Chapter 0: The First Divergent
[Unknown Date]
Somewhere beneath the Siberian ice, the cold hum of fluorescent lights echoed over surgical steel and screaming minds.
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[Krasnohrad Research Blacksite]
The lights had been out for nine minutes.
The emergency sirens should have triggered, but the control panels remained dead. Red bulbs blinked like dying eyes in the hallway. Somewhere in the east wing, the walls were smeared with static and frost—not the kind made from water, but from failed probabilities.
Footsteps echoed.
Dr. Yelena Sobolev moved like she was walking across broken glass—slow, cautious, breath held. Her left hand bled from a shattered screen. Her right hand gripped a clipboard stacked with sealed Archive pages. Each one vibrated faintly with forbidden logic.
The whispering had started seven minutes ago. Not voices. Just... variables.
> ∂s / ∂t = 0
Vector field collapse
Interference threshold breached
She had seen children die here. Dozens. But none of them had been him.
She had seen this one born.
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Room 102 wasn't locked anymore.
The door had turned inward—ripped from its hinges, not blasted. No heat. No kinetic force. Just a perfect inversion of trajectory.
Inside the chamber, the temperature was wrong.
Heat drifted upward, curling along the ceiling like reverse smoke. Papers didn't fall—they hovered in midair, quivering like leaves suspended in jelly.
He stood at the center.
Subject 102.
The boy without pulse, but not dead. White hair fluttering, despite the still air. Wires dangled from his spine like broken marionette threads.
And the bullets—
Five of them. Midair. Frozen between him and the last remaining guard.
The guard's corpse was against the far wall. Bent wrong. No blood. Just… folded.
Yelena's throat tightened. Her shoes crunched glass. She stepped forward, almost against her will.
He shouldn't be awake, she thought. Not this soon.
"Vector…" she whispered, "you're not supposed to be awake."
He tilted his head slightly. No warmth in his face. No fear, no pain, no joy. His lips barely moved, but his voice rang clear and absolute.
"Observation: variables hostile."
"Response: adjust trajectory."
"Result: elimination."
The five bullets rotated, emitting a soft metallic hum. Then—
Crack.
They launched backward. Each pierced the wall like sniper rounds, embedding deep.
Yelena dropped the clipboard. Pages scattered like frightened birds.
He looked at her.
And for the first time, she saw it—not a boy, not even a mind.
Just directions.
A being whose existence was not to be in this world…
…but to reject it.
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[Elsewhere – Storage Sector 315 | Two levels below]
Another child coughed, dragging his frail body over chalk dust and cracked stone. His wrist was cut—not deep—but bleeding over a roughly drawn circle.
He was alone.
No bullets. No guards. No screaming. Just cold.
But he remembered something.
Not a weapon. Not math.
A dream.
He muttered softly, eyes glazed and distant.
"To gain something... I must give something. Something of meaning..."
From his torn gown, he pulled a string. A paper tag:
SUBJECT 315 – ZHUKOV REN.
He placed it in the circle's center, just as his blood touched the etched line.
The room pulsed.
A low, harmonic tone filled the air. Lights didn't flicker on—they flickered inward, like the hallway was being remembered by something older than time.
"I give my name," he whispered.
"In return... open the way."
The circle ignited—not with flame, but with intention.
A doorway bloomed in the far wall. Behind it: stars. Not constellations—just scattered teeth of light, floating in an endless dark.
He didn't hesitate.
Not because he was brave.
But because there was nothing left of him to lose.
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[Somewhere beyond known layers]
Two signals pulsed in the Archive's cortex—deeper than speech, older than math.
[VECTOR NODE_102: ACTIVE]
[KHEMIC NODE_315: AWAKE]
A whisper followed...
"The equation has been broken.
The offering has been made.
One walks against force.
The other walks against fate."
"LET THEM CLIMB".
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