The red alert continued pulsing, casting an eerie strobe across the garage walls.
Jake and Mike stood motionless for a second, minds racing faster than the warning systems could blink.
Mike (urgently):
"We can't defend this place. Not against their agents. They'll wipe it clean in seconds."
Jake (gritting his teeth):
"Then we don't defend it. We make it useless to them. We move the Lighthouse—digitally and physically."
Mike's eyes sharpened.
Jake grabbed a nearby chalkboard and sketched a hasty plan.
Step 1: Signal Amplification
Connect The Lighthouse to an array of abandoned shortwave towers scattered around the outskirts of town.
Use analog AM frequencies—forgotten relics from a time before the internet—to broadcast the Anchored Truth Pulse.
Layer the signal with redundancy across multiple bands, making it impossible to shut down with a single strike.
Step 2: Physical Relocation
Build a mobile carrier unit.
Strip The Lighthouse down to its essentials and install it inside a shielded, EMP-resistant case—one they could move without drawing attention.
The case would be hidden in plain sight, disguised as a broken-down delivery van Mike's father used to drive.
Step 3: Decoy Systems
Rig the garage with multiple false servers running dummy codes.
Create "ghost beacons" — fake Lighthouse signals that would scatter their enemies across different locations.
Mike leaned in, adrenaline fueling him.
Mike (grinning):
"Basically, we turn the whole town into a game of whack-a-mole."
Jake:
"Exactly. Every second they waste chasing a fake signal gives us another second to strengthen the real one."
They split the tasks with surgical efficiency.
Mike got to work repurposing the old analog broadcast gear—miles of dusty wires, soldering iron flashing like a weapon of war.
Jake began dismantling The Lighthouse carefully, securing the lavender-etched device into a reinforced lead casing lined with copper mesh to block scanning.
They cannibalized an old battery array to keep it powered, even off the grid.
Hours passed like seconds.
Just before dawn, they rolled the disguised van out of the back entrance, slipping through the sleepy streets unnoticed.
The first broadcast tower—an old decommissioned AM station on the town's edge—loomed ahead like a forgotten monument.
Inside the van, The Lighthouse pulsed faintly.
Alive.
Jake tuned the broadcast frequencies manually, weaving their memories, truths, and declarations into the carrier waves.
And then, with a final press of a weathered button…
The Lighthouse sang.
Across broken antennas and rusted towers, across dead air and abandoned frequencies, the truth began whispering into the world again.
Quiet, humble—and utterly indestructible.
Mike (exhaling, listening to the faint hum through the old radio):
"They can't erase what they can't find."
Jake (steering the van deeper into the backroads):
"And they can't fight what they don't understand."
Behind them, in the distance, they saw smoke rising.
Their garage—burned to the ground by Nilgiris' operatives.
The war had officially begun.
But the beacon was alive.
And it was only getting stronger.
But the functioning of lighthouse has created awakening in the mind of people.
It started small.
A flicker on forgotten radios.
A strange hum at the edges of cracked speakers.
A pulse of memory carried on dead frequencies.
In the nearby town of Halewick, a place that had practically fallen off the maps, life was painfully ordinary.
A farming town turned ghost town, with boarded-up diners, a collapsed theater, and a few stubborn residents clinging to the last echoes of the old world.
At Mason's Repair Shop, an ancient AM radio—something Mason had stubbornly kept on the counter for years—crackled back to life.
Mason (gruff, muttering):
"Now what the hell..."
The dial, untouched, vibrated between two dead channels. And then a voice, clear and soft, broke through the static.
"I am Jake Mercer. Son of Thomas Mercer. I remember. I resist."
Mason blinked.
The voice was raw—not like anything he'd ever heard on commercial radio.
It wasn't a broadcast.
It was... personal. Intimate.
Like someone whispering directly into his mind.
Across town, at the abandoned St. Elara's High School, a group of teenagers who spent their nights skateboarding and goofing off heard the same signal through a busted PA system one of them had rewired for pranks.
At first, they thought it was a joke—until the voice started describing things no one outside the town should have known.
Old memories.
Forgotten faces.
Events that had somehow been... erased from their collective recollection.
One of the skaters, Lyla, shivered.
Lyla (whispering):
"Dude, that's my brother's name. The one who disappeared after the blackout... the one no one even talks about anymore."
She wasn't alone. Others started recognizing pieces of memories they'd been told were false—or worse, that they had stopped remembering altogether.
The transmission continued intermittently, looping at odd intervals, mixing in other voices now—an old woman's warning (Amara's), flashes of hometown events that had never made the news.
At a rundown nursing home on the town's edge, Mr. Calloway, a retired librarian almost lost to dementia, suddenly sat up straighter as the voice crackled through his bedside radio.
Tears welled in his clouded eyes.
Mr. Calloway (rasping):
"I... I remember. I remember her. They took her from the records, but not from me..."
The Lighthouse's signal was doing more than transmitting facts.
It was resurrecting memories the Architects had tried to erase.
Restoring fractures in the minds of everyday people.
And the more memories that aligned—the stronger the signal became.
By nightfall, dozens across Halewick had tuned in, whether intentionally or by accident.
A web of Awakened Minds began to form.
Confused. Curious. Angry.
And somewhere in the deeper networks, Jake and Mike watched the server logs with pounding hearts.
Mike (grinning):
"It's working, Jake. They're waking up. They're resisting."
Jake (quietly, staring at the spreading signal map):
"And when enough of them do... Nilgiris won't just be fighting two teenagers anymore. He'll be fighting the whole memory of the world."
The Lighthouse was no longer just a beacon.
It was a spark.
And soon—it would be a wildfire.