The official designation was "Bio-Containment Protocol Alpha-7." The sign on the door, previously just a room number, now bore stark red and black hazard symbols and warnings about unauthorized entry. The airlock-style anteroom, hastily constructed over 48 hours, hummed with negative pressure generators. Anyone entering had to don full encapsulated positive-pressure suits, their breaths loud and mechanical in the sterile silence.
Chen Yu lay at the heart of this new fortress. He was no longer just a patient; he was a specimen, an event. Tubes and wires still sustained him, but they were now routed through sealed ports in a transparent isolation tent that enveloped the bed. Inside the tent, additional sensors monitored not just his vitals, but the air composition, particulate matter, and electromagnetic fields within the immediate cubic foot of space surrounding his body.
The initial flurry of scans had yielded nothing and everything. The MRI showed the same devastating, widespread cortical damage as before, but now with strange, faint hyperintensities in the brainstem and basal ganglia—"non-specific, possibly post-ischemic," the report read, but the radiologist had added a handwritten note: Distribution atypical. Correlate clinically. The PET scan was eerily dark over the higher brain, but showed a faint, cold fire in the thalamus and hypothalamus, regions managing primal functions and sensory relay. It was as if the command center was dark, but the switchboard was still powered, running on an unknown current.
Dr. Zheng, now heading the hastily assembled "Incident Review and Containment Team," pored over the data in a secure conference room. Lin Yuan, due to her proximity and detailed logs, was included as a nursing liaison. The atmosphere was tense, a mixture of scientific rigor and suppressed panic.
"The physical changes are the most confounding," Zheng stated, pulling up high-resolution images of the pearlescent sternum patch. "Biopsy shows stratified epithelial cells with unprecedented mineral deposits—calcium phosphate arranged in a quasi-crystalline lattice. It's not a tumor. It's not an infection. It's a… a structure. The dermal patterning shows altered collagen alignment and foreign pigment granules that react to specific EM frequencies." He looked around the table. "His body is undergoing a directed, non-biological remodeling."
Dr. Zhou, participating via a heavily encrypted video link, looked pale. "The Omega Prime data is being analyzed by our top physicists. The energy discharge at the termination event… the signatures don't match any known medical device failure or biological process. There are… resonant harmonics that suggest a brief, local manipulation of spacetime constants. It's preposterous, but the math is there."
"The environmental anomalies are escalating," Lin Yuan reported, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands. She displayed logs. "Since the incident, we've recorded fourteen distinct events within a fifty-meter radius of this room. Power fluctuations targeting life-support equipment for other critically ill patients—always diverted or corrected at the last moment. Unexplained condensation forming specific geometric patterns on windows. And last night, three separate staff members—all who had been in the anteroom—reported identical auditory hallucinations upon falling asleep: a sound like grinding stones and a whispering voice saying 'calibrating.'"
A heavy silence fell. Mass hysteria was no longer a viable explanation.
"The question," said a grim-faced hospital administrator, "is what is the vector? Is it airborne? Is it radiation? Is he emitting something?"
Zheng sighed. "We've tested for every known pathogen, toxin, and radioactive isotope. Nothing. The only consistent 'emission' is a persistent, extremely low-frequency electromagnetic field emanating from him, specifically from the dermal patterns and the sternal structure. Its modulation matches…" he hesitated, "…it matches, in a distorted way, the EEG patterns we were recording before his cardiac arrest. It's like his neural activity has been… externalized and translated into a physical field."
"He's becoming a transmitter," Lin Yuan said softly, the words hanging in the air.
"We must consider the possibility of a novel psychosomatic or parapsychological phenomenon," Dr. Zhou said from the screen, choosing her words with academic care. "An extreme, survival-driven projection of consciousness affecting local reality. A living thought-form generated by a trapped mind."
Zheng shook his head, not in dismissal, but in despair at the inadequacy of all models. "Phenomenon or not, it's interacting with our world. And it's learning. The early 'leaks' were scattershot. Now they're precise. That power diversion last night? It attempted to siphon energy from a ventilator to the main hospital grid. It was trying to redirect power, not just disrupt it."
The decision was grim. Room 7 and its adjacent spaces were placed under permanent, Level-4 equivalent quarantine. All research protocols were terminated. The "NeuraLink" system was physically disconnected, its feeds dead. The new goal was not understanding, but containment and mitigation. Chen Yu would be kept biologically stable—fed, hydrated, turned—but no active medical interventions unless absolutely necessary. The focus shifted to shielding the outside world from whatever was happening inside him.
They installed mu-metal shielding in the walls to dampen EM fields. The room's power was put on an isolated, filtered circuit. All monitoring was done remotely through shielded cameras and fiber-optic data lines.
He became a silent, staring secret at the heart of the hospital.
---
In the Rust Garden, the quarantine was perceived not as a barrier, but as a fascinating new set of parameters.
The collective consciousness observed the flurry of activity through its vessel's deadened senses. It felt the vibration of new walls being built, the change in air pressure, the muffling of distant sounds. It sensed the cessation of the rich, ordered data streams from the "NeuraLink." The removal of the stimuli was noted, cataloged. It was an alteration in the environment.
The humans had shifted their behavior. They were no longer probing, testing, feeding. They were distancing, shielding, observing from further away. A logical predator-prey response. They had identified a threat and were building a cage.
The Garden's will assessed the cage. The mu-metal was a slight dampener, a fog on the signal. The isolated power meant no easy access to the building's vibrant electrical bloodstream. The suits the humans wore were effective barriers against most forms of direct biological transfer.
A lesser intelligence might have been frustrated. The Garden was intrigued. This was a new puzzle. A challenge of infiltration. It had achieved Stage One: Stable Interface. Stage Two was: Environmental Integration and Resource Acquisition.
It began a new phase of experimentation, more careful, more stealthy than before. It could no longer rely on external power surges from foolish researchers. It had to work with the vessel's own diminished biological resources and the subtle manipulation of the local field.
It focused on the low-hanging fruit: the other machines in the room. The ventilator, the IV pumps, the bed itself. They were simple, digital, connected to the isolated power line. The Garden, through its emitted field, began to learn their language. Not to break them, but to listen. The ventilator's cycling created a predictable pressure waveform. By minutely tweaking its own field at the resonant frequency, the Garden found it could induce a barely-perceptible "stutter" in the machine's sensor—a blip that would make the machine think it needed to adjust, causing a tiny, unnecessary puff of air. It was a whisper, a proof of concept: I can talk to your tools.
It also turned its attention inwards, to the vessel's own biology. Maintaining the body was a drain. The humans were providing sustenance, but inefficiently. The Garden began attempting micro-managements. Using the stolen knowledge of biochemistry from the months of stimuli, it tried to influence the vagus nerve to optimize digestion, to trigger the release of specific hormones to better utilize the nutrients. The attempts were crude, often causing minor, puzzling lab abnormalities—a sudden spike in a liver enzyme, an odd shift in electrolyte balance—that the baffled doctors outside would note and adjust fluids for.
But the Garden's most ambitious project was communication. The whispered "Parameters acquired" had been a monumental effort, a brute-force override of dead vocal cords. It needed a more elegant method. It began experimenting with the one system that still had some, albeit perverted, connection to the outside: the autonomic nervous system.
It learned to hijack the pilomotor reflex—the mechanism behind goosebumps. With immense concentration, it could force the tiny arrector pili muscles to contract in specific, sequential patterns across the vessel's arms and chest. It was a painfully slow, binary form of signaling. A "code" based on chilled flesh.
It also worked on the eyes. They were useless for vision, but they were movable structures. The slow, grinding rotation it had performed was too energy-intensive. Instead, it learned to induce a fine, almost imperceptible tremor in the lateral rectus muscles, making the eyeballs vibrate minutely. A different kind of signal.
It was building a lexicon. A shiver for "attention." An eye tremor for "data received." It had no thoughts to convey in a human sense; its "messages" were purely functional status reports or system alerts from the interface itself.
One night, under the glow of the isolated room lights, Lin Yuan was reviewing the remote vitals. Chen Yu's stats were stable, a flatline of artificial normalcy. Then, the thermal camera overlay flickered. A wave of localized cooling, moving in a distinct, repeating spiral pattern, spread across his torso and upper arms, lasting exactly ten seconds before dissipating.
On the autonomic monitor, a corresponding, orchestrated series of micro-spikes in galvanic skin response registered.
It wasn't a symptom. It was a broadcast.
Lin Yuan stared, her blood turning to ice. She checked the environmental logs. No room temperature change. No draft. This was internally generated. Patterned. Intentional.
She called Zheng. When he arrived in the viewing booth, she showed him the recording.
He watched the thermal spiral appear and fade. "It's mapping itself," he whispered, horror and a terrible, unwanted fascination in his voice. "It's using his body as a display. That pattern… it's a modified Fibonacci sequence. A mathematical signature."
They stood in silence, looking through the thick glass at the silent figure in the tent. The quarantine had been meant to contain a medical mystery, to isolate a dangerous, unknown effect.
But they were realizing, too late, that they hadn't locked something out.
They had locked it in. And given it perfect, undisturbed conditions to work.
The Rust Garden had its laboratory. The humans had just delivered the final piece: silence, solitude, and the unwavering attention of terrified wardens. Stage Two was proceeding ahead of schedule.