Control Room

  The sound lasted less than three seconds.

  It wasn't loud. There was no urgency in its tone — none of the patterns they had trained themselves to recognize with their eyes closed: capsule sealing failure, DNA incompatibility, temporal synchronization error. It was something different. Something none of the three men, after years of shifts in that room, had ever heard before.

  And for that exact reason, all three hearts sank at the same time.

  "What alarm was that?"

  The cards fell onto the table before anyone could answer. In a place where sounds were language, the unknown was always the worst news.

  "Move!" — the oldest man's voice cut through the silence. — "If the Leader finds us with an unregistered alert, we won't even have time to explain."

  The man at the main panel was already working. Fingers scanning the frequency history, trying to map the sound's signature. The second ran to the side shelf and yanked out the dark leather-bound volume — the Alarm Compendium. The third was still confused but decided to help the oldest by trying to identify the alarm's origin on the panel.

  "Did you parameterize the data before the export?"

  "Yes. The system cross-referenced all active records."

  "And?"

  "It found no identification linked to the alarm."

  The silence that followed had weight. Alarms were always tied to something — a failure, an individual, a measurable variable. It was the system's fundamental logic. Without an origin, there was no response. And without a response, they were screwed.

  "It must have been a system error."

  "Exactly that."

  The two repeated the words as if they were capable of making them true simply by saying them aloud. It was impossible for the system to err — everyone knew that. But it was even more impossible to present the Leader with an unexplained alarm.

  "Found it."

  The voice came out low. Without triumph. The man with the Compendium didn't turn the page — he kept staring at it, as if he needed more time before making it real for the others.

  All three leaned over the open pages.

  The text was there, in vivid red — a color the Compendium reserved for records that should never need to be consulted:

  SUPREME INTEGRATION ALARM Halt export immediately. Test subject of critical importance to humanity.

  None of them were breathing.

  "Supreme Integration..." — the oldest repeated the name in an almost inaudible voice, as though saying it louder might invoke something. — "This alarm shouldn't even exist on the active grid. It's theoretical."

  "It was theoretical."

  The pods had already completed the export cycle. The process was irreversible after the departure confirmation — everyone knew that. Even if they had wanted to act, there was nothing to be done. And, more gravely: there was no registered identification. They didn't know who it was. They didn't know where they had gone. They knew nothing.

  "If this is real..." — the second began.

  "We're dead." — the third finished.

  The silence that followed was not one of hesitation. It was one of calculation. Three men who had spent years learning to read every frequency variation in that room arrived, separately, at the same conclusion — yet it was the oldest who dared to speak aloud.

  "Erase the record."

  "What?"

  "Erase the alarm from the log. It was an automatic calibration test. It happens sometimes." — a pause. — "It happened today."

  Neither of the others protested.

  They knew what they had done. They understood the weight of what they had allowed to depart. But confessing the error to the Leader meant imprisonment or even a slow death, put on display as an example to others. Lying, at least, offered the possibility of walking away unpunished.

  The record vanished from the log in less than forty seconds. The export continued.

  Oasis received something that should never have arrived there.

  ___?___

  Oasis

  My body woke before my mind.

  The first piece of information it processed was touch: compressed earth beneath my palms, damp, with the specific texture of soil after recent rain. Then came smell — heavy, organic sea air, layered with plant decomposition that belonged to no urban environment I had ever known. Last came sound.

  The ocean.

  Deep. Constant. With that rhythmic pulse that seemed to breathe alongside something greater than anything I could name.

  I turned my face to the right.

  Endless blue, from the horizon to the edge of my field of vision. I had never seen so much water gathered in one place — not in person. Only in audiovisual recordings, filtered through screens and contexts that always made everything smaller than it truly was.

  I allowed myself exactly two seconds to take it in.

  Then the analysis began.

  Coastal zone. Daytime — sun high overhead, estimate of ten to twelve hours before nightfall. Good news, all things considered: I had been transported at the projected time, which ruled out a failure in the export protocol. The bad news piled up shortly after, as I stood and looked to my left.

  That wasn't in the book.

  Coastal zones were supposed to be semi-arid plains — open terrain, low-lying vegetation, full exposure. Poor ground for hiding, terrible for survival, but at least predictable. What lay to my left was none of that. It was a dense forest, and not of any ordinary kind: the trees had proportions that belonged more to geology than to biology. Trunks wide enough to build a room inside. Canopies that sealed out the sky so efficiently that the interior was nearly dark at noon.

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  I processed the available data as I moved away from the waterline.

  Beach: open terrain, no cover, high-threat amphibious creatures. Forest: excessive cover, unknown fauna, absence of ground-level edible flora due to light blockage. Risk of arboreal predators or unmapped inhabited structures.

  There was no good choice — only the least bad one. The ocean was consistently described as dangerous, while the forest remained unknown. Thus, the wisest move was to risk the unknown.

  I drew the Lord's Staff and advanced.

  The logic was simple: if something appeared before I could identify a strategic position, I would plant the flag immediately. One-kilometer expulsion radius, seventy-two-hour duration. Single use, fixed territory, no possibility of relocation. A high cost — but one I would accept before accepting direct contact with something that could kill me in a fraction of a second.

  The forest swallowed me whole.

  And the silence I found inside it was the wrong kind.

  Forests with that level of biomass should have been loud — insects, birds, the constant friction of life across multiple layers. Absolute silence meant one of two things: a total absence of fauna, which was impossible given the scale of the vegetation, or the presence of something large enough that everything else in the food chain had learned to go quiet.

  I worked with the second hypothesis.

  The immediate priority was water. Without it, my survival horizon shrank to less than twenty-four hours, and every other calculation became irrelevant. The size of the trees suggested a water table close to the surface — roots of that caliber wouldn't be reaching depths of ten meters or more, which gave me a reasonable window to locate a surface spring or an active watercourse.

  Forty minutes later, I spotted a cave.

  The entrance was roughly two by two meters — too small for large creatures, but not for packs, and not for most of Oasis's threats. The slope of the terrain ahead indicated an internal descent. And where there is descent, there is the possibility of an underground river.

  "Tablet. Activate flashlight."

  The light appeared on the chest of my uniform — strong enough to navigate by, controlled enough not to turn me into a glowing target inside a closed corridor. I advanced with the Staff in active position.

  The cave descended. The echo amplified every step — gravel under boots sounded like a series of detonations in the enclosed space. I stopped three times, waiting for a response to the sound. Nothing moved.

  After what I estimated to be forty meters of descent, I heard what I was looking for.

  Running water.

  The distinction was critical: stagnant water was potential poison — larvae, pathogens, mineral accumulation at toxic concentrations. Running water, on the other hand, was far more likely to be potable and, more importantly, it had both a source and a destination. That meant I could follow the current outward or use it to trace the underground topography. Two problems solved with a single variable.

  But before I could calculate the direction of the flow, I heard another sound.

  It was not water. It was not wind. It was rhythmic — metallic and organic at the same time, as if two incompatible materials were being forced to produce cadence together. Rattling. Teeth chattering. The kind of percussion that exists in no animal I knew from the world of origin.

  I switched off the flashlight.

  In the dark, with the sound of the river muffling my breathing, I mentally organized the data: preferentially subterranean habitat, sounds with a rhythmic pattern resembling both a percussion instrument and latent bruxism. In the Compendium, only one creature matched that combination of characteristics.

  Wendigo.

  The real name was something else — longer, more technical, more inadequate for what they actually were in practice. But the name that stuck was Wendigo, and it was precise enough: bipedal with all the wrong proportions, limbs elongated beyond what the skeletal structure should permit, faces stripped of the subcutaneous fat that gave human features their expression. Pure muscle, pure instinct, and an infection vector that made each bite a sentence of forced recruitment.

  One bite. The end.

  I entered the river slowly — continuous movement, no splash, no variation in pressure that could be detected by the current. The water reached chest height as I lay back. Too shallow for full vertical cover, sufficient to mask body temperature and disperse scent. The book was clear about their vision: weak, motion-dependent. Their sense of smell was another matter entirely.

  I kept only my face above the surface and pressed forward.

  When my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw the group. Eight units at the river's edge, in different stages of conversion — some still wearing fragments of the obsidian-black uniform I recognized as the standard issue for another summoned. Freshly infected.

  The largest remained crouched, but I identified it by its enormous antlers: that was the Alpha. It seemed unconcerned, savoring the spectacle before it.

  The hierarchy among the newly turned was still being established, which explained the tension in the group and the periodic clashes that broke the rhythm of the chattering teeth and the cavern's silence.

  And then I saw something fall.

  A ring. Small. The metallic impact against the stones was nearly inaudible, but I was close enough. I recognized the type — the same pattern I had seen the vampire hand to her sister. An item granted by someone of sufficiently high level that the gift held intrinsic value, regardless of any properties I had yet to discover.

  The creature that had lost the ring was still in the final stage of transformation: tremors, excessive sweating, skeletal reconstruction, and severe hair loss. It was that last detail that confirmed it. It was the ring. After all, that caramel-toned hair was the same as the vampire's sister's.

  I calculated.

  Risk: approaching a group of eight Wendigos in a phase of hierarchical instability, with one adult specimen of undetermined level. Cost of failure: infection or death. Probability of success dependent on a window of distraction.

  Return: item of known origin, high-level provenance, unknown properties but statistically positive given its owner.

  The group broke into open conflict — two of the newly converted fighting for position. That was the window.

  I slid toward the bank. The water dispersed scent. The sound of the river masked movement. I felt along the rocky riverbed with my hand, careful not to displace gravel in sequence —

  — and pressed my palm against a stone with a sharp edge.

  The pain was immediate. I caught the sound in my throat by reflex, but the damage was done. Within seconds, the water around my hand had color.

  I found the ring. I closed my fingers around it.

  And then silence fell over the entire group.

  I looked up.

  The Alpha was standing. Three meters crouched — more than five upright, its antler branching grazing the cavern ceiling. It wasn't looking at the group. It was looking in my direction. Its nose swept the river's surface in slow, deliberate arcs, with the methodical certainty of something that had learned, over a very long time, to trust its sense of smell above any other sense.

  Blood in running water. Diluted, dispersed, but present.

  It knew there was something in the river.

  I retreated toward the center of the channel. Twenty meters of shallow water — not enough to hide if it decided to enter, enough to give me two or three seconds of margin. I watched as it crouched at the bank and raked the surface with its claws, testing the resistance, gauging the depth.

  Then it grabbed one of the new Wendigos by the neck and hurled it into the river.

  The creature landed less than four meters from me. It screamed — not in pain, but in something approaching panic — and was out of the water in under two seconds, thrashing its limbs as if contact with the liquid were physically unbearable.

  Behavioral test. It was checking for some kind of reaction.

  Intelligent.

  The book classified Wendigos as mid-level predators. If that was mid-level, I needed to completely revise my frame of reference.

  I kept retreating. Slow. Without varying my rhythm. The Alpha sniffed, listened, processed. The others waited motionless — absolute submission while the leader worked.

  Oasis had that name for a specific reason. It was a reservoir — a preserved world where everything that had ever existed still existed, compressed into a space where the rules of natural selection operated without any of the artificial protections civilization had built. For the strong, it was a field of limitless opportunity. For the weak, it was simply a deadline.

  I had the Staff. I had seventy-two hours of territorial protection, if I chose to use it. I had the ring, which was worth the cut on my palm.

  And I had the one thing the Alpha could not change: daylight hours.

  Wendigos were nocturnal creatures — and sunlight was one of their greatest vulnerabilities. I needed to get out of the cave before the sun went down.

  After nearly two hours of dragging myself through the current, I could still hear the young Wendigos' conflict. The Alpha, however, seemed to have abandoned the pursuit. As I assessed my options, the cave finally began to reveal what I needed.

  Light.

  Faint at first, then growing — filtered through a curtain of water, distorted by the impact mist, but unmistakably natural. A waterfall. The exit was behind it: a narrow space between the rock and the veil of water, thirty centimeters at most, enough for a human body to move through carefully.

  I squeezed through the rocks. Slowly. Every foothold checked before shifting weight. The sound of the waterfall covered everything — my steps, my breathing, any variation I might produce.

  And then my hand touched something that was not rock.

  Slimy. Soft. With the wrong density for any inorganic material I knew.

  The thing vibrated.

  And the scream that came out of it cut through the entire cavern from end to end — sharp, unbroken, unmodulated, the kind of sound that needed no translation:

  "KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!"