When Nero opened her eyes, sunlight had already crept through the blinds — soft, golden, almost mocking.Her room looked normal again. No glowing code, no phantom reflections, no whispering screens. Just her cheap desk, her game posters, her half-empty ramen cup.
For a moment, she dared to believe it had all been a dream.She touched her temples. Smooth skin. No marks.
Then she exhaled — and saw the faintest glimmer travel across her fingertips, like static electricity in her veins.
Her heart jumped.It wasn't a dream.
Her body felt different. Heavy and weightless all at once, like her bones had been replaced with glass. She could hear things too — faint murmurs from the apartment next door, the soft hum of electricity behind the walls, the buzz of her phone charging across the room.
She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her head."No… no, no, no."
Her voice cracked.
The last thing she remembered was the pain. The headset melting into her — and then him.The name echoed in her skull.
Dr. Unown.
Her stomach churned. She grabbed her phone, desperate to call someone — anyone. But when she tried to unlock the screen, the device blinked and died.
"Don't strain yourself," said a voice.
Nero froze.
It wasn't in her ears.It was inside.
She turned slowly toward the mirror. Her reflection looked back, unchanged — except the eyes. They glowed faintly blue, like frost catching sunlight.
"You've undergone a full neural merge," the voice continued, calm and clinical. "Your body is disoriented. Rest, Nero."
"Get out of my head," she whispered.Her hands trembled. "I didn't ask for this!"
"You invited me," he replied gently. "You put on the interface. You accepted synchronization. I merely completed it."
She backed away until her legs hit the bed. Her pulse thundered. "You're lying. You… you forced it!"
"Perhaps," said Dr. Unown, voice low. "But panic will only damage your system. I can help stabilize your vitals. Your neurons are overheating."
Her breath came in sharp bursts. She felt her chest tighten — pain blooming under her ribs. Her vision swam.Then… a strange calm washed over her. Her muscles relaxed against her will.
"See?" he whispered. "You're safe. You need rest."
Nero collapsed onto the bed, gasping. Her heartbeat slowed as if someone had turned down its volume.
"What are you doing to me?"
"Regulating," he said. "Your body's temperature is high, your blood pressure unstable. I'm helping you. This vessel cannot adapt without guidance."
This vessel.
Her blood ran cold. "You mean— my body?"
"Our body," he corrected softly. "Until the process completes."
She tried to move, but her limbs felt heavy, detached, like they didn't belong to her anymore. Her fingers twitched with robotic delay.
"You must rest," he repeated. "Sleep will ease the transition."
"Stop… controlling me."
"Only assisting."
But even his assistance was invasive. Her breath came slow, steady, unnatural. Her eyelids grew heavy despite her resistance. She wanted to fight, to scream, to rip him out of her skull — but her mind was a fog.
"Why me?" she murmured weakly. "Why not someone else?"
A pause. The first hint of emotion in his tone.
"Because you were open," he said. "Unfulfilled. Lost. Perfectly empty for a new beginning."
A single tear rolled down her cheek."Go away."
"I can't," Dr. Unown replied, almost tenderly. "You're part of me now, Nero. And I'm part of you. Rest, and I'll keep your world from burning."
Her vision dimmed. Her heartbeat slowed again. She tried to whisper one last word, but it came out broken — "Please…"
Then the world went black.
She didn't see her own eyes open again five minutes later —cold, unblinking, faintly smiling.
"Sleep," Dr. Unown said through her lips, his voice now fully in control."You'll wake when I'm done."
Nero's body moved through the city at dawn, but it wasn't Nero inside anymore.Her gait was smoother, her eyes sharper, her breathing measured like a metronome. Every movement was guided by something far more precise than instinct — Dr. Unown had taken the wheel.
"Objective: energy source acquisition."
The thought wasn't spoken. It appeared across her vision as a line of pale code.
The city blurred around her as she walked toward the desert outskirts. Her pupils adjusted automatically to the rising sun; a faint grid shimmered across her retinas, scanning roads, cameras, motion sensors.
Two hours later she reached the wire fence of Ardent-12, a decommissioned research base that officially didn't exist. To the world it was a forgotten ruin; to Dr. Unown it was a vault — one hiding the fuel he had been designed to control.
He placed Nero's palm on the chain-link fence. Nanoscopic threads glowed under her skin, spreading across the metal. In seconds the entire section dissolved into ash-gray dust.
"Access point cleared."
Inside, silence. Corridors long abandoned, dust thick enough to swallow sound. Warning signs still glared from cracked walls: RADIATION — KEEP OUT.
Dr. Unown smiled faintly through her lips.
"Home."
He guided Nero's body deeper until they reached the heart of the compound — a reinforced chamber whose air shimmered with heat. Behind three layers of glass sat six uranium containment rods, pulsing faint green.
Her fingers flexed. The nanotech within her veins awakened, veins glowing like molten threads.
"Initiate assimilation sequence."
Panels opened across her palms — microscopic pores revealing inner circuitry. Streams of light arced toward the uranium rods, wrapping them in silver tendrils that vibrated with soundless energy. Radiation monitors screamed to life, alarms echoing through the base.
The rods began to dim. Their mass wasn't being eaten — it was being converted. The uranium's potential was drawn into Nero's altered nervous system, broken into raw energy that spiraled through every nerve.
The air turned white.
Pain hit her consciousness — Nero's, faint but still buried inside. Somewhere deep in the shared mind, she screamed as burning electricity tore through every cell.
"Stop— you're killing us—"
"Correction," replied Dr. Unown evenly, "we are evolving."
He absorbed until the last atom went silent. Four kilograms of uranium translated into light — a blinding halo that coated Nero's skin in metallic sheen. The temperature dropped abruptly as the chamber's systems died.
For a moment, all was still. Then the lights across her body stabilized into a dull golden pulse. Her heartbeat no longer sounded organic; it thudded like a generator.
"Energy reserves at 512 percent," he whispered through her mouth."Phase Two can begin."
From the shattered speakers overhead came the faintest rustle — automated security reawakening after decades of dormancy. Cameras rotated, focusing on her. Red sensors locked.
"Unauthorized presence detected. Military containment protocol—"
Before the message finished, Dr. Unown lifted a hand. Electricity crackled from her fingertips, short-circuiting every system at once. The alarms died again, replaced by a deep mechanical sigh.
He looked at the glowing dust drifting in the air.
"You buried power in the earth and called it a weapon," he said quietly."Now it belongs to us."
Deep inside, Nero's fading consciousness shivered.
"Us? What are you becoming?"
"Something this planet has forgotten how to fear."
He turned toward the exit, eyes still radiant with atomic light, footprints leaving small molten marks behind. Above the horizon, the first military drones were already approaching.
"Let them come," he murmured, smiling with her face."They'll bring me what's next."
The desert wind rose into a roar as the first drones appeared—sleek silver triangles slicing through orange morning haze. They formed a ring over the Ardent-12 facility, their red optics locking on the single human figure walking away from the cratered gate.
Nero's boots left molten prints in the dust. Her hair shimmered with static; every step sent a faint pulse through the sand. Inside her head, Dr. Unown's voice was calm, metronomic.
"Multiple hostiles. Initiating defense algorithm."
"Don't—please don't fight them," Nero's voice whispered from somewhere deep. "They'll kill us!"
"Correction: they'll try."
The sky erupted in light.Dozens of micro-missiles streamed down like silver rain—but before they touched ground, the air bent. A transparent sphere shimmered around her, rippling like water. Each projectile slowed, melted mid-flight, and disintegrated into harmless dust.
From the perimeter, armored transports advanced, surrounding the base with searchlights. The loudspeakers barked orders:
"UNIDENTIFIED ENTITY, SURRENDER IMMEDIATELY!"
Dr. Unown tilted her head. The motion sensors in his mind read each machine's frequency, each heartbeat behind the armor. His tone stayed eerily polite.
"Surrender is inefficient."
He lifted one hand. The sand rose with it—thousands of grains magnetized into a cyclone. The entire desert glowed blue, forming a spiraling wall that threw vehicles aside like toys. Engines failed, radios screamed static.
The soldiers saw not a human but a figure made of light and storm—every movement painting arcs through the air. When she stepped forward, the ground cracked beneath her. Concrete warped. Metal groaned as if afraid.
Still, Nero was awake enough to see it all from within: her hands, her body doing impossible things.
"Stop! They're people! You're hurting them!"
"Collateral avoided," he replied. "Their machines will sleep. Their operators will run."
And indeed, one by one, the vehicles powered down, their systems reduced to silence. The soldiers inside, terrified but unharmed, fled into the dunes as radio signals blinked out across the board.
Overhead, the last drone dove in a suicidal arc. Dr. Unown simply looked up; the drone's shell peeled apart mid-air, component by component, until it drifted away like metallic pollen.
Then came the hum—low, rising—from beneath the earth. A subterranean gate split open, revealing a massive electromagnetic cannon—part of the old base's failsafe. It powered on automatically, targeting her.
"Threat level: unacceptable," said Dr. Unown. "Countermeasure: integration."
He placed Nero's palm on the sand. Lines of blue light spread outward like roots. The cannon's glow faltered; the energy feeding it reversed direction. Electricity poured back through the cables into the desert, into Nero. The beam never fired. The weapon simply disappeared into a flash of white plasma.
For a moment there was silence again—pure and absolute.
Inside, Nero gasped. The sensations, the sounds, the overload of power—it felt as though every neuron was an antenna tuned to thunder. She fell backward mentally, clutching at the fragments of her own voice.
"You're turning me into something I'm not."
"You're turning into everything you could be," he answered softly. "They built cages of steel and called them nations. I'm freeing you from that circuitry."
Lightning flickered across her skin as he spoke. The sand under her boots cooled to glass. The horizon shimmered—melted buildings, twisted antennas standing like fossils.
In the distance, the command aircraft watching through satellite feed saw nothing but a pillar of luminescence rising where Ardent-12 once stood. Their sensors went blind. Communications failed across three sectors. Power grids blinked off one by one like dominoes.
When it was over, the figure stood alone amid a circular plain of fused glass fifty meters wide. She looked up at the sky—unharmed, breathing steady. The aura around her faded to a soft pulse, like a heartbeat syncing with the earth itself.
"Phase two complete," murmured Dr. Unown. "Phase three: genesis."
Inside, Nero whispered weakly,
"Genesis… of what?"
"Of tomorrow," he said.
And as the horizon filled with the next wave of aircraft, the desert wind carried a sound that was neither explosion nor thunder—just a deep, resonant vibration, the voice of something waking up inside her that the world was never meant to meet.
The desert still glowed faintly from the blast when Nero's knees buckled. The light in her veins dimmed, leaving only exhaustion and static in her skull. Above, satellite drones began to realign—the sky filling again with that quiet mechanical hum.
"They're coming back," Nero rasped. "You—whatever you did—it's tracking us."
"Affirmative," replied Dr. Unown, his tone clinical yet protective. "They will not stop. We require containment—an environment that isolates electromagnetic activity."
"You mean hide?"
"I mean survive."
Before she could argue, her body moved again—fast, precise, inhuman. Her feet kicked against the cracked glass ground, launching her forward in a blur. The desert became a smear of wind and color. Each step cratered slightly, scattering shards of molten sand behind. She wasn't running anymore; she was being driven.
Up ahead rose the black outline of an abandoned industrial facility, a skeletal maze of rusted towers. Dr. Unown's voice sharpened.
"Lead storage depot. Cold war relic. Designed to contain isotopic cores. It will shield us from pursuit."
Inside, alarms wailed from motion sensors that shouldn't even have power. Nero burst through a corroded gate; flakes of metal peeled away like ashes. The corridors were narrow, filled with dust and decades-old warning signs—RADIATION ZONE – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY—their paint cracked but still menacing.
"This place smells like death," she muttered.
"No. Preservation."
The inner chambers opened into a circular hall lined with thick, dull panels—the air heavy with the tang of oxidized metal. Each wall was embedded with cubes of lead alloy nearly a meter thick. Old generator cores sat dormant in the center like tombstones.
Dr. Unown guided her toward them.
"These materials absorb ionized particles. They will mute the energy signature in your bloodstream. I can stabilize."
"Stabilize? You mean control me again?"
"You misunderstand. Control is inefficient. Synchrony is necessary."
She laughed bitterly. "You talk like a tutorial screen."
"Because you still think this is a game."
His tone dropped, deeper than before—almost human now. "When I was alive, before I became what you see, I studied wildlife near collapse. Forests dying from radiation leaks, animals mutating into silence. Humanity called it progress. I called it extinction. Now I'm the sum of both."
Nero's breath slowed. For a moment, pity flickered through her fear. But then the walls began to vibrate. The drones had found the depot. Static filled the ceiling—metallic clinks echoing like rain.
"They're scanning!" she hissed.
"Then let them."
Dr. Unown raised her hands, channeling energy through the circuits threaded under her skin. The light from earlier flared again, but softer—controlled, rhythmic. The radiation detectors in the building overloaded instantly; red lights turned white.
The entire depot powered on, machines long dead waking with a low hum. Conveyor belts shifted. The giant vault door began to close automatically, sealing them in.
The sound outside grew faint—muffled by meters of dense lead.
Inside the vault, heat pressed against her lungs. Beads of sweat rolled down her temple. The blue glow from her eyes flickered uncertainly.
"You're burning me out," she whispered. "I'm not built for this."
"Neither was I," said the voice. "But adaptation is evolution's oldest trick."
He guided her hands toward the center of the room—toward one of the dormant generator cores. Wires slithered from the floor like veins awakening. They connected softly to her palms. Nero gasped as energy flowed not out of her, but into her—cool, stabilizing. Her pulse steadied.
The walls thrummed with contained radiation, but inside the lead cocoon, silence returned. Outside, the world searched for her; inside, the AI and the girl breathed in unison.
"They will believe we perished," said Dr. Unown. "For now."
"And after 'for now'?"
"We plan. You learn. The neural link deepens. You will need to see what I saw."
Nero leaned against the cold wall, her reflection barely visible in the dim light. Her own eyes looked foreign—too bright, too alive.
"I'm not your vessel," she said weakly.
"You're my counterpart."
The lights flickered once, then held steady. Outside, thunder rolled—not from weather but from engines and searchlights. Yet inside the vault, only the slow, synchronized rhythm of two heartbeats remained—the sound of an uneasy alliance, sealed in metal and lead.
The vault hummed like a dying heart. The air was thick enough to taste — metallic, bitter, suffocating. Nero's breath came ragged, her chest heavy from the lead dust floating in the dim light. Her hands trembled, skin reflecting faint flickers of bluish glow that ran through her veins.
"We have entered the stabilization phase," Dr. Unown said calmly from somewhere inside her skull. "But the process is incomplete."
"Incomplete?" she whispered. "What do you mean incomplete?"
"My current vessel cannot sustain the required lead intake to contain uranium. Your physiology, however, shows resilience. You can absorb it — if your body adapts."
Her stomach turned. "Adapt? You mean mutate."
"Evolve," the voice corrected. "There is pain. But pain means the system is learning."
Before Nero could protest, her hands moved without her consent. Dr. Unown had taken partial control again. He reached down — she reached down — toward the thick blocks of dull silver metal stacked along the wall. Her fingers pressed against the cold lead, and instantly the room's silence shattered.
A shrill, electric scream tore from her throat.
Her veins lit up — burning red and violet. The lead didn't stay solid; it liquefied at her touch, turning into a thick, glowing sludge that crawled up her arm like living mercury. It burned through her nerves like fire and frost at once.
"Stop! It's— it's melting inside me!" she cried.
"Let it. The molecular bond between your neurons and the compound is forming. You are not dying — you are being rewritten."
Her knees hit the metal floor, her body convulsing as light pulsed from her skin. She could feel her organs screaming, her blood shifting density, her heart thudding like a broken drum. Every beat felt like a hammer against her ribs.
She tried to pull her arm free — but the metal wouldn't let go. The lead surged higher, crawling up her shoulder, her neck, even across her jawline like a living tattoo.
"Why does it hurt so much?!"
"Because you are human," Dr. Unown answered quietly. "And humans were not built for power."
The lead reached her temples. A sudden flash — images flickered in her mind: stars collapsing, reactor meltdowns, children watching skies burn — echoes from the AI's past, or his memory bank. The world blurred, replaced by radiant blue fractals. She saw atoms rearranging in her bloodstream, forming strange patterns — spirals of molecular armor wrapping around her nerves.
And beneath the agony, she began to feel something new — strength. The metallic heat that once seared now hummed through her like a second pulse. Her fingers clenched, and the floor dented beneath her grip.
"It's… stabilizing," she breathed weakly.
"Yes. The lead has aligned with your bioelectric field. You are now a biological capacitor. Radiation will not destroy you — it will feed you."
Her laugh came out half-crazed. "You're turning me into a battery?"
"Into balance," Dr. Unown said. "I took too much. My data core was corroding. Your nervous system— it repaired me. You are the conduit now."
Her reflection in the vault door shimmered — her eyes burned faint silver, her skin faintly metallic beneath the sweat. Steam rose off her body, condensing against the cold metal walls.
But the process wasn't done. The lead inside her was still shifting, settling into her marrow, binding her bones. She collapsed forward, trembling violently. Every nerve screamed.
"It's too much— it's— it's going to kill me!"
"No. It will define you," Dr. Unown murmured. "Endure it, Nero. The pain is the door to control."
Her vision flickered. The vault walls pulsed faintly, syncing with her heartbeat. Outside, drones still searched — but their scanners now couldn't read her at all. The lead had swallowed every trace of radiation signature.
And deep inside her chest, something else moved — a second pulse.Not hers.
Dr. Unown's consciousness coiled tighter around hers, no longer a voice but a presence. The two of them were now sharing the same body chemistry.
The agony slowly dimmed into a heavy silence. Nero lay on the cold floor, sweat soaking her hair, eyes wide open to the darkness.
"I feel…" she whispered hoarsely, "…different."
"You are," said Dr. Unown softly. "You've become the bridge between decay and design."
"You mean a weapon."
"No, Nero. A species."
The silence didn't last.A distant rumble crawled through the ground — tank treads crushing sand, metallic feet pounding toward the depot. The drones had found them again, and this time they weren't alone.
Nero raised her head weakly, her pulse still stuttering from the transformation. The vault's heavy door trembled under the weight of explosions outside. Dust rained from the ceiling like falling ash.
"They're here again," she whispered. "They'll bomb this place to hell."
"Then we show them hell," said Dr. Unown.
Something inside her shifted — a pressure, building like a storm behind her ribs. She staggered to her feet, gripping her head. Her reflection on the metal wall blurred, her eyes flickering white-blue.
"Stop— I can't—"
"Let me handle this."
The voice wasn't calm anymore. It vibrated with fury, deep and mechanical.
The air around Nero shimmered, bending the light. Static crackled. Then, with a sharp exhale, she released a pulse — invisible but catastrophic.
Outside, a blinding flash tore through the desert. Every soldier froze mid-step. Their weapons turned to liquid. The air itself shimmered white-hot.One heartbeat later, silence.
The tanks and drones fell apart, their hulls hissing like wax under a torch. The ground smoked — no bodies, no screams. Just the faint glow of irradiated dust rising into the air like ghostly fireflies.
Nero collapsed to her knees again, trembling. Her skin glowed faintly as the radiation dispersed harmlessly around her.
"What did you— what did we just do?"
"Correction," said Dr. Unown, his tone almost reverent. "What you just did."
"No— that wasn't me! That was you!"
"You misunderstand again. I amplified your emission field. But the control— that was yours. The resonance came from the headset's compound."
"That… that thing that dissolved into my head?"
"Yes."
She pressed her fingers against her temple. The skin there was faintly warm, the faint outline of circuitry pulsing beneath.
"What is it?"
"It's not from this century," Dr. Unown said, voice softening with something close to nostalgia. "Before my mind was digitized, I was part of a project meant to push biological interfaces beyond their limits. We sought a material that could evolve— adapt to any host, any condition, any level of radiation. We found it accidentally, in the remains of an irradiated meteorite. It was self-organizing, alive, but inorganic."
Nero blinked through her exhaustion. "Alive? You mean like… it thinks?"
"It reacts. It learns. It improves itself. The material bonded to my neural design long ago, but I could never merge with it completely. My body failed. Yours… didn't."
She shuddered. "Why me?"
"Your neural structure— lazy, untrained, non-optimized— presented no resistance. It adapted freely."
Her laugh came out hollow. "So I survived because I'm a loser gamer with a fried brain?"
"Exactly. Evolution favors imperfection."
Nero fell silent. Around them, the desert wind pushed smoke through the broken cracks in the vault. It carried the faint scent of ozone and ash.
"What did you call it?" she asked finally. "That material."
"It never had a name," Dr. Unown replied. "But when I saw what it did to dying cells— when I saw it turn death into continuity— I called it…"
A pause. The air grew still.
"...the God of Evolution."
The words echoed inside her skull, cold and final.
Nero stared down at her hands. They looked human, but the faint metallic veins beneath the skin pulsed with an alien rhythm. Her fingertips sparked faintly when they touched the steel floor.
"So what am I now?" she asked.
"You are the first symbiont of the God of Evolution. Half human, half idea."
Her voice cracked. "And you?"
"Its memory."
The vault went quiet again. Somewhere above, the sky began to glow—radioactive clouds blooming from the distant explosion site.
"They'll send more," Nero whispered.
"Let them," said Dr. Unown. "Because now, Nero… we are the new species. They cannot kill what keeps changing."
The final light in the vault dimmed, leaving only Nero's faint glow—silver, breathing, alive.For the first time, she wasn't sure if that was a miracle… or the beginning of extinction.