Simon approached cautiously.
And as he did—
Something brushed against his mind.
A voice. A woman’s voice.
Proud. Confident. Speaking with excitement about revolutionary projects, shaking the president’s hand, beaming with ambition and promise.
Simon quickly realized that his mind had telepathically linked with the woman’s.
His sensors scanned the structure, his vision flickering between the organic mass of flesh and hardened structure gel that held her trapped.
The structure gel was making this possible.
He remembered.
The nightmares.
The eyeless creature that had once ensnared him, trapping him in its web of horror, twisting his greatest fears into something even worse.
The woman was dreaming—unaware of what had become of her.
The structure was sending and receiving electrical signals, her brain caught in a loop, reliving the glorious past she believed she still inhabited.
Simon’s gaze flicked to the edges of the flesh pillar, noting the blackened tissue, the hardened gel cracking apart.
She was dying.
And when the pillar’s life finally flickered out, so would her beautiful dream.
Simon clenched his fists.
"There must be something I can do to save her."
But how?
Should he wake her up?
But what if she couldn’t handle reality? What if she did as Adam did—
What if she killed herself?
What if she asked him to end it?
Simon felt the weight of the question settle heavily on his chest.
The world she knew was gone. What would she wake up to except an endless void?
He forced the thought aside.
Once he reached Theta’s main area, he would have time to find a solution.
"Come on, Jerry." Simon’s voice was quiet but firm.
The tiny submarine hummed beside him, Jerry’s silhouette barely visible through the glass dome.
Simon’s nano-ceramic blade slid out, the edge gleaming in the dim light.
Ready.
If anything tried to attack them, he wouldn’t hesitate.
They moved carefully through the winding, suffocating tunnels, the walls pressing in like an open wound.
And all around them—
More bodies.
More dreaming souls, fused into the walls, their forms half-consumed by the pulsating mass of flesh and hardened structure gel.
Some were fused only at the torso.
Others—
Simon could barely make out their faces, the remnants of a hand, a leg, a shoulder, consumed by the growth that would never let them go.
Ten.
And there would be more.
If his memory was correct, there were others upstairs, in the main area.
Were they still alive?
He didn’t know.
But he would make sure to check.
Simon retraced his steps from the first time he had been here.
Some portions of the station were pitch black.
Others were covered in layers of segmented structure gel, twisted into something disturbingly reminiscent of the Solipsist hive.
Finally, they reached a workstation.
The screens were shattered, their glow long dead.
But Simon didn’t need them.
He placed his hand on the console, letting the structure gel interface with him.
A wave of data surged through his mind.
"The lights are fried. The cameras that still work aren’t picking up anything."
Simon exhaled.
If there was something lurking nearby, he had no way of seeing it.
Not until his sensors picked it up directly.
They moved forward, carefully, every footstep echoing in the suffocating silence.
At last—
They reached the shuttle station.
Both ends of the tunnel were blocked.
Massive walls of solidified structure gel sealed the pathways shut.
Even if Simon willed it to move, he doubted this was the only blockage.
His eyes drifted to the yellow shuttle before them, sleek and bullet-shaped.
Inside—
Under the flickering red emergency lights—
Another body.
Simon stepped forward, peering through the cracked window, his breath shallow as the dim emergency lights flickered overhead. The dull glow cast long, jagged shadows across the ruined interior, stretching like skeletal fingers over the walls.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
And then he saw her.
Fused into the shuttle’s back wall, her body had become one with the pulsating flesh. Her skin—gray, papery-thin, stretched taut over her fragile frame—barely clung to her bones. Veins, blackened and sluggish, snaked beneath the surface, barely pulsing.
And then—
A breath.
Ragged. Shallow. Weak.
She was still alive.
Her lips trembled, barely parting. Her chest barely rose, the effort a struggle, a dying machine clinging to its last flicker of function. Then, from deep within her throat—
A sound.
A whisper. A wheeze. A breath rattling through the rawness of a withered lung.
And suddenly—he felt it.
Her dream.
A warm summer evening. Soft laughter. A gentle breeze rolling over the shoreline. She was sitting across from a man—Brandon Wan. Her lover. They were together, smiling, lost in the warmth of each other's presence. The clink of glasses, the murmur of easy conversation. Happiness.
She was still there.
Trapped in a world that no longer existed.
Simon stared. His fingers twitched at his sides.
Despite everything—her withered frame, her unnatural fusion with the walls—he knew her.
Alice Koster.
Another lost soul.
Trapped between life and oblivion.
A bitter weight settled in his chest as his gaze drifted forward. Beyond Alice, the open elevator doors loomed.
They had been forced open. The metal was bent outward, warped and twisted like something had forced its way through.
Simon stood before the ruins of the elevator, its twisted metal remains embedded deep in the floor, a silent testament to his past struggles.
He had used that elevator to descend to this level, only for it to malfunction, leaving him trapped between floors.
The maintenance ladder had been his only way down. The broken step—a moment of hesitation, the sudden plunge into darkness.
The impact.
The pain.
He had crawled out of the elevator shaft, broken, dazed—
Only to be caught.
The blind monster, sensing his movement, had dragged him away, pinning him to a flesh-covered pillar like a grotesque offering to the WAU.
Now, standing here again, he turned his head toward that very pillar, a monument to his suffering.
Not this time.
Simon moved forward, approaching a door to his right.
It was locked, its panel dark and unresponsive.
But not for long.
He placed his hand on the panel, his fingers pressing against the cold, lifeless metal.
The solidified structure gel nearby twitched, then slithered across the surface like living ink, creeping into the dead circuits.
A faint spark.
The panel flickered to life.
Then, with a soft chime, the door slid open, revealing a stairwell spiraling upward.
A path leading to the upper level.
Simon reached down, lifting Jerry’s submarine, positioning it against his back.
With a subtle hum, the magnets at the bottom of the drone activated, locking it securely in place.
The weight settled against him.
A presence. A reminder he wasn’t entirely alone.
Simon stepped forward, his boots echoing against the metal steps.
As he ascended, the fiber-optic filaments from the back of his helmet uncoiled, extending outward like ghostly tendrils, scanning for any anomalies lurking in the shadows.
When he reached the end of the stairwell, Simon pressed the panel beside the door. The mechanism hissed softly, and with a sluggish whine, the door slid open. He stepped through, pausing as his eyes darted left and right.
The hallway was empty.
Silent.
The kind of silence that felt oppressive, that made his footsteps seem too loud in the vast emptiness.
He moved forward, peering through the glass window into the management room. The space was shaped like a boomerang. Some of the computers lay shadowed in darkness, their monitors long dead. A printer, its feed long exhausted, had vomited paper across the floor—sheets curled at the edges, covered in faded ink. A single monitor hung from the ceiling, suspended by a tangle of wires like a gutted carcass.
Simon’s gaze locked onto the corpse in the chair.
The body sat slumped forward, its head sunken to its chest. Flesh had begun to rot, hollowing out the sockets where eyes had once been. The throat—
Slit. A deep, brutal gash, a final wound that had drained life from the body long ago. The blood had dried, blackened and cracked with time, a stark contrast against the pale skin. At the corpse’s feet lay a kitchen knife, dulled with age, its once-sharp edge crusted with remnants of its grisly work.
And then—his eyes caught something else.
A pink rubber band wrapped around the left wrist. A tiny, innocent thing. The kind given to newborns at birth.
A lump formed in Simon’s throat.
He knew the man.
Brandon Wan.
A Chinese engineer. A Wrangler stationed at Delta. A man who had worked tirelessly within PATHOS-II, who had once spoken of things he would never see again. A man Simon had broken.
The memories clawed at him. He and Catherine had needed the security code to release the DUNBAT. And they had used Brandon’s brain scane, forced him into a digital purgatory, again and again, wringing him dry for the information they needed. He had watched the man panic, beg, scream—and then, the moment he was no longer useful, Catherine had shut him down.
In a way, she had done the right thing. She had ended his suffering.
But it still made Simon sick.
Disgusted with himself.
He forced himself to look away. His fists clenched at his sides, fingers trembling. But there was nothing left to do. Nothing he could change.
He turned left, walking down the hall. He stepped into a vast, hexagonal chamber. Machines loomed around him—some towering, others squat and compact.
The quiet hum of dormant technology buzzed faintly in the background, filling the space with an eerie sense of life.
His gaze flickered to a cuboid device resting on one of the tables. The size of a car engine. But only for a moment. It wasn’t his concern right now.
Simon reached behind him, releasing the drone from his back and setting it down gently on the floor.
“Jerry, you’re gonna wait here while I fix the cameras around,” he muttered.
The rat's whiskers twitched and he offered a small nod.
Simon straightened, taking a deep breath. There was work to do.
Without another word, he turned and stepped out of the laboratory, leaving Jerry behind as he ventured deeper into the station’s decayed heart.
First, Simon walked into the management room, his steps echoing in the dimly lit space. He moved toward the workstation, pressing a few keys as the system flickered to life. The screen’s glow illuminated the darkened room, casting shifting shadows against the walls. With a few more commands, he restored power to the station’s main floor, activating the overhead lights.
The monsters he had encountered here were blind. He knew that. Light wouldn’t alert them—but it would help the cameras track their movements. It gave him an advantage. A sliver of control in a place where so much had already been lost.
He started his rounds, moving cautiously from room to room, checking for anything of use—or anyone still trapped in this limbo between life and oblivion.
The medical room was empty, save for overturned gurneys and shattered glass. Two incubators inside were covered in fleshy growths, their transparent covers warped and pulsating faintly.
The examination room had a single bed, covered in cancerous, tumorous growth. This was where he had first encountered the blind monster—formerly known as Terry Akers.
He had ingested large amounts of structure gel, undergone a brief period of reconstruction, and plummeted into insanity. In his madness, he had torn out his own eyes. A rusted tray of surgical tools sat abandoned, some of them still stained with old fluids, left to rot in time’s uncaring grasp.
The storage room shelves toppled, crates broken open, their contents looted or spilled across the floor. But among the debris, Simon found something useful—dried food for Jerry.
The conference room was silent. Chairs scattered, a whiteboard still displaying a faded, desperate plan scrawled by hands that had long since perished. A projector flickered on repeat, casting grotesque images of flesh merging with cold metal.
The distorted faces of the lost, their features barely recognizable, were fused into the walls—flesh intertwined with electronics, veins pulsing sluggishly beneath a thin coat of structure gel.
Payload design the same. Silent. A mausoleum to unfinished work.
Three more.
Three more souls left behind, locked in an endless sleep they would never wake from.
One was slouched in a chair next to a dead computer, head tilted to the side as if they had simply dozed off.
Nadine Masters.
The name flashed in his mind like an afterthought, a remnant of someone who had once been more than just another body left to decay.
The other two—
Their fates were worse.
They had been fused into the wall of the storage room, their bodies twisted and contorted, structure gel gripping their flesh like a parasite that refused to let go. Their expressions were eerily peaceful—unaware, or perhaps uncaring, of what had happened to them.
Simon exhaled, the sound more mechanical than human.
Simon turned back, toward the elevator, his gaze settling on the door beside it—the one leading downward.
The metal had been ripped open. The edges curled outward, jagged and torn, as if something had forced its way through with raw, unrestrained strength.
“That’s how that motherfucker got me,” Simon murmured, his voice flat, edged with bitter amusement.
Without hesitation, the welding tool popped from the inside of his forearm. Sparks flew as he sealed the door shut, the metal hissing and fusing under the heat.
One less way down.
There was still another door left open, the one across the management room—but for now, it was enough. He would deal with the rest later.
Simon returned to the laboratory, stepping inside to find Jerry nestled in his tiny submarine, nibbling at the biscuit Simon had left for him. The little rodent twitched his whiskers, glancing up as if acknowledging Simon’s return before continuing his feast.
He turned his attention to the lab itself, fixing the doors first, reinforcing them. He needed to secure this place. If this was going to be his workspace—he needed it locked down.
There were still the air hatches.
He’d take care of those soon enough.
His gaze drifted to the 3D printer.
For a moment, something flickered in him. A sensation. The shadow of a smirk.
If I still had a face, I’d be grinning right now.
