  Simon knew better than to assume it was harmless.

  Despite its shambling appearance, he had seen what these things could do. The WAU’s creations were persistent. Mindless yet driven, clinging to life through pure, unrelenting instinct.