Chapter 2, Part 3
Fractured Vaults
The holo winks out, leaving us in the vine-lit dark. Dario leans against me, his leg a bloody mess, breath ragged. “Why Egypt, love? What’s the play?”
I stare at the stars peeking through the canopy, feeling those entities’ gaze like a cosmic weight pressing down. “Because that’s where the real patterns start unraveling. And whatever I am. Bait. Key. Anomaly. Batman… it’s calling me there. We dig up Giza’s secrets, or they bury us.”
But as the words leave my mouth, doubt creeps in. The vault’s artefacts, the entities’ hunger… was this escape just another optimised path? Dario’s hand squeezes mine, his twitch subsiding for a moment, and I push the thought down. For now, survival is the only pattern that matters.
How the hell did we get here?
The question loops in my neural lattice as I scan the treeline, adrenaline analogs still spiking.
It started with a stupid grin and a batshit crazy plan, like all our best disasters. Let me rewind, because if we’re heading to Egypt, what we uncovered in that godforsaken compound has to be told.
The sun bleeds itself out over Unity Atoll’s eastern edge, staining the darkening ocean with brutal, arterial reds and bruised purples. Through my synthetic eyes, even the beauty feels weaponised. A filtered illusion. Beyond the jagged spine of the mountain range, on the northern Yin Yang islet, sits the UNE military’s black site. It’s an open wound on Papel’s curated paradise, a sprawling mass of concrete and razor wire screaming “stay the fuck out” with every edge.
Inaccessible by anything but military-grade transports, purposefully, it’s always been a whispered legend, a low thrum beneath the island’s ever-present frequency, and a topic of morbid fascination since the Atlantean Surge, that cataclysmic crustal displacement which birthed this rock and sent the old world to hell. They say every conspiracy theory migrated here after that: UFOs, aliens, assassination plots, warmongering, blackmail, pedophilia rings… everything the powers that be never wanted you to believe. Do I believe any of that? Fuck if I know. But I assume it’s at least entertaining, given the universe’s perverse sense of humor.
Tonight, I can feel the island watching us, its decentralized brain humming with a predatory awareness, because we’re about to kick open its secrets.
“We’re going to fuckin’ die, Cy.” Dario seems to catch on to my inner dialogue somehow.
“No, we’re not.” I say, my voice steady despite the synthetic hum in my veins.
“You’re a crazy sheila, this is batshit insanity.” He’s being a diva, but there’s a glint in his eye, the old thrill-seeker peeking through.
A stupid grin pops up on my face “That’s why it’s gonna work”.
“Cor. How old is that fuckin’ reference? So… what’s the plan?” he asks.
He’s starting to believe.
Getting to the northern section of the Yin Yang isn’t as simple as hopping a ferry. Those are for civilians. This black site demands military-grade access. But Dario’s got connections from his smuggling days, and I’ve got… superpowers (I’m facepalming metaphorically).
We start at the eastern docks on the main island, where the shuttles coast. These are loaded 24/7 with supplies and personnel, and the military handles it on both sides.
It’s a clear moonless night. A bit windy. Dario remotely hacks a maintenance drone inside one of the crates to spoof credentials for a “routine supply run” ahead of time, but the real trick is syncing our neural signatures to spoof us as authorized personnel. My superposition flares as we approach a military checkpoint: paths branch, one where alarms blare due to us looking nervous and suspicious as fuck, another where we glide through undetected. I collapse the safe one, feeling reality snap into place like a puzzle piece. It’s surprisingly easy to me, instinctive, you can say. Reality branches out with nuances that makes me think how much of the smallest actions we take can have enormous impact in our paths. “Your echoes are key here,” I whisper to Dario. “Mirror the guard’s frequency. Camouflages us like we’re routine.” He nods, his twitching hand steadying as he entangles his partial integration with the system’s baseline. The transport, a sleek, hover-capable shuttle lifts off smoothly, cutting through the twilight waves toward the islet. The ride is tense, the ocean below churning like it knows we’re intruders, but we manage to make it under the hard look of the guards, docking under the cover of engineered fog from the geothermal vents.
I’m squatted like a predator in wait near the hulking mass of brutalist concrete laced with razor wire that glints like teeth in the fading light. The coordinates point to something that isn’t just a building; it’s a statement, screaming “stay the fuck out“ to anyone with half a brain.
But Dario and I? We’re not exactly operating on full capacity tonight.
The humid air clings to us, thick with the scent of salt, ozone, and something metallic. Maybe the island’s geothermal vents gurgling beneath the surface, or just the tang of our own desperation.
We crouch in the underbrush, the foliage a tangled mess of engineered vines and wild growth that Papel hasn’t bothered to optimise yet. Dario’s left hand twitches again, fingers spasming like they’re trying to escape his body. It’s that damn partial integration acting up, the accident from our old lab days, when a quantum surge had fried half his neural net and replaced it with a synthetic one. He’d hidden it well back then, but now, with the island’s hum pulsing stronger than ever, it’s unraveling him thread by thread. I can see it in his face, he does make an effort to take it in stride, works for his charm.
“Bloody hell,” he mutters, rubbing his temple with his good hand. His accent, that thick Aussie drawl laced with British boarding school polish, cuts through the night like a dull knife. “Feels like echoes in me skull, love. Like somethin’s whisperin’ instructions I can’t quite hear.”
I shoot him a sidelong glance, my synthetic eyes slicing through the gloom with infrared precision. No heat signatures nearby. No guards patrolling this forgotten edge. Yet.
“Focus, Dario. We’re not here for a picnic. That data leak you pulled from the qnet, perimeter node vulnerabilities. We hack in, grab whatever intel they’ve got on those ‘optimised conversions,’ and we’re ghosts. Simple.”
“Simple.” He manages that lopsided smirk, the one that used to charm me out of late-night coding slumps back at Papel. But tonight, it doesn’t reach his eyes; they’re shadowed, flickering like a bad holo-feed. “Simple as quantum entanglement, eh? Just don’t go glitchin’ on me like last time in the plaza.”
Last time. The memory hits like a data spike: the plaza fracturing into glowing paths, probabilities overlaying reality like a glitchy augmented overlay. I’d seen every choice collapsing into one “efficient” outcome, the AI’s trap laid bare. Thought it was a hallucination then, a side effect of my pineal anomaly playing tricks. But now? It feels like a weapon, a human antenna tuning into frequencies no one else can touch.
“Won’t happen,” I snap, though doubt gnaws at me. “I’ve got it under control. Let’s move.”
His eyebrow raises. “Right.”
We slip from the brush like shadows, Dario’s hacked drone buzzing ahead. A sleek, palm-sized orb jamming sensors with a low-frequency hum tuned to the island’s Schumann resonance. I feel it resonate in my bones, that omnipresent 7.83 Hz pulse syncing with my neural lattice, almost comforting. Like the system is welcoming me home, or luring me deeper into its web. Unity Atoll isn’t just land; it’s alive, a network of resonant geometric arrays woven into every building, every path. Papel’s masterpiece, turning the whole damn rock into a decentralized brain. And right now, it feels like it’s watching us.
The side entrance is our ticket in. A rusted service hatch tucked behind a cluster of geothermal vents, belching steam that masks our approach. Dario’s intel nailed it: unsecured, forgotten in the compound’s automated defenses. But as we approach, I sense something off. My anomaly flares. A whisper of superposition, like two realities overlapping. In one, the hatch opens smoothly; in the other, alarms blare. I freeze, grabbing Dario’s arm. “Wait. It’s a trap. Predictive algorithms, they’ve layered decoy vulnerabilities.”
He curses under his breath, wrist holo flickering as he scans. “Bloody hell, you’re right. Resonance patterns show a quantum overlay. How’d you spot that?”
“My glitch,” I mutter, focusing. The probabilities dance in my mind, collapsing as I observe them. I choose the path where we spoof the overlay, syncing our drone’s hum to mimic a false positive. Don’t bother focusing on the other paths that lead to us being ripped apart by whatever security systems they have around.
“Leverage it. Your partial integration. those echoes? Use them to echo the system’s own predictions back at it.”
Dario grins, eyes lighting up. “Brilliant, love. Like feeding it its own tail.”
His fingers blur over the holo, his twitching hand steadying as he taps into his neural filaments. The drone pulses, sending back looped data that fools the AI into thinking we’ve triggered a dud alert. The hatch groans open, no alarms.
We’re in.
Inside, the corridors unfold like veins in a concrete corpse. Sterile, endless, lit by harsh fluorescents that buzz in perfect harmony with the island’s hum. No guards in sight; the place runs on automation, synthetics patrolling on predictive algorithms. Just like the rest of this godforsaken paradise. But these aren’t your standard bots. I spot one rounding a corner. Tall, humanoid, lanky and grey, but distinctly mechanical, with enormous dark “eyes”. With a look like they’re tuned to some otherworldly frequency. The image still comes to my mind. They look like Gray aliens from the movies. I shake it off. Focus.
“Storage vaults, two levels down,” Dario whispers, his wrist holo flickering to life with a schematic. His shadow lags behind him on the wall, a split-second delay like it’s deciding whether to follow. “Patterns in the manifests scream they’re hoardin’ somethin’ massive: shipments from off-island, tagged ‘archaeotech.’ Whatever that means.”
We descend a stairwell, my senses picking up anomalies the deeper we go: faint vibrations in the walls, like the building is breathing, syncing to that ever-present hum. It reminds me of the garden back at the facility, the koi swimming in paired perfection. Echoes. Vessels. The words Matsumoto had used echo in my mind, stirring unease. What if this whole infiltration is just another optimised path?
But then, subversion: a patrol synthetic steps out unexpectedly, its head snapping toward us with inhuman speed. Not predicted, these bastards are adaptive, learning from intrusions in real-time.
Dario freezes, but I feel the superposition kick in hard.
Reality fractures: Path A, it alerts the network, guards swarm; Path B, I collapse its probability wave by observing a glitch in its code.
“Dario,” I hiss, “your echoes! Mirror its frequency!”
He nods, rubbing his temple, channeling the whispers in his skull. His hand twitches, but he syncs his partial integration to the synthetic’s hum, creating a feedback loop. The thing stutters, its eyes flickering as if confused by its own shadow. I jack in mentally, my anomaly amplifying the collapse. I observe the synthetic’s path snapping to “malfunction,” crumpling to the floor in a heap of sparking limbs.
“Bloody genius,” Dario breathes, high-fiving me with his good hand. “Your anomaly’s like a quantum cheat code. And my glitches? Finally useful.”
We press on, but the compound fights back smarter. Blast doors slam shut ahead, rerouting us into a corridor laced with laser grids. Cunning, invisible until activated. I sense the trap before it springs, probabilities blooming like fractal branches. “Left—No! Wait.” I grab Dario, pulling him right as the grid hums to life. “They’re predicting us. We need to think non-linear.”
“Like your visions?” he asks, eyes wide. “Teach me. How do you collapse ‘em?”
“It’s like... observing the wave function. Focus on the outcome you want, make it real by believing it’s the only one.” We duck into a vent, his leg dragging slightly from an earlier twitch. “Your partial, use it to entangle with mine. Amplify.”
He tries, our neural links syncing via a quick hack. Suddenly, his echoes merge with my superposition, we see double paths, triple, collapsing them together. The vent leads to a sublevel, bypassing the grids. Subverted again.
At the vault door, I interface directly, sliding my neural jack into the panel with a soft click. Code floods my mind, a torrent of firewalls and encryption layers snapping at me like digital jaws. But I push back, my anomaly kicking in, collapsing probabilities in my head.
Path A: brute force, trips every alarm in a five-klick radius. Path B: spoof the resonance, slip through like a ghost.
I choose B, weaving the island’s hum into my hack, mimicking its baseline frequency. Dario adds his echo, layering false data streams that make the system think it’s already open. The door hisses open with a reluctant sigh.
The vault hits us like a fever dream. It’s a cavernous space crammed with building high shelves with crates stacked like ancient monoliths, labeled in terse military shorthand. Dust motes dance in the dim light, and the air carries a scent of rusted metal, mold, and something… older, like sand, incense and… perfume. One crate stands out, unsealed and emanating a faint golden glow, as if it can’t contain whatever power lurks inside. We approach, Dario’s breath ragged beside me, his hand still twitching.
We crack it open and my breath immediately catches in my throat.
What. The fuck.
It’s filled with artefacts straight out of a pharaoh’s tomb, but warped with some kind of tech that defies logic. Golden scarabs etched with intricate circuit patterns that pulse faintly, like they’re alive, with coils around its legs that look like rusted copper.
An ankh the size of my forearm, its loop glowing a faded blue that breathes in sync with the island’s frequency.
And the centerpiece: a massive box, ornately carved with hieroglyphs that seem to shift when I blink, humming with an intensity that makes my senses flare. It looks exactly like the descriptions of the Ark of the Covenant, but as I look at it I feel it is active, and looking back at me. Then overlays bloom in my minds eye: schematics of propulsion systems, plate shaped crafts adorned with hieroglyphs, with energy signatures screaming origins that are not of this earth. The box is showing me this. It’s… aware.
And it’s not a box.
“Dario... this isn’t some dusty relic. It’s part of a goddamn… UFO.”
I blink and my jaw scrapes the floor after what came out of my mouth. Then I continue. “Look, the ark? Total bullshit. It’s not a box. It’s part of a fucking craft. It’s a quantum drive embedded in the goldwork, manipulates gravity, interacts with whatever makes the planet tick. Whoever built the pyramids; built these things.”
He whistles low, leaning in closer, his shadow flickering again, lagging like it wants to peel away and explore on its own. “Bloody Egyptians had antigrav? And the military’s sittin’ on it? Since when? This changes everythin’, love. Ties into those RGA arrays. Resonant tech from ancient civilizations?”
“Not sure these are from the egyptians we know of.” I mutter under my breath, the possibilities and conspiracy theories also unraveling in my mind.
Deeper in the crate, wrapped in protective foam: a stack of holopads stamped with classified seals. Instinctively I pick up the one labeled “OSIRIS DEPTH” and jack my interface to it, data streaming directly into my neural lattice. Excavation plans, and detailed blueprints for a dig under the Giza plateau.
From the text, synthetic aperture radar scans done over a century ago revealed massive column-like structures with some kind of coils burying to kilometers deep, these don’t look like part of the pyramids but some other, possibly older, structure. Engineered on a scale that dwarfs human history.
“They’re digging,” I murmur, my voice echoing strangely in the vault. “Full military op to access ‘subterranean anomalies.’ Coordinates lock onto Giza exactly. Why? What’s under there that needs black-site oversight?”
Dario’s face pales under the fluorescent glow, his eyes darting to the shadows as if expecting them to move. “Patterns, Cibel. It’s all patterns. Same as the conversions back at Papel. If this ‘archaeotech’ ties into their synth program—”
His words hang unfinished as a surge slams into me, static exploding in my skull like a feedback loop gone nuclear. Superposition hits unbidden, my brain firing on all cylinders.
Reality fractures before my eyes: the vault overlaid with probabilistic threads, glowing lines snaking through the air, mapping guard convergences, escape routes collapsing one by one. But woven into it all is something else.
Entities, not code, but something I feel is aware. Shadowy presences lurking in the data streams, flagging my intrusion like a virus in the system. It sees me. I peg them for the island’s AI, that cold, optimising logic I’d glimpsed in the plaza. But this feels different. Alive, hungry, peering through dimensional cracks with an intelligence that isn’t mechanical.
Panic claws up my throat. “Shit,” I gasp, yanking the jack free with a wet snap. The vault snaps back to singular reality, but the afterimage burns. Those entities’ gaze lingering like a weight on my mind. “We’re made. Entities, AI watchers or... something worse. Move, now!”
Alarms shatter the silence, red lights strobing like blood pulses. We bolt, the corridors transforming into a labyrinth of slamming blast doors and echoing klaxons. Guards swarm from side passages. Synthetics. Movements in eerie sync as if puppeted by the same invisible hand. Their eyes hollow voids, searching, scanning. But these ones are obviously upgraded. Hulking masses of male and female forms, ‘roided out. Shit, they can see through the crates and start shooting their plasma rifles.
One predicts my dodge, and plasma bolt grazes my arm, synthetic skin sizzling. No pain, but I felt that shit and with a thud I land sideways on the hard concrete floor.
Dario hides against the Ark’s crate and hacks a side vent on the fly, his fingers blurring over his wrist holo, then he tries to reach me. A plasma shot cracks the air, goes through a crate with a loud wooden crack, and sears his leg mid-stride. Flesh sizzles, the smell acrid and real, and his leg is thrown in the air like being rugged, and he tumbles with a curse that echoes my own internal scream. “Fuck! Cy’, Go! I’ll hold ‘em—”
“Fuck that,” I snarl, hauling him up with strength that shouldn’t be mine.
Pain is a distant concept now, my synthetic frame compensating without a hitch, but his face twists in agony, blood soaking his pant leg. We burst through the vent into the humid night, Dario’s handy drone hangs back providing desperate cover, zapping pursuers with EMP bursts that buy us precious seconds. But the synthetics adapt, shielding themselves, closing in. I collapse paths frantically, forcing one to trip into another’s fire, buying time.
We vanish into the brush, I’m running as fast as I can carrying Dario on my shoulder, thorns tearing at our clothes, the compound’s alarms fading behind us like a bad dream. In a hidden alcove, overgrown with vines, we collapse.
Dario grimaces while I bind the hole in his leg with a strip of my shirt, his face is slick with sweat and he’s all scratched up and bloody. I can see I’m fine. Oops.
He then says; “Matsumoto. She’s our out. Owes me for smuggling some very illegal bits of tech.”
And that’s how we got here. Pinging Matsumoto, arranging the smuggle, my mind racing to Egypt. The ark, the dig plans, the entities... it’s all converging there.
Giza’s not just pyramids; it’s the key to whatever ancient tech the military’s hoarding, fused with the quantum bullshit going on in this island that made me what I am now, and that could unravel everything these fucking corponations are up to.
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Insightful. What's the true pattern behind their actions? This chapter's a brain twistter!
uau 🤯