June 24, 2029 – 07:15 AM
Public Transit Bus, Antofagasta, Chile
The bus lurched through Antofagasta's choked veins, a metal beast crammed with the city's weary ghosts.
Elias Vale pressed against the grimy window, seventeen years etched into a face too sharp for his age—cheekbones like knife edges, eyes the color of spent circuits, dull and distant.
He didn't lean on the pole; he floated in the crush, armored in apathy. Emotions were cracks in the hull, letting in the flood. He'd learned that young, after his parents' wreck left him adrift with an uncle who chased stars like they owed him something.
Around him, the air hung thick with sweat and salt from the nearby docks, undercut by the faint ozone tang of overheating electronics.
Passengers huddled over devices, their faces lit in sickly blues and greens. A man in a rumpled suit two rows up clutched his tablet like a shield, sweat beading on his shaved head as alerts flickered across the screen—red warnings bleeding into one another.
He muttered curses in Spanish, glancing at the door every few seconds, as if the vehicle might swallow him whole.
Across the aisle, a girl no older than fourteen sobbed into her sleeve, her phone glowing with an emergency icon: a jagged wave pulsing like a heartbeat gone wrong.
Her mother draped an arm around her, whispering tranquila, mija, but her own eyes darted, wide with the kind of fear that turns neighbors into strangers.
Whispers rippled through the crowd—"¿Qué es eso? ¿Extraterrestres?"—but no one raised their voice. Not yet. The fear was still private, a shadow stretching longer with each jolt of the bus.
Elias stared past it all, out at the skyline: squat concrete blocks scarred by dust storms, cranes clawing at the harbor like skeletal fingers.
The Pacific sprawled beyond, flat and indifferent under a sky the color of tarnished silver.
Overhead, the bus's display—usually a parade of garish ads for cheap neural implants or fusion-powered scooters—had devolved into a twitching void.
Static crawled across it like maggots in flesh, the words GLOBAL SIGNAL ANOMALY – CIVIL DEFENSE ALERT slithering along the bottom in blocky letters.
A tinny voice droned from the speakers: Manténganse calmados. No hay peligro inmediato. But the static undercut it, a hiss that burrowed into the skull.
To Elias, it was just the Noise. Another glitch in the machine. The world broke daily—power grids flickering, feeds glitching from solar flares or black-market hacks.
This? Probably his uncle Orion's latest fever dream leaking into the feeds. Orion Vale, the disgraced astronomer who'd burned through grants chasing whispers from the void. Grand theories, grander failures.
Elias had grown up in the fallout, shuttled to this coastal hellhole on Orion's dime, told to "see the patterns, Eli, not the chaos." Poetic bullshit from a man who'd forgotten how to be human.
His pocket buzzed again, a persistent itch. He fished out the phone—an ancient brick of a thing, screen cracked like a bad omen.
Forty-seven missed calls from an unknown number, climbing by the minute. A video thumbnail from Leo, his face twisted in that manic grin, thumb frozen mid-gesture.
Elias skipped it. Then the text, timestamped 11:49 PM last night: It sees the patterns, Eli. Not the noise. Remember. From Orion.
Cryptic as always, like he was scripting some holovid thriller. Elias snorted, a dry puff that didn't reach his eyes.
He silenced the ringer and buried the device, turning back to the window. The bus groaned toward the wealthy district, where glass towers mocked the slums below.
The city watched him go, or so it felt—shopkeeps peering from doorways, their stares heavy with unspoken questions. What's happening? Do you know?
A vendor hawking empanadas from a cart shot him a glance, lips moving in silent prayer. Elias met no eyes. He was the ghost in the machine, invisible until he wasn't.
07:45 AM
Instituto de la Estrella del Norte Atrium (Institute of the North Star Atrium)
The bus spat him out onto sun-baked pavement, the heat already rising in waves that warped the air.
Elias shouldered his battered pack and trudged up the hill to the Institute, a gleaming monolith of glass and steel perched like a predator over the port.
Solar wings arched from its flanks, drinking the light, casting long shadows that swallowed the approach path. It screamed otherworldly—imported architects, corporate sponsors, a bubble for the elite where the air recyclers hummed clean and the water tasted filtered.
Elias hated it. The Vera Rubin Scholarship had bought his way in, a pity prize for slum kids with test scores that punched above their weight. Gifted from the gutter, they called him behind manicured hands. He was the exhibit, the proof of their benevolence.
The gates parted with a whisper-scan of his wrist, and he stepped into the atrium: vast and cool, floored in polished obsidian that reflected distorted faces like funhouse mirrors.
Holo-displays flickered along the walls—usually equations blooming into star maps—but today they stuttered, veins of static threading through the projections.
Students milled in clusters, their uniforms crisp white against the chrome. Whispers chased him like smoke: Did you hear? The whole grid's infected.
A cluster of girls by the fountain shot him glances, their eyes narrowing—That's the Vale kid. Orion's nephew. Pity laced with suspicion, like he carried the anomaly in his blood.
He kept his gaze on the floor, boots scuffing softly, until the path narrowed.
Mateo Ruiz loomed ahead, flanked by his shadows—Javier and Nico, both built like they benched fusion cores.
Mateo was senior poison: olive skin, perfect teeth, family money from lithium mines that scarred the desert. He blocked the way with casual sprawl, arms crossed, a smirk carving his face.
"Well, mira who dragged in from the barrio," Mateo drawled, voice smooth as synth-whiskey. "The Stargazer himself. Hey, becado, your loco uncle finally cracked the cosmos? Broke the sky wide open?"
Javier chuckled, low and mean, leaning in. "My old man's raging—stock feeds are tanking. Says some 'Vale Echo' torched the sats. Global blackout on his yacht fund. Nice one, freak. Family tradition?"
Nico just grinned, silent muscle, but his eyes bored in, waiting for the flinch.
Elias stopped, pack heavy on his shoulder. He didn't look up. Didn't breathe fire or spit back. Just stood there, flat as a dead signal, the atrium's chill seeping into his bones.
The air hummed with distant vents, carrying the faint floral sting of the fountain's mist. Around them, the crowd slowed—kids pretending not to watch, but their stares prickled like static on skin. Fight back, slum rat. Or run.
A teacher across the hall paused, eyebrow arched, but turned away. Not his circus.
Mateo's smirk faltered after ten seconds of nothing. "What, cat got your quantum tongue? Nerd."
He shoved Elias's shoulder—light, testing, just enough to sting. Elias rocked once, then straightened, expression a blank wall.
The trio sauntered off, laughing too loud, but Mateo glanced back once, unease flickering in his eyes. Why doesn't he break?
Elias walked on, rubbing the spot absently. Lockers lined the hall in silent ranks, chrome doors etched with student IDs glowing faint.
His clicked open at a touch—empty, save for a dog-eared notebook of scribbled equations. He lingered there, the cool metal grounding him, until the bell's chime cut through like a blade.
08:10 AM
Advanced Quantum Physics Classroom
The room was a vault of muted grays: walls paneled in smart-glass that shifted opacity with the sun, desks clustered in pods for "collaborative entanglement."
Holo-projectors dangled from the ceiling like mechanical spiders, today casting jittery shadows from corrupted feeds.
The usual ozone bite of ionized air mingled with nervous sweat, and the class—thirty sharp minds—buzzed low, a hive on the edge of swarming.
Elias slipped in last, the door hissing shut behind him. For a split second, his mask slipped—eyes scanning, landing on Isabela Reyes by the window.
She perched on her stool, dark hair spilling like ink over a tablet alive with star charts, lines of code twisting like veins.
Brilliant didn't cover it; she burned—top of the cohort, daughter of astronomers, the kind of girl who debated black hole thermodynamics over lunch.
To Elias, she was a parallel universe: warm laugh, eyes that saw through bullshit, the only one who'd ever asked about his sketches without pity.
Now, she looked up, brow furrowed, lips parted in that soft worry she wore like a second skin. She knew about Orion—the late-night talks in the atrium, her hand brushing his once, accidental fire.
Her gaze met his: You okay? This... your uncle? Fear and something tender, gone in a blink.
He looked away, jaw locking, heat crawling up his neck. Don't. She's not for you.
He dropped into the back-row pod, the seat molding cold to his spine.
Before he could bury his head, they descended—Leo and Sofia, his anchors in this sterile sea.
Leo first: short and wired, curls wild as untrimmed code, always hoarding data like it was oxygen. He slammed into the adjacent seat, tablet thrust forward like a weapon.
"Eli! Dude, you alive? The feeds are insane. They're scrubbing it hard—gov nets locking down, but I scraped a ghost cache. Listen: it's not random pulse shit. It's packeted. Structured data, buried in the hydrogen band. I got a frag—look, it's fractal, man. Like it's watching the noise for patterns."
Sofia slid in opposite, her voice a scalpel—quiet, precise, black-framed glasses magnifying eyes that missed nothing.
She was the coder, fingers scarred from jury-rigged rigs, from a family of hackers who'd clawed out of the same slums.
"Dark webs are lighting up, Elias. They're dubbing it the 'Vale Echo.' After Orion. The signal's root? Not binary, not qubits. It's... alien syntax. Layered, self-modifying. Your uncle tip you? Or is this him going full ghost in the machine?"
Their words tumbled over each other, urgent, laced with that raw edge—Leo's hands shaking just a bit, Sofia's foot tapping silent Morse.
The class leaned in subtly, ears perked; even the prof, Dr. Harlan, hovered by his console, pretending to calibrate while stealing glances. The Vale kid knows something. Spill.
Isabela twisted in her seat two pods up, half-turned, her chart forgotten, eyes flicking back to him with that pull he couldn't shake.
Elias shoved Leo's tablet aside, the screen's glow harsh on his face. Annoyance flared, hot and familiar.
"Back off. It's nothing. Uncle Orion's just... manic again. Global tantrum 'cause his pet theory glitched the grid. Noise. All of it."
He leaned forward, voice dropping to a hiss. "Shut it before Harlan boots us. Class starting."
Leo deflated, but his eyes sparked—hurt under the hype. "C'mon, Eli. This ain't your old man's fever. It's real. What if—"
"Drop it." Elias hunched over his desk, fingers drumming the edge, the pod's hum vibrating through his teeth.
Sofia exchanged a look with Leo—He's walls up again—and they pulled back, whispers fading into the room's tense drone.
Harlan cleared his throat, launching into a lecture on waveform collapse that rang hollow against the static bleeding from the walls.
Elias stared at his blank pad, the words patterns, not noise echoing unwanted. Outside, the solar wings creaked in the breeze, casting bars of shadow across the glass like prison bars.
The day blurred after that—classes dissolving into half-lessons, screens fritzing with the same alert loop.
Whispers grew bolder: Aliens? Hack? End times? Stares followed Elias like hounds—curious from the geeks, venom from the rich kids.
Mateo shot him a glare in the hall, mouthing freak across a sea of lockers.
Isabela brushed past once, murmuring "Talk later?"—her scent of vanilla and circuit board lingering like a promise he wouldn't claim.
By dismissal, the air crackled with unspoken dread, the Institute's gleam tarnished under a sun that felt too close.