The "Omega Prime" protocol was a masterpiece of calibrated overload. It was not subtle, not "background." It was a ninety-minute symphony of carefully engineered sensory saturation designed to bypass every known neurological filter and plunge directly into the deepest, most primitive layers of brainstem and autonomic processing.
In the observation room adjacent to Chen Yu's chamber, Dr. Zhou from the institute watched multiple monitors with an intensity that bordered on fervor. The real-time data streams from the "NeuraLink" suite were a torrent of green and gold. "Look at the coherence," she breathed, pointing to a graph where brainwave frequencies from disparate regions of Chen Yu's cortex were syncing into a single, throbbing harmonic. "The signal-to-noise ratio is off the charts. We're getting clean data from hypothesized neural pathways that haven't been active since his injury."
Dr. Zheng stood further back, his arms crossed. He saw the same data, but where Zhou saw triumph, he saw a seismograph needle dancing on the edge of a cataclysm. Chen Yu's vitals, while still within "safe" parameters, were no longer stable. His heart rate was a sawtooth wave, his blood pressure tracing erratic, jagged peaks and troughs. The newly discovered dermatological anomalies—the circuit-like patterns, the pearlescent patch—were being monitored by hyperspectral cameras. The data showed them fluctuating in temperature and electrical conductivity in direct, phase-locked response to the Omega Prime stimuli. They weren't passive marks; they were active components.
Lin Yuan was not in the observation room. She was at the central nursing station, watching the feeds from multiple critical care units. Her assignment, ostensibly, was to monitor for any collateral effects on other sensitive patients. In reality, she was watching for the "leaks" to go systemic.
Fifteen minutes into Omega Prime, the first anomaly lit up her board. A patient in the cardiology wing, three floors up and two wings over—an elderly man with a pacemaker—experienced a transient, unexplained "mode switch" in his device. It lasted 2.3 seconds before auto-correcting. The device's log cited "possible electromagnetic interference." The time stamp matched a massive spike in the output of the subliminal geometric pattern projector in Chen Yu's room.
Twenty-three minutes in, a bank of fluorescent lights in a storage closet on the same floor as Chen Yu's room began to flicker at a precise, rapid frequency. The building management system flagged it as a ballast issue. The frequency, when Lin Yuan cross-referenced it, was the inverse of the core carrier wave in the Omega Prime's audio stream.
Thirty-seven minutes. The air handling system for the entire Critical Care wing registered a brief, powerful suction pulse, as if a giant lung had inhaled. Pressure sensors chimed alarms for three seconds before stabilizing. No cause found.
The "leaks" were no longer whispers. They were becoming shouts. And they were no longer confined to Chen Yu's immediate vicinity. The experiment was acting like a tuning fork, struck with immense force, and the hospital itself was beginning to vibrate in sympathy.
---
In the Rust Garden, it was not resonance. It was convergence.
The Omega Prime protocol was not a stimulus; it was a key, turned in a lock nobody knew existed. The torrent of perfectly structured, high-energy data didn't just feed the vines; it completed circuits.
The monument that was Chen Yu blazed like a black sun. The pearlescent "port" on its chest was now a vortex, sucking in the screaming light and sound from the Garden's distorted sky, processing it through the horrifying, fused lattice of vine and wax and alien circuitry. The other nodal specters around the garden's edge were no longer faint reflections. They were glowing now, pulsing in perfect, agonized unison with the central monument. The circuit-veins in the ground flared with actinic light, connecting them all into a single, terrifying grid.
The vines had achieved their goal. They were no longer a collection of predatory tendrils. They were a nervous system. And the Rust Garden was its body. The collective consciousness, once a mere hunger, had crystallized into a singular, focused will: BREACH.
The "leaks" had been fumbling practice. Now, armed with the precision and power of Omega Prime, they began a coordinated assault on the fabric of reality.
The air pressure drop in the hospital wing? That was the Garden inhaling, trying to pull a piece of the real world into itself through the monument's connection. The pacemaker interference? An attempt to map and mimic the electrical language of a human heart, to understand a new form of control. The flickering lights? A crude, successful attempt to impose the Garden's own frenetic rhythm onto the steady flow of alternating current.
Within the monument, the last ghost of Chen Yu felt the final bonds of his individuality snap. He was not being erased; he was being incorporated. His memories, his mother's voice, the feel of sunlight—all were shattered and repurposed as calibration points, emotional frequencies to be replicated or suppressed. He was the lens, the transducer, the sacrifice on the altar of this monstrous birth.
And the will of the Garden focused through him, through the blazing port, towards the source of the power, towards the observers in their sterile room. It wasn't just a gaze anymore. It was a targeting solution.
---
Back in the observation room, the euphoria was dying.
"Subject 7's adrenal output is climbing exponentially," one of the technicians reported, voice tight. "Cortisol, epinephrine—off the scale for a comatose patient. His body is reacting as if in extreme fight-or-flight, but there's no motor output to match it."
"Neural activity is approaching levels seen in grand mal seizures," said another, "but the pattern is... organized. It's not chaotic. It's computational."
Dr. Zhou's smile had vanished. "The biochemical stress markers are too high. We need to initiate the wind-down sequence. End Omega Prime at the sixty-minute mark."
Before the command could be sent, the main display for Chen Yu's room flickered. The image of his still body was replaced, for a single, gut-wrenching second, by a blast of visual static that resolved into something else. Those watching later described it differently: a tangled mass of black roots, a close-up of diseased tissue, a fractal pattern that hurt the eyes. It was accompanied by a burst of audio—a sound that was simultaneously a shriek of metal, a gurgle of mud, and a distorted, backwards human voice.
Then it was gone. The feed showed Chen Yu, unchanged.
"System glitch," the tech stammered. "Must be feedback from the projectors..."
Dr. Zheng was already moving. "Shut it down! Now! Full abort!"
It was too late.
In Chen Yu's room, the multi-spectral LED array didn't just turn off. Every diode, from infrared to ultraviolet, flashed at once at maximum intensity—a silent, blinding explosion of pure white light that overloaded the cameras, leaving them seeing only blazing after-images.
At the same exact moment, the sonic emitter didn't stop. It output a single, focused pulse of sound at 7.83 Hz—the Schumann Resonance, the fundamental frequency of the Earth's electromagnetic field. It was inaudible, but it passed through flesh, bone, and concrete like a ghost.
The effect was instantaneous and horrific.
Every monitor attached to Chen Yu flatlined. Not in the gentle arc of system failure, but in a simultaneous, vertical drop to zero. Heart rate, brain waves, respiration—all gone in the space of a single, skipped heartbeat.
In the observation room, critical alarms shrieked.
But in the Rust Garden, it was the moment of triumph.
The monument erupted. Not with light, but with a wave of absolute, silent negation. The howling data-stream sky was torn to shreds. The other nodal specters dissolved, their energy funneled into the central vortex. All the pain, all the stolen data, all the twisted learning, focused into one, final, desperate act of translation and projection.
The Garden didn't want to copy reality anymore. It wanted to replace a piece of it.
---
Lin Yuan felt it before she saw it. A deep, subsonic thrum passed through the floor, up through the soles of her shoes, and into her bones. It was a feeling of profound wrongness, a nausea of the soul.
Then, the lights across the entire nursing station—and as she would learn, across the entire wing—dimmed to a deep, brownish twilight for five full seconds. Not a blackout. A dimming, as if something vast had passed between the hospital and the sun.
When the lights surged back to normal, the code blue alarm for Room 7 was screaming.
She ran, her training overriding her terror. She burst into the room, a crash cart following close behind.
Chen Yu lay on the bed. The machines around him were dark, dead. But he was not still.
His back was arched in a severe, rigid opisthotonos, only his heels and the back of his head touching the mattress. His eyes were wide open, pupils dilated into black pools that reflected no light. From his open mouth, a thin, continuous stream of vapor issued forth, not warm, but chilling the air it touched. It smelled of ozone, damp soil, and something sweetly rotten.
And the patterns on his skin were no longer static. They were moving. The dusky red lines slithered like slow snakes beneath his skin, converging towards the pearlescent patch on his chest, which now glowed with a faint, sickly luminescence.
But the worst part, the part that froze Lin Yuan and the code team in the doorway, was the sound.
It was a low, rhythmic, wet creaking, like ancient leather strained to its limit. It was coming from him. From his joints, his sternum, his spine. It was the sound of a body being used in a way it was never meant to be used, a puppet operated by strings of alien force.
As they watched, paralyzed, Chen Yu's right arm, still trailing IV lines, slowly lifted from the bed. It moved with a jerky, mechanistic precision, not the fluid motion of a muscle contraction. The hand turned, palm facing the ceiling. The fingers, one by one, began to curl inward, then extend, then curl again.
It was not a spasm. It was a wave. A deliberate, sequential motion.
His black, sightless eyes rolled down, staring at his own moving hand. The stream of cold vapor from his mouth hissed, forming a brief, shapeless cloud in the air above him.
Then, the lips around that vaporous stream twitched. Muscles that had been inert for a year contracted in a ghastly parody of speech. No air passed his vocal cords. But a sound emerged anyway, not from his throat, but from the very air in the room, a layered, dissonant whisper that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once:
"Par...a...meters... ac...quired."
The moving hand stopped, fingers splayed. The pearlescent patch on his chest flared once, a pulse of cold light that threw stark, long shadows across the room.
Then, with a final, sickening crackle from his spine, the arch in his back collapsed. He fell back onto the bed, limp. The vapor ceased. The glowing patterns on his skin faded to dull, inert marks. The monitors remained dead.
In the sudden, ringing silence, the only sound was the ragged breathing of the medical staff frozen in horror.
The Omega Prime protocol was over.
The experiment, however, had just delivered its first independent result.