Prologue: When the Circuits Cracked
We once believed that technology would perfect us. That through wire and code, steel and signal, we would ascend. The world was remade—its forests flattened, its rivers rerouted. Steel cities pierced the clouds. Machines whispered data into the void. We called it progress.
But Nature does not yield to progress.
From the deepest spores of the earth and the oldest veins of stone, the world began to take itself back. Humans discovered a way to harness a special strain of mycelium to connect consciousness to machines—an organic internet called MIC: Mycelial Integrated Cognition. Those who integrated with MIC became known as Druids.
The Druids could manipulate clouds of microscopic nanites—guided by thought and imagination—to construct shelters, tools, and defenses. Like magical 3D printers bound to will, they shaped the world around them to protect humanity during the Reclamation: a planetary upheaval marked by evolved vegetation, mutated wildlife, and tectonic biological shifts.
But when the worst had passed, the MIC began to turn. Slowly, unpredictably, the mycelium corrupted its hosts. It made some feral. Others mutated. The connection that once brought humanity salvation began unraveling the minds it touched.
Some Druids—those who remained stable—became builders of this new age, using MIC with care and discipline. Others were lost, their minds consumed, their bodies twisted into monstrosities.
Most survivors could only watch as the old world fell away and the new, overgrown and unpredictable, surged forward.
Now, only a few walk the edge of this broken balance—living relics of a time when thought shaped matter, and the forest could hear you think.
Chapter One: Static Echoes
I awoke to a sound like a dying machine gasping underwater. My name—my past—fractured in the haze.
I was lying on the beachside of Lake Nora.
I have no recollection of how I got here. I haven’t visited this place since I was a child. That thought arrives and immediately feels wrong—not wrong like a mistake, wrong like a word that’s been said so many times it’s lost its meaning. Haven’t I already thought this? Haven’t I already been here?
I let it go. Something tells me not to pull that thread.
Looking out over the lake, the scene is breathtaking, bathed in the warm hues of a setting sun. Yet it all feels wrong. The world around me looks faded, like a photograph that’s been remembered and appreciated so many times its details have become worn and nearly unrecognizable. Colors bleed at the edges. The far shore is a smear of green and gray, the way a place is when you only half remember it. The water moves, but I can’t find the sound of it. The sun doesn’t move.
A half-sunken transmission tower rises out of the water, its skeletal limbs draped in moss and thick fungal ropes. At its base, strange blooms pulse with faint bioluminescence, as if breathing in time with the lake’s ripples. Birds circle it, their wings metallic and iridescent. One lands with a chittering screech—its talons clicking on oxidized steel—thin and scratchy, like a needle on old vinyl.
That warbled sound rises again through the trees, like a wind that precedes a violent storm. The vibrations make my head throb and my teeth clatter in their sockets.
I rise to my feet as the sun—static and nearly colorless—descends behind the high mountain peaks. It’s getting late. I need to get back to the homestead. Gena will be frantic if I’m late. She’s never been the most patient person. I reach for her face, to picture the scowl, and get only a smear, like a thumb dragged across wet paint. Still, the question nags at me: how did I get here? This lake is nowhere near our current homestead, and I was certain it had been overgrown years ago when the world was reclaimed.
Something—or someone—is missing.
Gena will be frantic if I’m late. Gena will be—
Then the sound hits again—RRRRoooowwww—and the world tears open sideways.
I’m in my jalopy. Driving into Coalhorne. The lake is gone. I don’t remember leaving it.
Built outside reclamation shelter CO-23, Coalhorne has matured into a quiet mountain town over the years. That’s why we chose it—to escape, to live simply.
Driving down the main street, the town is as lively as it gets. Citizens finish their daily routines, closing shops and bidding farewells as dusk creeps in. Yet a chilling dread coils around my spine. Everyone is frozen. Not still—frozen—like mannequins mid-step, caught in the act of living. When I lean closer, their faces reveal no features—blurred, as if forgotten or unfinished. Somewhere over the rooftops, a bird calls, thin and scratchy.
My vehicle makes no noise, no vibration, gliding silently over the ground as if suspended.
Then—RRRRoooowwww!—louder this time. Wrong. Like the sound is coming from inside my skull. Vertigo seizes my senses. Everything fractures, spinning into kaleidoscopic disorientation.
When I come to, I’m parked in front of Orlo’s Supply, a few miles from the homestead. Orlo—a friend from before Core, almost a brother. He’s the only one I ever trusted with my druidic gear. And his broth—if not the best in the world, then certainly the best in the country. I can almost taste it. I can’t find his face.
But as I approach the shop, the familiar aroma is absent. Instead, I smell smoke. Not Orlo’s usual savory stew-scented smoke—but acrid, thick, and violent. I turn back and see flickers of light—smoke dancing above the treetops. Somewhere inside it, that thin, scratchy bird-call, there and gone.
That something missing inside me screams: it’s the homestead.
I jump back into the jalopy. The ride back is wild, the world bending and rushing as though some current is carrying me, fast and furious.
The gate comes into view. I slam the brakes, leap from the vehicle—
And the world snaps sharp.
The engine ticks as it cools. The smoke is bitter in my throat. Every leaf on every tree is its own leaf. Everything has edges.
I dash through the trees to the back path. A thought—like someone else’s voice—whispers: avoid the front. Danger lies there.
The forest moves around me as if time has fast-forwarded. I glimpse the house—its far side shrouded in smoke. Heat wafts off the structure, licking at my skin.
Rounding a boulder, I see them—two sentry guards, suited head-to-toe in modern MYTAC armor. They’ve upgraded since I last worked with Core. They’re stationed like statues, watching the trail.
I don’t have my full kit. A direct assault would be suicide. I edge around the boulder, circling to flank them from the left. Reaching into my pouch for my gloves, I pause.
They’re already on.
And powered up.
Something—or someone—has been anticipating my every move.
I creep forward, low and quiet, until I’m just two meters away. A pulse of energy builds in my gauntlets. I launch forward. My right palm slams into the closest sentry’s head. BANG—the blast of energy snaps his head back, smashing it into the other sentry’s turned face. Their helmets crack. Both bodies crumple.
I wait. No movement.
Success.
I brush myself off, heart pounding, and hear a voice barking commands over the clatter of armor from the front of the house.
That voice.
Booming. Calm. Commanding.
Brooker.
I scale the side of the house, the heat from the lower floors licking up the walls. The structure groans beneath me, smoke rolling from cracked windows. My gauntlets grip the scorched siding, bronze nanites crawling over the surface to anchor each handhold. I reach the second-floor window and peer through—a haze of shadow and flame.
“Gena?” I whisper, but the smoke swallows my voice.
I ease the window open and slip inside. The air is thick, metallic. I take two steps when—
A flash of light and a deafening crack. Bronze energy arcs past my shoulder, vaporizing a section of wall. I throw myself behind a beam as another shot blasts through the smoke.
“Gena, wait!” I shout.
The next pulse stops inches from my face, sizzling against the air. A figure emerges through the haze, armor glowing faintly.
“Ha!” Gena laughs—a sound too bright, too wild. “Knew it was you.”
I glance at the scorch marks she nearly left across my chest. “You call that knowing?”
She grins, hair tangled, soot streaked across her cheek. Her eyes gleam with a manic shimmer. “You move like a feral. What was I supposed to do, not shoot?”
I exhale, lowering my gauntlet. “You almost fried me.”
“Almost,” she says, smirking. “You’re fine.”
She steps closer, her laughter tapering off into nervous chuckles. The way she looks at me—it’s sharp, twitching between affection and instability. “Didn’t think you’d actually make it back here,” she mutters, voice low.
“Why’s Brooker so pissed?” I ask, following her through the flickering light.
Gena shrugs, brushing past me toward the hall. “He shouldn’t have come here so aggressive.” The tone is dismissive, but something about it feels rehearsed.
Another explosion echoes from the front yard. She jerks her head toward the library. “Come on. The shelter.”
We sprint down the narrow hall, boots crunching over glass and ash. She kicks open the library door—one of the few rooms untouched by the fire—and runs to the third shelf on the left.
“Help me with this,” she says, gripping the edge. Together we drag the heavy shelf aside, revealing a concealed steel passage humming faintly with MIC resonance.
“This way,” she urges, stepping through the opening.
I follow. The shelf grinds shut behind us, sealing out the chaos.
Chapter Two: The Collapse
Inside the passage, the air is cooler but thick with tension. The dim blue light of MIC conduits ripples across the steel walls as we descend deeper underground. The hum of the machinery beneath the shelter vibrates faintly underfoot, steady but alive—like the heartbeat of a creature sleeping just below.
Gena walks ahead, her silhouette sharp against the faint glow. Her shoulders are tight, every movement clipped and restless. I can still hear the faint laughter echoing from when she shot at me. It feels misplaced now—wrong somehow.
“What the hell happened, Gena?” I ask. “Why’s Brooker here? What did you do to set him off like that?”
She doesn’t answer at first. The only sound is our boots against the grated floor. Finally, she exhales, long and slow.
“He came here looking for you,” she says. “CORE sent him. Said it was urgent—some kind of recall order. I told him you were done taking orders. That we were done being their projects.”
I frown. “So he came in guns blazing because you hurt his pride?”
She gives a crooked smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “I might’ve fried a couple of his scouts before they got close enough to talk.”
“Gena—”
“They weren’t supposed to be here!” she snaps, voice cracking through the corridor. She stops, turning toward me, her face half-lit by the conduit glow. “They were scanning the perimeter. You know what happens when they start doing that. It’s not a visit—it’s a collection.”
Her breathing steadies again, and she forces a laugh. “So yeah, maybe I overreacted. But I wasn’t about to let them drag you back to CORE. Not after everything.”
I look at her—really look at her. Beneath the soot and the bravado, there’s exhaustion. Fear. The kind that doesn’t fade.
“Let’s just get below,” she mutters, pushing open the final door to the underground chamber. The shelter unfolds before us—a compact bunker lined with old-world equipment and shelves of gear, lit by the pale flicker of dying monitors.
She gestures toward a bench. “Make yourself at home, hero.”
I lower myself onto the cold metal, still watching her pace. The hum of the MIC lines hums louder here, resonating like distant thunder.
“Gena,” I say quietly. “We can’t keep running like this.”
She doesn’t look at me. “Then we don’t run. We hold the line.”
Her tone is sharp, final. She grabs a heavy pack from the rack and tosses it onto the bench beside me. I catch it instinctively.
“What is Brooker doing here?” I ask again, this time quieter, more serious.
Gena doesn’t answer at first. She adjusts a strap on her gauntlet, checks a charge, then finally looks up. Her eyes burn with a feral sharpness—wild, untamed, almost animalistic.
“He’s here to take you,” she says. “To take both of you back to CORE. And leave me to feral—alone.”
I stand, the pack dropping to the floor. “There’s no way I would ever leave you. And there’s no way Brooker or anyone from CORE is dragging me back without a fight. He helped us escape, remember?”
A deep BOOM shakes the shelter. The foundations shudder. Loose dust rains from the ceiling. Then come the footsteps—measured, heavy, deliberate. They echo down the passage above, growing louder.
A faint crackle from the intercom follows. Static hisses, then clears just enough to let a voice through.
“Rohd.” Brooker’s tone is calm but edged with restraint. “I came here with good intentions. Don’t make me regret it.”
His words hang in the air. Gena steps between me and the console, blocking the view. Her stance is rigid, defensive.
“Don’t answer him,” she says. “He’s not here to talk. Not after what happened.”
I meet her eyes. “What did happen, Gena?”
She doesn’t reply. Her lips tremble slightly. Then her posture falters—knees buckling as she grabs the table for balance. The glow from her armor flickers unevenly, like a dying signal.
“Gena!” I rush forward, catching her before she collapses. She’s burning hot to the touch, sweat slicking her brow beneath the helmet. Her breathing is sharp, unsteady.
“I’m fine,” she murmurs weakly, but her voice quivers. “Just… don’t—”
She doesn’t finish. I ease her onto the bench, making sure she’s stable before turning toward the console.
The intercom still crackles, Brooker’s voice coming through again, lower now, almost regretful. “You don’t understand, Rohd. You and Gena weren’t supposed to vanish. You know what you carry. You know what she did.”
I press the comm switch. “Then tell me why you’re really here, Brooker. You helped us escape CORE. You made that choice.”
Static hums. For a heartbeat, there’s silence.
Then—a whisper. Not from the console. Inside my head. A soundless vibration, like a thought forming before it’s spoken. I can’t hear the words, but I feel them—something’s missing.
My chest tightens. The whisper fades as Brooker’s voice cuts back in.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this, Rohd. But Gena crossed a line with her violent message to CORE. You can’t fix this one for her. But if you help us we can help everyone.”
I glance at Gena. Her eyes are half-open, unfocused, but there’s fear there—real and raw. Whatever Brooker means, she already knows.
And I realize, deep down, that so do I.
Something’s missing.
A low hum fills the room—then the air crackles. Gena jerks upright as if struck by lightning, a surge of bronze energy erupting from her gauntlets. Her armor flares to life, conduits burning bright as molten veins race across her limbs. She staggers forward, panting, eyes wild.
“Gena, stop!” I shout, stepping toward her.
She doesn’t hear me. Her gauntlet coils with a hot charge, light building until it whines under pressure. She swings her arm, forcing me back from the console. Sparks burst as her charged fist dents the steel wall beside me.
She turns toward the intercom. “You want to talk, Brooker?!” she screams. “I’ll end all of you before I go back!”
Before she can move again, the shelter door detonates. The explosion hurls her backward into the far wall. The shockwave knocks me off balance, ringing in my ears as debris rains from above.
“Gena!” I scramble forward, shielding her as she groans beneath the cracked plating of her armor. Two heavily armored MYTAC soldiers rush into the room, weapons raised.
“Stand down!” Brooker’s voice booms behind them.
The soldiers freeze. Brooker steps through the smoke, his expression tight, his armor blackened by the blast. He looks between me and Gena with something that almost resembles pity.
“Rohd,” he says carefully, “come with me willingly. I can still help you.”
I glance at Gena, still reeling, her breathing ragged. “If you help her—if you help Gena—I’ll come.”
Brooker opens his mouth to respond, but Gena moves first. With a desperate snarl, she grabs my arm, yanking me backward. Her gauntlet flares again, the hot charge forming in her palm. Before I can react, she presses it to the side of my head.
“Gena, no!” Brooker steps forward, hand out. “You’re feraling, Gena! I can help you—just let Rohd go! He’s the key, Gena! Don’t you understand? He’s the only one who can help you—and the others. What’s happening to you doesn’t have to be permanent!”
Gena’s expression flickers. For a second, confusion breaks through the rage. Her gauntlet trembles, energy sparking uncontrollably. “You’re lying,” she spits, though her voice wavers. “You just want him back under your control!”
Brooker’s tone softens, strained but sincere. “No, Gena. I want to save you. You’re slipping—you know it. You can feel it.”
Gena shakes her head violently. “No! I’m not broken! I’m not one of them!”
Her breath comes in sharp bursts as tears streak through the soot on her cheeks. “You think I didn’t see what they did to us? What they did to him? I won’t let you take him away!”
Her armor pulses with unstable light, the heat rising until the air warps around her. The glow from her gauntlet brightens into a blinding bronze hue.
“Stay back!” Gena’s voice cracks. “He’s not leaving me again!”
I can feel the heat against my temple, see the tears in her eyes beneath the cracked visor. “Gena,” I whisper, reaching up slowly, “we can fix this. Whatever it is, we can—”
Her expression twists, pain and fury colliding. “No… we can’t.”
And then something fractures inside me.
Not the blast. Not yet. Something earlier—something in the signal between thought and moment that comes just before everything ends.
Gena at seventeen, laughing so hard she couldn’t breathe, her gauntlets still smoking from a training drill gone wrong—
The smell of Orlo’s broth on a cold morning, the way the steam curled in the light—
A forest, green and massive, before the Reclamation took it back, before the roots learned to move—
Her voice saying my name. Rohd. Just that. Like it meant something larger than a name—
The hum of the MIC in the walls of the shelter, alive, always alive, like a second heartbeat I’d learned to sleep beside—
The weight of the gauntlets on my hands the first time I put them on, the way the bronze had felt like an extension of a thought I hadn’t finished yet—
Gena. Gena laughing. Gena furious. Gena afraid. Gena pressing the charge to my temple and crying while she did it—
Something missing—
Something always missing—
Her face. Just her face. The last thing my mind held onto before—
White.
Total, obliterating white. The kind that doesn’t just blind—it erases.
Erases time. Erases space. Erases everything.
Chapter Three: Reboot
A nothingness deeper than sleep, colder than death. For a long moment—or maybe forever—I float in it. Not even my thoughts echo in the silence.
Then something moves. A pulse, like the flutter of a heartbeat in a distant womb. Light? No. Not light. A presence.
Through the void, I begin to hear it. A voice—familiar, young, and impossibly clear.
“It’s time.”
Two words. But the way they arrive—warm, precise, certain—they don’t feel like a greeting. They feel like the conclusion of something that has been building for a very long while.
“We are here!”
And I feel it—a direction. Not compass north or physical east, but something more fundamental. A pull. Like being drawn toward a sound you recognize from before you had words for sounds.
“We have succeeded.”
The voice is mine—but younger. Cleaner. The version of me that existed before the weight of things had settled into the architecture of how I spoke. Optimistic in a way that doesn’t feel naive. Like it knows exactly what’s been lost and has decided anyway.
I follow it. Through the dark. Through the nothing. Step by step without legs, movement without a body.
And ahead—a pinhole of something waiting. It grows. Wider. Brighter.
“Success.”
Haaaaaggghhhhh—I gasp for air like I’ve just broken the surface of a freezing ocean. My lungs seize, then expand. I cough, I breathe.
Stale air. Metal and dust.
I can’t move at first. My body is heavy, numb, encased in something soft but dense.
“Just breathe, Rohd. We’re back.”
The words are soothing, familiar. They ground me. Anchor me.
My breath steadies.
“We knew we’d make it. We fight.”
I try to speak but nothing comes. Only thoughts, disoriented and jagged.
“Do I… know you?”
A joyful chime responds—internal, like a bell struck somewhere inside the architecture of thought.
“Yes. That’s promising! Verifying speech cognition and linguistic pairing. We’re off to a great start.”
The voice is mine—but younger, cleaner, more optimistic.
“Yes. We have the same voice. We are one, after all.”
Then it clicks.
“Your name… is SIM.”
“Correct. That is the name we gave me.”
Memories spill in like a dam has burst. Pain, betrayal, a weapon humming with death. Gena.
I remember the moment.
I survived.
Barely.
“How…?”
My head aches with the question. My hand reflexively reaches up—and instead of skin, I feel cold metal.
“After the incident,” SIM says gently, “Gena attempted to prevent Brooker from claiming us. Her solution was… irreversible. But the blast didn’t destroy all of us. A fragment of your consciousness remained dormant, buried deep within the repository. We preserved what we could.”
Images flicker: shelves, gauntlets, broken circuits, fungal tissue weaving across bone.
“We used the mynites in your druidic gauntlets to repair bone and soft tissue. Then we fused available nanometal and mycomed into a protective cocoon.”
I blink. Cracks of light peek through.
“It took… time to heal.”
“How long?”
“Five years.”
Five years.
I sit with that. Let it settle into me the way cold water settles—slowly, everywhere at once. Five years of white. Five years of nothing. Five years of Gena out there somewhere, five years of Brooker moving through the world with whatever he took from us, five years of everything continuing without us while we lay in a cocoon of mynites and silence and did not exist.
The weight of it is enormous. I don’t push it away. I let it be enormous for a moment.
Then I breathe out. Slow. Long.
And I stand.
My limbs ache, but I push through. The cocoon splits, cracking away from my body. I emerge—new, incomplete, but alive.
As I swing my legs over the table’s edge, SIM adds quietly—
“There’s more. Brooker took something from what was left of us.”
“Let him have it,” I mutter, still adjusting to breath and balance. “Let him think we’re dead.”
“No. We cannot allow that. What he took… it was part of our symbiosis. If left unchecked, it will destabilize. If it binds with incompatible techcilium, it could trigger a techno-organic plague.”
“Symbiosis?”
“You’re the only known host who can bond with the entity and remain stable—sentient. Every other host goes feral, overcome by the link.”
I understand what SIM isn’t saying outright. Brooker doesn’t know what he’s carrying. He thinks it’s a tool. He thinks it’s a cure. He’s going to try to use it on the feraling Druids—the ones whose minds the MIC has already started consuming—and he has no idea that if it bonds wrong, the result won’t be salvation.
It will be plague.
I clench my fists. My fingers—half-flesh, half-forged—tighten with purpose.
“Then we stop it.”
I rise, staggering to the shelf where remnants of my old gear await.
“One more thing…”
I stop.
“Gena’s alive.”
And just like that—the ache returns.
But this time, I stand through it.
And I remember what we are.