The Raw Code

Opening: “The Rawborn”

She woke up screaming.

The sound tore from her throat like it had been waiting there for years—raw, primal, louder than the hum of machines and the distant thunder that wasn’t thunder. Her hands clawed at wires, slick with gel and panic, as the cry echoed through the sterile chamber like a banshee trapped in glass.

She wasn’t supposed to wake up.

Not yet.

Sera ripped the feeding tubes from her arms. Needles snapped. Alarms lit up across her vision—not red, but a cold, clinical blue, like the system didn’t know how to process terror. Her feet hit the metal floor with a slap. It was too bright. Too quiet. Too clean.

Then came the voice.

“Subject Breeder-9 is active. Restoration compromised. Initiate recall protocol.”

It wasn’t spoken. It was in her mind—a thought that wasn’t hers, sliding in sideways, ice-cold and precise.

She staggered, blood smearing the glass tank behind her. Her breath fogged in the cold air. The scream still rang in her ears—or maybe it never stopped.

Then she felt it.

A mind that wasn’t hers, moving toward her. Not footsteps—intent. Clinical. Inevitable.

Sera turned. The walls didn’t open. They shimmered. And through them stepped a figure in seamless white, faceless, weightless—barely shaped like a man.

The Custodian.

Her eyes widened. Her mind burned.

Run.

And she did.

⸻

At first, it felt like déjà vu—

that slippery, stomach-tight moment when you know what’s going to happen just before it does.

But it didn’t stop.

She turned down a corridor, and something in her brain flared—not a voice, not a thought, but a pressure behind her eyes, like the air had thickened around a wrong decision.

Left would’ve ended in a stasis field. Right—three seconds to the door before it seals.

She went right.

The Custodian behind her didn’t shout. Didn’t run. It simply knew where she should be. But she was always just outside that knowing. Because she saw them too—their choices, their movements, before they committed to them.

Two Custodians. One stepping through the wall to flank. One waiting at the end of the hall. Pause now. Drop flat. The one ahead scans at eye-level only.

She dropped. A whisper of static fizzled over her head as a white blur passed silently by.

Her brain wasn’t thinking. It was navigating a living map of probability—each thread tugging toward failure or escape. Some choices glowed with danger. Others felt hollow. But one strand, thin and silver, hummed with purpose.

She followed it.

ESP wasn’t hearing thoughts—it was hearing inevitability and choosing when to cut the thread.

⸻

The hallway split ahead—one path winding down into shadow, the other slanting toward a pulsing emergency light.

To the eye, both looked the same: sterile steel, flickering lights, no sound but the low hum of alien machinery and her own ragged breath.

But in her mind?

They couldn’t have been more different.

The path to the left felt like oil—thick, slow, suffocating. She saw herself running down it, just a half-second flash, but it was enough: a Custodian phasing in ahead of her, its fingers opening like scalpels, the air trembling as her spine lit with pain. That path ended in silence. Her silence.

The other way gleamed.

Not in reality—but inside her skull. A thread of silver light stretched through the corridor, pulling her. Not with sound or words—just certainty. That path was narrow. Terrible. But it didn’t end in death.

She took it.

Doors hissed open just as she reached them—not luck, but timing, guided by something deeper than thought. Her feet hit the floor harder now, her body moving before her brain caught up.

ESP wasn’t a power. It was a survival instinct evolved into prophecy.

Behind her, reality bent—Custodians phased in and out of time, slow to adjust, too late.

She had already chosen.

⸻

They had her cornered. Three Custodians closed in, phasing through walls like ghosts of inevitability.

Sera backed against the stasis vault wall, her breath hitching, vision going thin at the edges from overuse of her gift. Her mind was fire and pressure and string. The silver path she’d followed flickered, dimming.

No escape.

One Custodian stepped forward. It didn’t raise a weapon. It didn’t need to. Its faceless head tilted slightly, almost… gently.

And in that second—she saw them.

Not as white figures of plastic and silence.

But as they were beneath the veneer.

The ESP flared hot, too deep, too sudden—like her mind fell through a trapdoor into time itself. A vision struck her like lightning:

They were human once.

Future-born. Genome-choked.

Generations of modification, enhancement, design… until something essential collapsed. Creativity waned. Empathy thinned. The subconscious turned silent. Their dreams died.

They had no madness left. No imagination. No music.

They couldn’t feel what it meant to be human anymore.

And so they came back.

Not to conquer, but to harvest. DNA, yes—but not for strength. For spirit. They needed the wild, unshaped rawborn. The chaos. The pain. The spark.

They weren’t scientists.

They were beggars.

Thieves of memory.

Curators of lost fire.

Sera gasped—eyes flooding with something deeper than fear. Pity. Horror. Recognition.

The Custodian stood before her, still unreadable. But now she felt its truth: It didn’t want to kill her. It wanted to be her.

“They ruined themselves,” she whispered, trembling.

The Custodian reacted—not with motion, but with a shift in mental static. Regret. Maybe even… shame.

Behind her, a control panel hissed open. The silver thread reignited.

Sera took one last look at the beings who had made themselves hollow in the name of control—and ran.

This time, not just to save herself.

But to protect what they had forgotten.

⸻

“The Waking of Wisp”

Abandoned sleep research facility, sealed under a decaying hospital on the edge of a dead city. The air smells of antiseptic and mold. Electric lights flicker in time with her heartbeat.

⸻

Sera stepped lightly, boots soaked through from the sewer crawl, breath tight in her throat. She didn’t need a map—the hum of another mind was calling her, dream-warm and drowsy. Wisp was close. Too close.

Don’t think. Listen.

A Custodian was nearby. She didn’t see him, not yet—but she felt the way the air went thick with intent, like static about to snap.

Then she found the door. Cold, pressurized. Her fingers brushed the control panel, and it let out a sigh. Inside, Wisp floated in a vertical stasis tank, her body slender, her hair drifting like smoke in water. Electrodes clung to her temples, feeding images into her dreams. A machine was talking directly into her subconscious.

Sera’s gift pulsed open. Her vision blurred—and suddenly she was inside Wisp’s dream.

⸻

The Dreamworld

A field of black glass stretched into forever. Wisp stood barefoot, unmoving, with eyes like distant moons. A voice echoed from all directions—soft, clinical, relentless.

“You are safe. You are quiet. You are forgetful. You are no one.”

Sera pushed through the fog, speaking not with sound, but intention.

“That’s not your voice.”

Wisp turned slowly, her expression confused. “I know you,” she whispered. “You’re the one they lost.”

“I’m the one who woke up,” Sera said. “And I’m here to wake you too.”

“They told me if I wake up, I’ll tear everything apart.”

“Good,” Sera replied. “Let’s tear it all down.”

⸻

Back in Reality

Sera ripped the interface cables off the tank. Alarms screamed. The liquid drained with a gurgling hiss as Wisp collapsed into her arms, eyes fluttering open, her breath hitching with the first full inhale in years.

Then the room froze.

A Custodian stepped through the wall—not literally, but in that terrible way they phase, half here, half somewhere else. Its body was smooth, faceless, barely human. A thin voice emerged from its hollow frame.

“Subject 2 is not to be extracted. Surrender the anomaly.”

Wisp, still dazed, locked eyes with Sera. And Sera knew what to do.

“Sleepwalker,” she said. “Show me what you can do.”

Wisp raised her hand. The Custodian shuddered, staggered, then stopped—its mind suddenly trapped inside a recursive dream. It let out a fractured sound like glass breaking inside a bell.

They ran.