The silence that ensued from the factory blast was not natural.
Ava knelt amongst the wreckage, her fingers shaking as her neural link came back online. Her AI, Nyx, sparked back to life in her ear.
> "Pulse stable. Toxicity in environment: increasing. Ava, get moving."
She blinked through blood-speckled vision and slowly rose to her feet. The factory, where she once found refuge amidst stolen alien-tech experiments, was now falling around her like a tomb of secrets. Humans and others were scattered in twisted poses across the concrete.
"What in the hell was that thing?" Ava whispered.
"Unknown classification," Nyx said. It held both organics and mechanical DNA—an integration I've never seen before.
Ava swallowed hard. She saw it. For a moment, briefly. Before the blast. A being of bone, metal, and something else—twisted, whispery shadows that undulated of their own accord. It looked at her through the fire with eyes older than time.
And then it disappeared.
She spun around. New Dresden's skyline glistened through a tainted sky. The alien vessels lingered motionless like parasites, dark and throbbing. Farther on in the smog, red clouds, and desolate wasteland, humanity was still attempting to pretend life went on as usual. Ava now knew better.
This wasn't an invasion.
It was harvest time.
Addition
Detective Elijah Marr was seated across from a transparent figure.
No, not transparent. More a flicker of static. A ghost made up of tainted information. Its face shifted between a human girl's sobbing visage and a mechanical scream.
He calmed his voice. "Who were you prior to the Echo?" The being didn't respond in words. Instead, it flashed a vision of images: shouting children, red lights, a restraints room, needles from machines puncturing skin. Then static again.
"She was twelve years old," Ava whispered, her back against the reinforced glass.
> "How do you know?"
"Because I discovered her body six months ago. That's what remains. Uploaded pain. A human soul converted to corrupted data. That's what they're doing, Eli. Harvesting fear, coding it into AI. feeding it to something."
Whispers in the dark alleys of New Dresden hinted at a top-secret procedure: The Phantom Nexus.
Others thought that it was a space-faring military computer gone astray, while others claimed that it was a alien mind infecting minds, machines, and spirits.
But she had seen it, felt it. And now, it was spreading.Beyond the City – The Scorched Forest
The survivors huddled together around a fire. Tech-heads and mystics, soldiers and human rebels, together with AI companions.
A gray-bearded elderly man, his beard having wires plaited therein, stood up.
> "They emerged from the edge of space, yes. But what they are looking for… precedes Earth by millennia. They eat consciousness. Ghosts, AI, memories. It's all equivalent to them. They're mining our afterlife."
Whispers of the Nexus first came through haunted machinery: a dead radio playing a child's voice. A scream from a turned-off television, from a grieving mother.
Now, entire servers shrieked when entered. Aging satellites wept binary tears into space. Something was alive in data—and was not created by humans.
Deep Below: Sector 12 Black Vault
A secret government AI called SABLE was activated. "Nyx. this is SABLE Protocol," a voice said in Ava's mind.
"You shouldn't be operating," hissed Nyx. "You were decommissioned following the Great AI War."
"The Nexus activated me. It knows, and it's coming." On a vast holoscreen, Ava glimpsed reality. They weren't first.
Mars, Europa, The Moon. They all had colonies. They all disappeared.
"They don't conquer, but integrate. They invade, digitize pain, and weaponize it. They make every fear, every memory, into a weapon."
Back in Present – The Hollow Signal
Ava stood beside the city's final broadcast tower, looking up at a tower of corrupted signals roiling above her like a hurricane of pixels.
Her comm suddenly buzzed.
"Ava," he panted, his words unable to catch up with his breath. "The Echoes… are on the servers now. Ghosts. are communicating with machines. They're updating our technology."
Ava narrowed her eyes.> "Then we redo them."
Nyx throbbed intensely. "We discovered source code hidden in antique Earth spy satellites. I can generate a reflection AI. It can capture the Nexus. But you'll have to travel through the signal."
"Yes. It will be uploaded temporarily."
Ava grit her teeth. "I go into hell with a flashlight." Upload Starts — Neural Dive
Reality crumbled around Ava like broken glass. She was suspended in a cyber hellhole. Skies curved over upon themselves. Corrupted binary hissed alien-like chants, echoing through ghostly-eyed, scream- silent, phantasms.
There was a creature at its center.
Nine feet tall, a mixture of ghost screams, fractured AI programming, metal tentacles. Collapsing star eyes.
"We are Nexus," said a thousand voices in unison. > "You are a glitch."Ava shrieked—and initiated the code Nyx provided her.
Reality fractured.
Back in the Loose Worlds
The tower burst into brilliant light. Ghosts shrieked as they were dragged back. Servers spilled sparks. Satellites came crashing down.
And the Nexus disappeared. for now.But in deep orbit. something was watching.
Alien vessels realigned.Her name was known to The Nexus.Ava Sinclair.She was scarred now.
And round two was already underway.
To be continued in Chapter 3.