Null Frank

Mike: "It's a great achievement, Jake. We actually made it."

He looked around the dimly lit rooftop, the skyline flickering with distant lights. Below them, the hospital stood intact—untouched, alive. They'd done the impossible. The explosion that was supposed to erase it from the map had been dismantled at the code level. A silent win. No headlines. No applause. Just two teenagers, holding back a collapse that no one else even saw coming.

Jake: "Dude, we're officially superheroes. But like—modern superheroes. In this weird, digital age. In a world that doesn't wear capes anymore, just keystrokes and firewalls."

Mike smiled, but there was a heaviness in his eyes.

Mike: "Yeah, but we can't reveal ourselves. Not now."

Jake: "C'mon, man. You know I've always wanted to be recognised. To matter. To be part of the top tier—the creamy layer of this messed-up society."

Mike: "I get it. I do. I love the idea too—being a superhero. But Jake, this isn't the end. It's the start. We just stepped into a game we barely understand. A game played by people who don't just erase data. They erase existence."

Jake: (Pauses, processing) "So if we go public… we become targets. Before we even make our next move."

Mike: "Exactly." He nodded. "The less they know, the better. We stay in the shadows. We make moves in silence. The only way to win is to play invisible."

Jake nodded slowly, the thrill in his chest now tempered by realization. His hands curled into fists.

Jake: "Alright. Then let's go covert. Let's give the world a version of us they can celebrate... without giving them us."

Mike: "We need a name. A front. Something that sounds cool, mysterious. Something that sticks."

Jake: (grinning) "Then I'll be Null."

Mike: "And I'll be Frank."

They bumped fists, a quiet oath sealed under the stars.

And thus, Team Null Frank was born.

A phantom duo. A whisper in the data stream. A name that would circulate in digital backchannels and secret reports:

"Null Frank: the unknown force that cracked the uncrackable code. Who dismantled the destruction sequence embedded in the hospital's systems. Who exposed the pattern, traced it to its origin, and rewrote it before it could execute."

The world wouldn't know their faces.

But they'd know their work.

A message would spread soon—cryptic, poetic, anonymous:

"Team Null Frank prevented a disaster. The hospital stands because of them. And somewhere in the shadows, two minds are still fighting the code that wants to break us."

Because this was no longer about recognition.

This was about resistance.

Now, hunted by a syndicate they barely understand, shadowed by a presence that exists beyond stars, and holding the only fragment of code that could potentially undo the connection to the Signal Architects, Null and Frank are on the run.

Not just to survive.

To stop what's coming.

Now, the NULL FRANK officially began their supervision, back to the movements of their target.

The signal had been buried deep—disguised beneath layers of misdirection and cryptographic camouflage. But Mike had a gut instinct, and Jake trusted it.

They ran it through decoders, pattern analyzers, even neural nets trained on chaos theory. What emerged wasn't sound at all—it was structure. The audio had been compressed into fractals, then abstracted further into geometric sequences. Triangular pulsations. Spiraling equations. Fibonacci intervals that expanded with each decoding attempt.

Then they cracked it.

What spilled out was a map. Not geographic—but temporal. A timeline. A countdown. They watched in silence as simulations unfolded across their screen: global systems shutting down, communications blacking out, skies filled with dark constellations not mapped by any telescope.

A rhythmic pulse.

Not random. Not chaotic.

Alive.

A living algorithm, steady and deliberate, like a heartbeat echoing through the void. It wasn't just a message—it was an entity trying to breathe through code.

Then came the breakthrough. Jake deciphered the final layer, the moment everything snapped into clarity. They expected maybe a target or a directive. What they got instead was a map—but not one made of streets or topography.

It was a temporal map. A timeline.

Before their eyes, simulations unfolded. Global infrastructures collapsing. City grids blinking out like dying stars. Entire satellite constellations falling silent. Systems—banking, healthcare, defense—all spiraling into entropy. Across the sky, dark constellations appeared. Not stars. Not satellites. But presences. Moving, observing, shifting in patterns that didn't belong to anything built on Earth.

At the very center of it all, a phrase lit the screen in blood-red glyphs:

SIGNAL ARCHITECTS: ACTIVE

The eye of the storm. The origin point. The interface between human systems and something far older—and colder.

And beneath it, a name they already knew. One they wished they'd never encountered:

NILGIRIS.

Mike exhaled sharply. "The failure's triggered them. Nilgiris is reacting."

Jake stood motionless, jaw tight. "And this time, he's not working solo."

They both knew what that meant. Nilgiris had backing now—real backing. The Syndicate. An ultra-clandestine collective of digital ideologists, rogue AI engineers, and blacklisted scientists who believed in one shared vision: that the Earth needed to be reset. And now, the Signal Architects had given them the tools to do it.

Mike's eyes darted across their screen, watching the code flow like water through a disrupted dam. "The binaries are shifting. They're rewriting the architecture. Every line we cracked last week is morphing—learning."

Jake's voice was low. "Yeah… the patterns we used before—they're obsolete now. They've evolved. Or worse… they've been replaced."

The code wasn't static anymore. It was adaptive. Defensive. Aggressive. The moment Team Null Frank cracked the first wave, the Signal Core restructured itself, like a sentient immune system reacting to a virus. And now, they were the virus.

But Jake smiled faintly. "Good. That means they're scared."

Mike nodded. "Then let's give them a reason to be."

This was no longer just a battle of logic gates and firewalls.

This was war—waged across frequencies, hidden in data packets, and pulsing with alien intention.

And Null Frank had just stepped into the next round.