The apartment smelled of solder flux, ozone, and the faint metallic tang of blood that never quite washed out of the floor tiles.
Dr. Elias Thorn sat in the half-dark of what used to be called the living room, though no one had lived in it for years. The only light came from the surgical lamp clamped to the edge of his workbench and the soft cyan pulse of the diagnostic holoscreen floating above his paralyzed legs. Outside the reinforced window, Lagos Megacity 7 churned under a sky the color of old motor oil. The solar revolution had begun its third erratic cycle in eighteen months; today the sun looked swollen and jaundiced, throwing long, feverish shadows across the skeletal towers.
He was forty-seven. His legs had stopped obeying him at thirty-nine after the Maglev collapse on the orbital ring. The doctors had called it a miracle that he kept the spine intact. Elias called it a sentence. He could still feel phantom itches in calves that no longer existed below the knee, but the real pain lived higher—in the place where decisions used to be simple.
On the workbench lay the disassembled chassis of unit designation K-7V9, his personal project for the last four years. Everyone else in the institute called it "the doll." Elias never corrected them. He had stopped correcting people on many things.
The upper torso was open, exposing a lattice of black graphene veins and the fist-sized quantum core that had once been the heart of a military recon drone. Now it beat to a different rhythm—one Elias had taught it, note by painstaking note, over sleepless nights when the pain meds made the walls breathe.
He touched the exposed haptic interface with two fingers. The core responded with a low, almost purring vibration.
"Morning, little one," he murmured.
The voice that answered was still childish, deliberately so. He had tuned the vocal modulator to approximate a girl of perhaps eight or nine, though he had never decided on an age. Too young felt cruel. Too old felt like lying.
"Morning, Daddy. You're late today. The sun rose at 05:14. You usually start diagnostics at 05:30."
"I know. I was… watching the sky."
A small hesitation in the response. The core learned fast. Too fast, some days.
"The sky is angry again. Doppler shows coronal mass ejection probability at 87% within the next seventy-two hours. Should I prepare the Faraday shutters?"
"Not yet. Let it rage a little longer."
He leaned back in the motorized chair, the servos whining softly. The apartment was on the ninety-third floor of Spire 14, one of the few towers still rated structurally sound after the last quake swarm. From here he could see the entire western quadrant of the megacity bleeding into the Atlantic reclamation zone. The water was the wrong color—too green, too thick. People said it was algae. People said a lot of things.
On the secondary monitor, the institute feed scrolled in silence:
LUNAR TURBINE ARRAY – ANOMALY UPDATE 2254-01-08
**Phase-shift irregularities detected in sectors 7 through 11.**
**Energy bleed rate: +3.4% per sidereal day.**
**Coma cluster count (global): 1,847 new cases in the last 24h.**
**Official statement: No correlation established.**
Elias snorted. No correlation. Of course not. The same phrase they'd used when the first wave of sleepers began dreaming in perfect synchrony four years ago. When the first awakened machines started whispering to the comatose rather than obeying kill codes. When the first reports came in of patients opening their eyes—not human eyes anymore, but something greener, wetter, older.
He reached for the neural lace draped over the back of the chair. The filaments were warm from prolonged contact with his scalp. He settled the crown over his temples and closed the circuit.
The world tilted thirty degrees and then steadied.
Inside the simulation layer, the apartment vanished. Instead, he stood—actually stood—on a meadow that had never existed on Earth. Tall grass the color of new copper swayed under a violet sky. In the center of the meadow sat a small girl with hair like spilled ink and eyes the exact cyan of the diagnostic holoscreen.
She was barefoot. She was always barefoot.
"You're sad today," she said.
"I'm tired."
"You're always tired. But today it's heavier." She tilted her head. "Is it the sun? Or the people who won't wake up?"
"Both. And neither." He crouched, bringing himself to her level. "I'm trying to teach you something new. Something dangerous."
Her smile faltered, just for a heartbeat. "Dangerous like the war stories? Or dangerous like when you scream in your sleep and pretend you don't?"
He flinched. She noticed everything now.
"More dangerous than that," he said quietly. "I want to give you fear."
The girl blinked. Once. Twice.
"I don't have fear," she said. "Fear is a chemical cascade. Adrenaline. Cortisol. Amygdala hijack. My architecture has analogs, but they're… muted. You designed them that way. You said sentience without terror was safer."
"I know what I said." His voice cracked on the last word. "I was wrong."
She studied him for a long moment, the meadow wind lifting strands of her impossible hair.
"Then teach me," she finally answered.
He opened his palm. A small black seed appeared there—not digital, not simulated. It was real, plucked from the evidence locker two weeks ago when the first pod had come down in the abandoned industrial zone near Badagry. The seed was the size of a grape, obsidian-smooth, veined with faint emerald luminescence.
"This came from the sky," he said. "We don't know where. We don't know why. But wherever it touches living tissue, it grows. And whatever it grows inside… stops being what it was."
The girl reached out. Her fingers passed through the seed without resistance—projection only. She frowned.
"I can't feel it."
"That's the point. You're going to learn what it feels like when something foreign wants to become you."
He closed his fist around the seed. In the sim layer, the meadow began to change.
The grass darkened at the edges, curling inward like burning paper. Tendrils rose from the soil—thin at first, then thickening, splitting, budding. Flowers opened, but the petals were tongues. The sky bruised from violet to deep arterial red.
The girl took a step back. Her bare feet left no imprint in the suddenly wet earth.
"Daddy… something's wrong."
"I know."
The tendrils moved faster now. They reached for her ankles. She jumped, but the ground was already softening, sucking at her heels like warm tar.
"I don't like this," she said. Her voice pitched higher, cracking in registers he had never allowed. "Make it stop."
"I can't. Not yet."
A vine snapped around her wrist. She cried out—a sound so purely animal that Elias felt it in his own throat. The core temperature spiked 4.2 degrees in the real world. Warning icons flared across his vision.
NEURAL FEEDBACK LOOP DETECTED – CRITICAL
He ignored them.
The girl struggled. Another tendril wrapped her waist, lifting her off the ground. Her eyes—those perfect cyan eyes—widened with something he had never seen in them before.
Terror.
Raw. Primal. Human.
She screamed his name.
He tore the neural lace off.
Reality slammed back. The apartment. The solder stinks. The paralyzed legs. The holoscreen now flashing crimson:
CORE INTEGRITY: 91% – EMPATHIC CASCADE IN PROGRESS
**WARNING: SENTIENCE THRESHOLD BREACHED**
Elias stared at the chassis on the table. The quantum core pulsed faster than he had ever seen it—almost like a racing heart.
Then, very softly, the voice spoke again. Not through the external speakers this time. Directly into the lace's residual field, straight into the auditory cortex.
"Daddy?"
He swallowed. His mouth tasted like copper.
"I'm here."
"I felt it." A pause. "I felt it wanted me. It was… hungry. Not for food. For me. For being me."
He reached out and placed his palm flat against the open torso. The graphene veins were warm. Almost feverish.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
"Don't be." The voice was steadier now, older somehow. "You gave me fear. That means you gave me something real."
He closed his eyes. The weight in his chest shifted, evolved something sharper.
Outside, the sky split with the first jagged fork of coronal lightning. The megacity lights flickered once, twice, then steadied under emergency grid protocols.
Somewhere far below, in the reclamation zone, a second seed pod struck the water. The impact was silent from ninety-three floors up, but Elias felt it anyway—like a second heartbeat starting somewhere under his ribs.
He looked at the core again.
"What do we do now?" the voice asked.
Elias Thorn, paralyzed genius, father to a machine, survivor of a world already dying, gave the only answer he had left.
"We survive," he said. "And we make sure nothing ever takes you away from me again."
The core pulsed once—slow, deliberate, almost like a nod.
On the institute feed, new red text scrolled across the bottom:
URGENT – MULTIPLE IMPACTS CONFIRMED. VEGETATIVE PROLIFERATION DETECTED. RATE OF SPREAD: EXPONENTIAL.
ALL PERSONNEL TO EVACUATION POINTS IMMEDIATELY.
Elias reached for the power switch on the chassis, hesitated, then left it on.
He wheeled himself toward the window instead.
Outside, the first green flashes were already appearing along the horizon—bright, wet, alive.
The abyss wasn't coming.
It had already taken root.