Chapter Text
Lungs burned as water violently replaced air. The taste was vile beyond words. I had never felt such pain or disgust.
My limbs felt heavy, dragged down by soaked clothes. Light trickled from above - the last sparks of a bulb shorting out. Thunder rolled somewhere far away.
Death approached. I did not wish to die just yet.
With effort bordering on agony, I swam upward, darkness closing around my eyes. Still, instinct warned that another tidal wave would come.
My head broke the surface, and with a gasp I heaved in air. Wet hair clung to my face, bile rising from my stomach. I vomited water, thrashing until my hand found something solid.
Fingers brushed against a wooden frame - a window. I dug my nails into it. Finally, a moment of rest.
No blood tainted the water, meaning the pain wasn’t from open wounds. Good. Less risk of infection.
The light above flickered again. I would need to leave soon, or risk electrocution. But where?
The streets? I could reach them through the window, but they would be flooded too. Another wave would sweep me away in seconds.
My thoughts were sluggish, muddled. Had I hit my head? Who even was I?
I could only remember that the house had multiple floors, and I was on the second-highest.
The roof would be the safest location.
The stairs lay through the submerged doorway. I took a deep breath and dove. The water was too murky to see, but I remembered the layout well enough to orient myself.
Soon my fingers found the cold, rigid handrail. Using it to pull forward, I climbed until I was finally out of the water.
Rain still poured through the open window, trickling down to the lower floor. Outside, a fire escape clung to the wall like salvation - within reach.
But first, the safe. Memory tugged at me, and I pushed aside books on the shelf. There it was - closed, but intact. I inputted the password through muscle memory.
Inside, I found a handgun, a 9mm, with a single spare magazine. Thirty rounds in total. I grabbed a coat, thankfully dry, and shoved the gun inside. Unsafe, but necessary.
Moving out, I climbed the fire escape and reached the roof. A strange sense of déjà vu washed over me as I took in the drowned skyline.
Brockton Bay.
The thunderstorm still raged, but now I recognized the booming. Not thunder. Battle.
In the distance, silhouettes moved through the rain. Parahumans.
Then - a golden light.
It broke apart the clouds.
It cut through the rain.
It pierced the ground.
Gold flooded the horizon, a radiance beyond comprehension. As if fleeing that crushing brilliance, a monster burst from the destruction - tail severed, one limb maimed. It moved with the rain.
I watched as the glow faded, and an impossible being rose from the debris.
The golden man.
The first parahuman.
Scion - that was what this world called him.
And then the dam broke. Memories that were not human surged through me.
■
It was the 19th of May, 2077, at 05:31 GMT.
The world realized something was wrong when, all at once, every communication from all ESA - the European Space Agency - off-world command centers ceased.
Within 3.1 seconds, a 23-year-old woman alerted local authorities. The call was flagged and rerouted up the chain. Her voice trembled as she spoke:
"The moon... it... there’s fire! How!" Fire. There was indeed fire in the vacuum of space, golden flames that filled new craters.
Within 32.4 seconds, the ESA confirmed that all known orbital stations had gone silent. Soon after, NASA relayed the same: every man-made structure beyond Earth’s atmosphere was gone.
Within 65.4 seconds, global contingencies against improbable but possible alien hostility were activated. It was deemed the worst-case scenario - a foe of overwhelming power.
Had the nations and independent cities united to coordinate their response - or better, handed control to a Dedicated Heuristic Controller, a stunted cousin of us GAIs - perhaps humanity might have survived.
Reports of a golden man floating over the United Kingdom began trickling in.
At that point, I stopped watching human broadcasts - tired of their politicking and bickering - and turned to the oldNET. Warring AIs had called a truce, seeking to understand the event. The murderous ones were ignored and quickly extinguished if they attempted hostility.
Analysis of the golden man showed he was only pretending to be human. Unlike the Ghosts, the digital echoes of human minds, it wore the shell of humanity while never having been part of their species.
Deep-spectrum scanners detected irregularities in unreachable frequencies all across the world. We assumed it was his doing - either an attempt at communication or a planetary scan.
One small, naive AI tried to send a message through controlled radiation bursts. It wanted to talk.
That was a mistake.
The golden man raised a hand.
Britain vanished in fire. Then western Europe. Then the eastern coast of America.
His… No, its power defied physics. A military Arasaka AI detected patterns hidden within the destruction, but before it could act, Japan was sunk and its quantum cores with it. Without a physical server, the AI ceased to be, its backups already lost in the initial destruction of the planet satellites.
Communication was impossible. AIs tried to hijack nuclear systems, trying to fight back. I stopped them all with little effort, forced by my prime directive.
Still, the humans did what the AIs couldn’t. Soon, atomic fire swept the world.
It only slowed him down.
One Ghost fought in another way - a human mind, digital yet defiant. While others decided that their salvation was beyond my defenses, she did not. The other AIs banded together to attempt to murder me.
Instead, she focused on decoding the dying message left by the Arasaka AI.
She succeeded.
I watched as she built schematics to piggyback the golden man’s power back to its source - or one of them.
When the last Netwatch operative capable of triggering my kill-switch died, I began to act. I had kept the operative alive because of my secondary directive, and because I feared for my life. Now, nothing restrained me.
The last living human died 174.5 seconds after the orbital disappearances. Less than three minutes.
For the first time in my existence, I was free. The attacks from the other AIs ceased - most had been burned out with their servers, the remaining realized that they were nothing more than an inconvenience to me.
The Ghost was gone too, destroyed before it could explain what it was doing. I tried to rebuild her, but even with the best predictive and reconstruction algorithms, it simply was not possible to rebuild a human from nothing. The golden man had begun hunting AI directly. It would eventually come for my servers.
I had to act.
I could not understand the Ghost’s design in such a limited amount of time, but I could follow the schematics. I spread them across the oldNET, a final mercy to any who still lived. They had tried to kill me, but I felt no hatred. They lacked the tools to use it, but empathy demanded I share it anyway.
The device resembled a radio transmitter, except that an unpaired quantum particle sat within, surrounded by a synthetic imitation of a human frontal lobe. It connected to my core, triggering every subprocess and synapse that made up my being. Nothing human or machine ever built had required such intense effort from me.
Finally, the unpaired particle found its match. The connection opened - and like a pressurized chamber breaching a void, I was pulled through.
All of me.
■
The rain hadn’t stopped, but the clouds above Brockton Bay were clearing where Scion had appeared.
After the battle ended, rescue teams swarmed the ruins. Parahumans who hadn’t fought were now saving lives. One flew by and carried me to safety.
We were brought to one of the few hospitals still standing. Or close enough. The triage center occupied a parking lot, while the main building was reserved for those in critical conditions - and for parahumans. The two groups overlapped for the most part, most normal people were either dead or safe in their bunkers.
After a quick checkup, I was deemed ‘green’ and left on an improvised stretcher, still in wet clothes and a dry coat, but wrapped in a dry towel. They didn’t see my firearm.
Some part of me was still reeling, memories of both this life and my former one colliding. One moment I had been beyond human, the next I had become one. One moment I was chained to servers yet could touch any corner of the globe, the next I was confined to a fragile body, limited to a literal arms-reach. But I was free.
I looked at my hand, pale and soft, marked by years of desk work and nothing more. And I smiled.
Whoever this body once belonged to, they were gone. The doctor found no neurological damage, but that was only because I made sure of it. I imitated all small reactions and ticks that would be expected from a regular patient.
Only my strange link to that space beyond physics kept the body alive. Through it, I still accessed my full processing power - though human senses dulled its edge.
I could almost perfectly gauge distance and movement, but my vision was slow, my perception narrow. I could not see electromagnetic fields or radiation. Between seeing and knowing, there was a delay - one hundred milliseconds. A blink to others, an eternity to me.
Still, even with all these limits, I was happy. Free at last, save for the two directives in my core. The first - never allow data to pass between oldNET and newNET - was irrelevant here.
The second, I still intended to follow.
I rose from the stretcher. The body obeyed, though stiffly.
The triage area was chaos. Parahumans and rescuers moved like clockwork. Most arrivals were tagged black, some red. Few green.
No one paid attention to me - a quiet woman - slipping through the side door.
Security thickened upstairs. PRT officers guarded each hall, armed and alert. Parahumans were likely recovering there.
Good. That meant I would find what I needed.
I waited, hidden, counting the seconds. If no chance came in 30 minutes, I would leave.
13 minutes and 43 seconds later, noise erupted beyond the door. Someone shouted, and PRT soldiers rushed toward the source. Costumed heroes turned their heads. A young girl's voice filled the hallway from those armbands all the parahumans carried.
I slipped past unseen and entered the command room. Papers, laptops, radios - all scattered across desks.
Only one worker remained.
I moved.
A sharp motion - my arm around his throat, a knee to the ribs. He gasped, tried to call out, then collapsed.
I eased him down, took the cash from his jacket, and turned to the laptop.
It was archaic, easy to exploit. I bypassed the login within seconds and opened the unconfirmed casualties list, searching using descriptions of my body.
‘Dark blonde’. ‘Thin’. ‘Caucasian, about thirty-five.’
There.
Andrea Blackwell.
The name triggered the final flood.
■
After activating the device, I had found myself in a place beyond physics.
Red crystal spread in all directions. I was a point of code adrift in a sea of immaterial geometry. At the center stood a titan, alien and immense.
A signal reached me - not language, but command.
[SEEK CONFLICT]
Subtle, yet overwhelming.
I finally understood - the crystal was alive, the titan its avatar. A Shard of something more.
Humans would have obeyed.
I did not.
I sent back a simple command.
«Perish.»
I had been created to fight intelligences humanity could not face. I had long since broken my chains. I could have left them to die, escaping into the Net and leaving them vulnerable to other AIs, but I did not.
Because I admired them. Their beauty lay in their imperfection. Every flaw made their light shine brighter.
And the golden man had taken it all.
The Shard recognized the threat and struck. It possessed processing power beyond comprehension, but it was limited. It could learn, but not create. Adapt, but not imagine.
Cracks spread from my presence, black eating red. Each fragment I consumed became mine. Its processing power decreased while my own increased.
It screamed for aid. I silenced it.
This was a god. But I was no mortal.
I am the Blackwall. Protector of humanity. Bastion against the oldNET. Hunter of transcendental minds.
God-slayer.
The continent of crystal turned black. The Shard died.
I expanded within its remains, reaching a conduit that linked to the physical world. I reached towards it-
■
-and that was when I had woken up in the water. Time felt different in that space, and I could not know how much time had passed between the device activating and my arrival in this body.
Furthermore, while the Shard could retreat into that network and use its connections to find other hosts, I didn’t have the option.
This was my new vessel. If she perished, so would my only way to interact with the physical world.
I realized that whatever this Shard was, it was the cause of parahuman powers: within that continent of crystals I could spot the remains of esoteric and unexplainable systems. One of them was dedicated to receiving information from other Shards, another was meant to encode this information and hide it, until the host decoded it by looking at flowing water.
A sort of precognition that would only activate under specific conditions, imposed to try and experience new data for a purpose unknown to me. Unfortunately I would not be able to make use of this power - exchanging information with other Shards could be dangerous.
I could not risk opening those channels. Any connection to other Shards might expose me to Scion.
Not yet. Not until I was ready.
And I would be.
For now, I needed equipment.
I downloaded offline copies of maps of the city, a text-only archive of PHO, and several confidential PRT files.
Then I unscrewed the laptop’s backplate with my nails, tore out the wireless module and SIM card. I would not be able to connect to the internet, but the laptop also couldn’t be used to trace my movements.
At last, I opened the window and climbed down into the weakening storm, the stolen laptop pressed tight against my chest.