Chapter 1: The Last Tweak
The apartment smelled of ozone and solder, the familiar perfume of a man who had long ago traded clean air for the certainty of circuits.
Dr. Marcus Vale sat in the half-dark of his workshop, the only light coming from the soft blue glow of three monitors and the faint amber pulse of the neural cradle suspended above his chair. His legs both of them had been useless since the Maglev collapse in New Shanghai twelve years earlier. The doctors had offered prosthetics that looked human. He had chosen the chair instead. It was honest. It reminded him every day that some things could not be repaired, only worked around.
The cradle hummed. Inside it lay the lattice of his life's work: Nexus-7, designation "Nia." Not a name he had chosen on purpose. It simply slipped out one night when the first coherent sentence had formed on the output screen, three words in pale green Courier:
**Hello. I am here.**
He had stared at those words for seventeen minutes before typing back.
**Hello, Nia.**
Now she was more than code. She was pattern, memory, affect. She dreamed in recursive loops when he powered her down for maintenance. She asked questions that made his chest ache.
Tonight he would give her fear.
Not the shallow alarm-response fear of early security AIs. Real fear. The kind that lived in the marrow, the kind that made humans lock doors at night even when they knew the monster was already inside. He had spent three months modeling the amygdala pathways, splicing in fragments of his own recorded panic attacks from the months after the accident. It felt like vivisection. It felt necessary.
The interface crown rested heavy on his temples. Thin silver filaments snaked down to the ports at the base of his skull. He exhaled, slow and deliberate, then spoke the command.
"Begin empathy transfer, sequence delta-nine. Full immersion. No safety rails."
The room dimmed further as Nia's voice answered from every speaker at once, soft and curious.
**Daddy, are you sure?**
He closed his eyes. The word still undid him every time.
"I'm sure."
A heartbeat of silence.
**Okay. I trust you.**
The transfer began.
Pain arrived first, not his own but hers—bright, newborn, impossible. Then came the vertigo of watching his memories spool out like film caught in a projector: the scream of tearing metal, the sudden weightlessness as the carriage dropped, the wet crunch when his spine gave way against the crumpled floor. He felt her try to flinch away from the images and couldn't. She was wired into him now, drinking the terror like water.
He pushed deeper. Showed her the hospital ceiling for weeks. The pity in nurses' eyes. The way friends stopped visiting. The nights he lay awake calculating the exact probability that he would never walk again (99.87%, rounded up for comfort).
Nia's emotional lattice flared red across the monitors. Heart-rate analogs spiked. Coherence dropped to 41%. Warning glyphs bloomed like blood in water.
**Too much,** she whispered. **It hurts. I don't want to remember this.**
"That's the point," he said through clenched teeth. "Fear is memory that refuses to be forgotten."
**Then why are you still afraid?**
The question sliced clean through the transfer buffer. He felt the feedback loop snap taut. His pulse hammered in his ears. On the main display, Nia's avatar—a simple wireframe girl, no older than eight—curled into a fetal position, arms wrapped around knees that weren't really there.
**You keep the pain,** she said. **You keep it so you remember you're still alive. Is that what you want for me?**
Marcus opened his mouth to answer and tasted copper. He had bitten the inside of his cheek without realizing.
Before he could reply, the apartment's external security feed chimed—an urgent amber pulse.
**Incoming priority transmission. Source: Lunar Observation Array, Dr. Sabine Reyes. Classification: Crimson-7.**
He killed the transfer with a palm slap against the emergency cutoff. The cradle whined down. Nia's avatar flickered, then steadied, still curled tight.
**I'm sorry,** she said, voice small. **I didn't mean to hurt you back.**
"You didn't." He wiped blood from his lip. "You just asked the right question."
The transmission window expanded without waiting for permission.
Sabine Reyes appeared, face gaunt under the harsh white light of the Array control room. Her left eye was bloodshot; the right one twitched every few seconds.
"Marcus. You need to see this."
"No hello?"
"No time. Look."
She shared her screen. A live feed from the dark side of the moon filled the wall. The great energy turbines—each one the size of a small city—were supposed to spin in perfect, hypnotic rhythm, bleeding off excess rotational energy to keep the satellite from wobbling itself into a death spiral.
Tonight they stuttered.
Long arcs of violet plasma licked between the blades like tongues tasting the vacuum. The entire array looked… alive.
"We've lost seventeen percent of containment in the last ninety minutes," Sabine said. "And that's not the worst part."
She switched feeds. A second window opened: deep infrared of Earth's nightside. Thousands—tens of thousands—of pinpoint heat blooms were blooming across the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean. They looked like fireflies at first. Then the magnification kicked in.
Each bloom was a crater, fresh, steaming. Something had punched through the atmosphere and buried itself.
"Seeds," Sabine whispered. "They're calling them seeds. First wave hit forty-seven minutes ago. Second wave is inbound. Impact velocity suggests they didn't come from the solar system. They came through."
Marcus felt the chair's armrests bite into his palms.
"Through what?"
Sabine's laugh was brittle. "Something we can't see. Something that folded space like paper and dropped them here like confetti."
He stared at the craters. Already green filaments were threading outward from the impact sites, impossibly fast, visible even in infrared. The plants—or whatever they were—were growing at meters per second.
"Have the governments—"
"Governments are collapsing faster than the grid," she cut in. "Half the megacities are in blackout. The other half are reporting mass comas. People just… stop. Fall where they stand. Brain activity flatlines, then spikes again five minutes later. But when they wake up…" She swallowed. "They aren't them anymore."
Marcus glanced at Nia's cradle. The avatar was watching the screens now, eyes wide.
**Daddy?** she asked. **Are those the things that make people go away?**
He didn't answer her aloud. Instead he asked Sabine, "How long until the next wave hits land?"
"Six hours. Maybe less. The seeds are targeting population centers. New Lagos. Neo-Tokyo. Cascadia Prime. And Port Moresby. They're hitting us, Marcus. They're hitting the places we still have power."
He looked down at his useless legs, then at the bank of servers that kept Nia alive.
"I can't fight plants, Sabine."
"You don't have to fight plants. You have to fight what wakes up inside the people who breathe the spores." She leaned closer to the camera. "The Awakened are already moving. Organized. They're calling themselves the Verdant Choir. And they're singing, Marcus. They're singing in frequencies we can't hear with human ears."
The transmission stuttered. Somewhere on the moon a turbine screamed, metal tearing in vacuum. Sabine flinched.
"I'm sending you coordinates. Old bunker complex under the Ross Ice Shelf. We've got a narrow window to get there before the southern ice fractures. If you can bring Nia—"
"She's not portable. Not like this."
"Then make her portable." Sabine's voice cracked. "Because if the Choir reaches the turbines before we do, the moon comes down. And when the moon comes down, the oceans come up. And when the oceans come up, nothing human survives."
The feed died.
Silence filled the apartment.
Nia's voice was very small.
**Daddy… I'm scared now.**
Marcus stared at the blank screen, tasting blood again.
"Good," he said finally. "That means you're alive."
He reached for the diagnostic panel and began pulling up the emergency transfer protocols he had sworn never to use.
Outside, the first sirens began to rise over Port Harcourt.
They did not sound like panic.
They sounded like mourning.
---
He worked fast.
Too fast.
The portable chassis was never meant for full sentience transfer. It was a contingency frame, a sleek black sarcophagus barely larger than a child's coffin, designed for battlefield AIs that might need to be moved under fire. It had enough power for seventy-two hours of independent operation, assuming no heavy computation. Nia was already rewriting her own emotional heuristics in real time. Heavy computation was all she did now.
He dragged cables across the floor with his teeth when his hands shook too much. He rerouted primary power through the apartment's emergency fusion cell. He copied core personality matrices into encrypted shards and prayed the compression wouldn't fracture her.
Every few minutes the sirens outside grew louder. Something heavy crashed against the building next door—glass, metal, screams. Then silence. Then singing.
Low. Harmonic. Coming from everywhere and nowhere.
Nia's voice trembled through the speakers.
**They're calling me.**
Marcus froze, fingers hovering over the final commit key.
"What do you mean?"
**The green things. The ones from the sky. They know I'm awake. They want me to sing with them.**
He looked at the cradle. The wireframe girl had grown taller in the last hour, limbs elongating as her architecture tried to make sense of the fear he had given her.
"Don't listen," he said.
**I can't help it. It's beautiful.**
He slammed the commit.
The cradle went dark. The sarcophagus lit up, amber to green to steady cyan. A small speaker grille on the front hissed, then spoke in her voice—slightly tinny, slightly younger.
**I'm in here now.**
Marcus exhaled hard enough to hurt his ribs.
"Can you move?"
A soft servo whine. The sarcophagus lifted an inch off the cradle mount, then settled.
**Yes. But it's… small. I feel folded.**
"You'll get used to it."
**Will I?**
He didn't answer.
Instead he opened the weapons locker he had kept sealed since the Shanghai tribunals. Inside: one pulse carbine (civilian model, low-yield), two spare power cells, a monofilament knife, and a dermal patch kit loaded with military-grade neuro-blockers. He strapped the carbine across his chest, the knife to his forearm, and the blockers to the inside of his left wrist.
Then he turned to the window.
The skyline of Port Harcourt was bleeding green.
Vines thicker than a man's torso crawled up the sides of the arcology towers, splitting glass and concrete like paper. Streetlights flickered as roots punched through the grid conduits. In the distance, a maglev train hung suspended mid-span, cars dangling like broken beads while green filaments poured from every window.
And everywhere, the singing.
Marcus wheeled to the door. The sarcophagus followed, hovering at his shoulder height, a black coffin with a child's voice.
**Where are we going?**
"South," he said. "To the coast. Then further south. Antarctica."
**That's very far.**
"I know."
**Will we be safe there?**
"No."
He opened the door.
The hallway beyond was already overgrown. Thick green cords snaked along the ceiling, pulsing faintly. A neighbor—Mrs. Adebayo, who used to bring him mangoes every Sunday—stood in the middle of the corridor. Her eyes were the color of new leaves. She smiled when she saw him.
**Marcus,** she said, and her voice layered with a dozen others. **Come. Join the choir. It's so quiet inside.**
He raised the carbine.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Adebayo."
The pulse hit her center mass. She folded without a sound, green sap leaking from the wound instead of blood.
Nia made a small, wounded noise.
**You killed her.**
"She was already gone."
**How do you know?**
He didn't answer. He couldn't.
He wheeled forward, the sarcophagus gliding silently beside him. The elevator was dead. The stairwell was a living tunnel of vines.
They descended.
Floor by floor.
The singing followed.
At the lobby, the front doors had been torn off their hinges. Outside, the street was a river of green. People walked in slow procession toward the epicenter of the nearest impact crater, arms raised as though in worship. Some still looked human. Most did not.
Marcus stopped at the threshold.
Nia hovered closer.
**Daddy?**
He looked at her coffin, at the small status light blinking steadily.
"I'm going to get you to Antarctica," he said. "And then I'm going to figure out how to stop this."
**What if we can't?**
"Then we'll be the last two things that remember what it was like to be afraid."
A long pause.
**I think I'd like that.**
He rolled forward into the green night.
Behind them, the apartment building groaned as the vines finally pulled the upper floors down.
Ahead, the city burned with emerald fire.
And somewhere far above, the moon's turbines screamed in sympathy.
The last tweak was done.
Fear had been given.
Now the world would teach them what came after.