Vlad didn't trust the General's VTOL; it was too easy to remote-detonate. He pulled his damaged comms unit and keyed the emergency frequency.
"Henry, it's Vlad. I need a pickup at the Hollow's Georgia extraction point. We're going to the offshore rig. One last drop."
"Copy that, brother," Henry's gravelly voice crackled back. "The bird is fueled and hungry. See you in five."
Minutes later, Vlad and the Alpha-1 were hurtling through the stratosphere in Henry's white jet. The Alpha-1 sat perfectly still, its violet eyes fixed on the horizon, while Vlad prepped two high-altitude parachutes. They didn't speak. They didn't need to. They were two versions of the same storm.
The Offshore Rig: Sector Zero
They dropped from 20,000 feet, black silhouettes against a moonlit ocean, plunging through the clouds and sticking the landing on the rig's helipad. Vlad used his emergency override to blow the hatch.
They expected an army. Instead, they found a tomb.
The interior of the rig was a nightmare. The air was thick with the copper tang of blood and the sterile scent of chemicals. As they moved through the primary lab, Vlad's flashlight swept over rows of shattered pods.
Inside weren't just humans. There were twisted, failed amalgamations—dead animals fused with human DNA, and "Advanced" prototypes that had clearly been discarded like trash. It was a factory of horrors, a biological slaughterhouse.
"This isn't evolution," the Alpha-1 whispered, its voice trembling with a flicker of disgust. "This is a massacre."
The Holding Cells
They sprinted deeper into the rig, following the thermal pings for Beatrice and Vance. They found them in reinforced glass cells at the end of a long, dark corridor. Beatrice was conscious, her face bruised but her eyes wide with relief as she saw Vlad.
"Vlad! Get out of here!" she screamed, her voice echoing off the metal walls. "It's a trap!"
Before Vlad could reach the control panel, a slow, rhythmic clapping began to echo from the shadows at the far end of the hall.
"I always knew you were the best of the blueprints, Vladimir," a familiar voice rumbled—a voice that used to tell him bedtime stories before the Agency took him. A voice that had been dead for fifteen years.
Vlad froze, his heart stopping in his chest. A tall, elegant man stepped into the dim light. He wore a tailored charcoal suit, his hair perfectly silver, his features an older, more refined version of Vlad's own.
"Dad?" Vlad whispered, the word feeling like ash in his mouth.
His father smiled—a cold, calculated expression that reached nowhere near his eyes. "You've done well to bring the Alpha back to me. Now, don't look so horrified. We have so much work to do."
The air in the corridor grew heavy as another figure emerged from the darkness behind Vlad's father. It was his mother, Elena. She looked exactly as she did in the photos he carried in his wallet—untouched by time, her expression serene and chillingly proud.
"Don't be so modest, Vladimir," she said, her voice like velvet. "Your father and I only built the house. You were the one who drew the blueprints. This was all your idea."
In their cells, Vance and Beatrice looked on with expressions of utter bewilderment.
"Vlad?" Vance whispered, his voice cracking. "What is she talking about? You're an operative, not a... not a mad scientist."
The Evidence of the Past
His father, Viktor, stepped toward a mahogany desk in the center of the lab and opened a leather-bound folder. He spread out yellowed pages of sketches and meticulous notes.
They weren't just doodles. They were high-level theoretical designs for Subject Alpha and Subject Delta, drawn in Vlad's unmistakable, sharp handwriting from his teenage years. There were sketches of the pods, the biometric sync logs, and the first conceptual drawings of a "Hollow" society.
Viktor pressed a button on a remote, and a grainy video projected onto the wall. It was Vlad at seventeen, standing in a high school science lab. He looked younger, hungrier, his eyes burning with a terrifying ambition.
"The human body is a flawed vessel," the teenage Vlad said on screen, pointing to a chalkboard covered in equations. "If we can bridge the consciousness into a reinforced biological shell, we can eliminate suffering. We can create the Advanced Human. I call it the 'Hollow'—a perfect void waiting to be filled with pure potential."
The room fell into a suffocating silence. Beatrice backed away from the glass of her cell, her dark eyes filled with a mixture of horror and betrayal. Even the Alpha-1 tilted its head, processing the realization that its "Original" was also its "Creator."
The Denial
Vlad's breath came in ragged gasps. He looked at the journals, the video, and his parents as if they were ghosts trying to pull him into a grave.
"No," Vlad rasped, shaking his head. "That's... that was twenty years ago. I was a kid. I was obsessed with science fiction and the limits of biology. It was a childish dream, Dad! A fantasy to cope with the world being a mess!"
"A dream you shared with us," Elena said, stepping closer, her hand reaching out to touch his cheek. "We didn't 'die' in that accident, Vladimir. We took your 'childish dream' and we made it a reality. We did this for you. We did this with you."
Vlad slapped her hand away, his eyes wild. "I am an agent of the Agency! I've spent my life fighting people like you!"
"You've spent your life fighting your own shadows," Viktor countered coldly. "The Agency? They were just the testing ground for your prototypes. Why do you think you're the best, Vlad? Because you designed the game." His father says with a smile.