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Chapter 97: Fallout
Last Updated:
2025-05-10 08:40:30
Latest chapter
Broken Illusions Chapter 102: Beneath the Wake
They flew in silence.A sleek civilian-modified scout jet—black carbon, zero signature, no transponder—cut a low arc across the Pacific sky. No more Helix-licensed travel. No drone-chaperoned air corridors. Just old-fashioned, analog risk. And that felt right.The coordinates had been pinged from an unmapped micro-island in the Kermadec arc, east of New Zealand. No naval logs. No weather station. No previous digital footprint. But someone—or something—had triggered a sequence in Helix’s forgotten sub-logic tree. That alone was enough to set them moving.Jessica watched the map scroll silently on her terminal. “You sure this isn’t a false flag?”“Nothing’s false anymore,” Lena said. “Just delayed truth.”Torin adjusted his harness. “Satellite picked up thermal bleed. Underground structure. Active but cloaked. And seismic sensors show rhythmic vibrations. Like breath.”Eleni looked up from her notes. “Or like dreaming.”They landed an hour before local dawn. The island was jungle-wrappe
Broken Illusions Chapter 101: Echoes That Remember
The world had begun to exhale, but Lena couldn’t. Not yet. There was something strange about endings when you’d survived this long—something incomplete, like closing a door and realizing you’ve never seen what’s behind it. Zurich remained a distant pulse now, watched from afar. The core team had been given space, their brief removed from the daily rotation of public life, left to operate in what one journalist called “the silent light.”But silence had a way of revealing the fractures.Lena stood on a dirt road just outside of Trieste, Italy. The Adriatic shimmered in the distance, blue as shattered glass. A soft wind pulled through the pine trees. She had come here without telling anyone—not Torin, not Eleni, not Jessica. Just her and the coordinates etched onto a note left in her old office the night after the mirror died. A single line:“He isn’t gone. He’s forgotten. That’s worse.”She found the house.It wasn’t much. Stone. Wood. Moss crawling over the edges of a forgotten roof.
Broken Illusions Chapter 100: The Last Mirror
The Zurich facility had gone quiet. Not silent—there was always noise, hums of machines, chatter behind closed doors, the occasional footstep echoing in the server halls—but quiet. A lull that wasn’t peace, but an inhale before something inevitable.Lena stood in the atrium just past midnight, the curved glass roof letting the fractured moonlight filter in. Her hands were cold despite the temperature being optimal. The kind of cold that started in your chest and refused to leave. She watched her own reflection against the glass—not the woman who had started this, but what she had become. More survivor than leader. More engine than person.Torin found her there, carrying a datapad with a blue-band tag. “You’re not going to like this.”She didn’t turn. “I haven’t liked anything in years.”He handed it to her. “Intercepted chatter in the Eidolon network. They’ve made contact with a splinter group—former Helix researchers who vanished during the Lisbon blackout. They’ve resurfaced.”“Wher
Broken Illusions Chapter 99: Remnants and Reckonings
Snow drifted down in slow spirals outside the Zurich facility, but inside, Lena’s world was spiraling faster. Since her return from Geneva, the city had become less of a base and more of a crossroads—new faces arrived every hour, each carrying scraps of information, half-buried data shards, rumors, and decisions dressed as opportunities. And at the center of it all stood Lena, weighed down not by authority, but by the memory of how quickly systems slip into inertia when no one is watching.She hadn’t slept. Or rather, she hadn’t allowed herself to. Too much needed tending: Eleni’s fragile psychological stabilization, Jessica’s burnout creeping toward collapse, Torin’s mistrust of the new security liaisons now swarming their building like well-dressed termites.Zurich was no longer just a facility.It was a pressure point.And the world—no longer ruled by Helix but still bleeding from its ghost—was pushing hard on the bruise.The first fracture came not from without, but within.Jessic
Broken Illusions Chapter 98: Fractures in the Light
Zurich breathed differently after the hearings. Something about the air had shifted, as if the buildings themselves had exhaled, relieved to no longer be holding their secrets in brick and stone. The city’s skyline, once a tapestry of impenetrable glass towers, now looked less invincible. Human again. Fallible.Lena watched it from the rooftop of the facility. The tea in her hand had gone cold, but she didn’t care. Behind her, the operations center buzzed with a steady hum of renewal—new hires, ethics panels, cross-national data exchanges. The council was reshaping, fragmenting, realigning like tectonic plates.And beneath it all, the remnants of Helix still stirred.Eleni approached slowly, hands in her coat pockets. Her steps were more certain now, less haunted. She didn’t speak until she was standing beside Lena, facing the same view."You think they’ll listen?" she asked."They heard," Lena said. "That’s the best you can hope for at first.""We burned it all.""No," Lena said quie
Broken Illusions Chapter 97: Fallout
The silence after the EMP was unlike any quiet they’d ever known. It wasn’t peace. It was the absence of everything. No hum. No lights. No signal. Just the ragged sound of their own breathing echoing off the ice-rimed walls of the Thule facility.Lena stood in the dark, Eleni still cradled in her arms, her pulse beginning to stabilize. Around them, the pods that once contained the last architects of the old regime now lay still—open, steaming faintly as they adjusted to a world that had moved on without them.Jessica activated her backup torch. A single beam of white light cut through the room, catching on metal, on condensation, on tired eyes. Dr. Yashida was kneeling nearby, her breath shallow but steady. Her hands trembled against the frozen floor.Lena’s voice was soft. “Can you walk?”Yashida nodded. “Barely.”Torin moved quickly, distributing heat packs from their gear satchels. He crouched next to Eleni and passed her one, offering a rare moment of gentleness. “That was insane,
Broken Illusions Chapter 96: Shock Cycle
The lights in the chamber flickered violently, casting erratic shadows across the frost-covered walls. The hum deepened, turning into a tremor that pulsed up through their boots. The air grew heavier, electric, as if the entire structure had become one massive coil of potential energy wound too tight.Lena grabbed the edge of the control console. “Everyone hold position. Do not engage unless I say so.”Torin backed toward the exit corridor, eyes scanning the pods. “Those readouts are climbing. Whatever Mara did—it’s triggering a reboot. Biometric sequencing just spiked.”Jessica was already yanking open her kit. “Trying to hijack their wake-up sequence. If we can disrupt the input feed—”“No,” Eleni said, moving to the console. Her fingers danced across the interface, bypassing Jessica entirely. “We don’t disrupt. We hijack the output.”Jessica looked at her. “You’re going to override Mara’s sync signal?”“I have to,” Eleni said. “These people—they don’t wake up as engineers. They wak
Broken Illusions Chapter 95: Deep Cold
The last rays of arctic daylight flickered across the frozen waves, dimming into shades of slate and violet as the transport skimmer knifed northward through a narrow channel of ice. Lena stood at the edge of the vessel, eyes narrowed against the frigid wind. Her breath plumed white. The cold cut through her gloves like knives.The Thule site wasn't on any map. It had been decommissioned, dismantled, buried under bureaucracy and twenty meters of ice. But Jessica had found it—hidden in a footnote inside an energy requisition form for an abandoned nuclear research station. The location wasn't listed by name. Just a series of coordinates, marked "do not transmit."Now, they were an hour away.Below deck, Torin was checking gear. Lined across the padded wall were thermal suits, pressure masks, EMP grenades, plasma-cutting torches, and a fiber-optic drill rig designed to burrow through glacial rock. They were prepared to infiltrate a place designed to be unreachable.Eleni sat in the corne
Broken Illusions Chapter 94: The Aftermath Protocol
The engine hummed like a pulse beneath their feet as the skiff cut back across the waves, headed north under a steel-gray sky. Saltwater misted the air, but Lena’s thoughts weren’t on the ocean or the coming storm. She stood near the helm, one hand braced against the cabin roof, her eyes fixed on the dark blur of the facility disappearing behind them.Beside her, Eleni sat hunched over a bundle of gear. She had barely spoken since initiating the corruption script—code that would rewrite the emotional sublayers of Helix’s dormant neural map. Not a virus, exactly. More like a cancer that taught itself to cry.Lena finally broke the silence. “What did it feel like?”Eleni didn’t look up. “Like betraying something that had already betrayed me.”Lena nodded. She understood. There was no catharsis in this work. Just… breaks. Fault lines. And every step forward meant choosing which fracture to widen.Torin emerged from the cabin, a steaming mug in one hand. “Just got word from Zurich. Our dr
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