[LOCATION: BASíLICA DE GUADALUPE - MEXICO CITY]

  [DATE: FEBRUARY 11, 2020 - 18:45 CST]

  [STATUS: DAY 42]

  The Valley of Mexico was drowning in a soup of smog, incense, and the copper-sweet scent of the Carrier.

  Father Rodrigo looked down from the balcony of the Old Basilica. Below him, the Plaza de las Américas was a mosaic of the living and the hollow. Ten thousand people were gathered in the square, but only six thousand were breathing. The rest were Echoes—Reconstructed shells of the city’s faithful, performing a pilgrimage that had no end.

  The Mexican Army had established a perimeter of concrete blast walls and snarling machine-gun nests around the sanctuary. They were trapped in a logistical nightmare. They couldn't clear the plaza because the living civilians—the "Santeros"—had formed human chains around their dead relatives, shielding the Echoes with their own bodies.

  "They think it’s a miracle, Padre," a young Lieutenant whispered, his fingers twitching on the safety of his rifle. "They think God has brought them back to pray."

  Rodrigo adjusted his worn stole, his eyes burning from the acrid smoke of thousands of votive candles. "It’s not a miracle, Lieutenant. It’s a loop. And we are the ones caught in the gears."

  Rodrigo looked at a group of Echoes kneeling near the main entrance. There were nearly forty of them, synchronized in a perfect, rhythmic swaying. They weren't speaking, but the air around them was vibrating.

  Rodrigo noticed the stained glass of the Basilica’s high windows. They weren't just rattling; they were pulsing. The 40Hz frequency emitted by the Echoes' neuro-crystalline lattices was finding the resonant frequency of the glass. Micro-cracks were spreading like spiderwebs across the face of the Virgin.

  "Padre, you need to see this," a woman cried out from the front row of the crowd.

  Rodrigo descended the stone steps, his heart heavy. He reached a young woman, no more than twenty, who was sitting on the ground. In her arms, she held a bundle wrapped in a colorful rebozo.

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  "Bless him, Padre. Bless my Pepito," she sobbed.

  Rodrigo looked down. The infant had been dead for at least three days. His skin was the color of a bruised plum, translucent and waxy. But he wasn't still. The child’s mouth was opening and closing in a rhythmic, mechanical suction. Click-suck. Click-suck. It was a Nesting routine. The infant was "nursing" from a mother who had no milk left, his tiny, calcified jaw moving with enough force to bruise the woman’s breast.

  The woman’s blouse was soaked in blood where the infant’s jagged, newly-hardened gums had torn through her skin. She didn't pull away. She smiled with a terrifying, glassy-eyed devotion.

  "He’s hungry, Padre. He’s back," she whispered.

  Rodrigo felt a surge of pure, revulsion. "He isn't back, hija. This is just a memory of a hunger that no longer exists. You are letting a ghost consume you."

  "Blasphemy!" a man screamed from the crowd. "They are the Pure! They do not sin! They only pray!"

  Suddenly, the resonance hit its peak.

  A high-pitched thrum rippled through the plaza. The stained glass windows of the Basilica shattered simultaneously, raining down shards of colored glass like a hail of crystalline knives.

  Panic erupted. The living screamed and ran, trampling each other in the dark. But the Echoes didn't move. They remained kneeling, even as the glass shards sliced into their shoulders and heads. They didn't bleed red; they leaked a thick, viscous amber fluid that smelled of ozone.

  The military, thinking the shattering glass was an IED or an attack, opened fire with tear gas.

  "CEASE FIRE!" Rodrigo roared, but his voice was drowned out by the hiss of canisters.

  The gas billowed across the plaza. The living choked, vomited, and fell. But the Echoes—including the infant in the woman's arms—simply continued their routine. To them, the gas was just a mist. They breathed it in, their non-functional lungs indifferent to the poison.

  Rodrigo watched through the stinging haze as the soldiers began to move in with batons, trying to separate the living from the dead. He saw a soldier grab an elderly Echo by the arm. The Echo, not out of malice but out of the sheer Friction of its routine, didn't stop its prayer-sway.

  With a casual, sickening crunch, the Echo’s arm snapped the soldier’s wrist like a dry twig as it continued its motion.

  "We aren't fighting an army," Rodrigo whispered, clutching his rosary until the beads cut into his palms. "We are fighting the habit of being alive."

  He looked back at the woman with the infant. She had been hit by a stray glass shard in the throat. She was dying in the middle of the plaza, her blood staining the rebozo. And even as her heart gave its final, fluttering beat, the infant didn't stop.

  Click-suck. Click-suck.

  The child was waiting. In minutes, the mother’s heart would stop, and she would join him. Not in heaven, but in the Sway.

  [SITUATION REPORT: MEXICO CITY - DISTRICT 1]

  [CASUALTIES: 142 ACTIVE (STAMPEDE/RESONANCE) / 0 RECONSTRUCTED]

  [PSYCHOLOGICAL NOTE: RELIGIOUS FANATICISM IS ACCELERATING INTEGRATION RATES.]

  [STATUS: THE PERIMETER IS FAILING. THE ROUTINE IS EXPANDING.]