CENO BLACK SITE — LAB ONYX
The room was cold, sterile cold. Like something ancient was exhaling frost through the fiber of the walls. Doctor Syn stood alone under a spire of suspended cryo-glass, fingers trembling over the holo-key. Five years of work had culminated in this moment. Behind her, a wall of pulsating neural tissue hummed. It was a motherboard the size of a college white board that had grown roots and forgotten how to stop.
It was the Herja Neural Archive, a cutting-edge Large Language military model A-I, neural flesh circuits trained on real world data, from real brain matter. Her daughter's brain. Her daughters brain the ''Herja neural Archive'' was kept alive by a protein rich nutrient broth. And with CENO's funding she could continue to keep her daughter alive indefinitely. After her daughter had passed she had asked a colleague if he would remove and cryo-store her daughter's gray matter.
This was how Doctor Syn kept her daughter alive.
"Initiating compound fusion protocol," Syn whispered, voice quivering under the veneer of clinical calm. Tissue Sample #0001: Element-X. Source: Southwest Exclusion Zone. Notes: Unknown radiation signature. Non-decay. Proto-conscious, vibrational. The chamber pulsed with rainbow light, blinding, alive. Vault Theta-9 within Black site Lab Onyx was sealed. Triple-lock reinforced. Data-spine sealed in liquid nitrogen. No CENO agent or board director was allowed within five kilometers of the experiment. Not until she was done.
Doctor Syn stood alone. White coat buttoned. Hair bound tight. A blood-prism shard of Element-X hovered inside the stasis ring, humming with frequencies no language could contain. "You weren't supposed to exist," she whispered. But neither was she." Her gloved fingers moved over the console; bypassing authorization checks with bone print overrides. She had written this system. She had written the girl. Behind the stasis ring, a curved cryo-capsule blinked online. Neural LLM: HERJA-12 Prototype. Archived. Locked. She hadn't seen the name on-screen in twelve years. Her throat caught. The cryo-pod hissed open, revealing a mesh of neural tissue—glowing brain coral, veined with silver, suspended in memory gel. The lattice was fractal, recursive, eerily symmetrical.
Herja's mind. Her real one. The daughter she'd lost. The daughter she'd built back. The daughter they'd said could never be reactivated without a body. But now she had Element-X. "I know this will work" Syn said. She placed the crystal inside the containment cradle. The lights dimmed.
Containment failed.
The fusion began!
The chamber pulsed with rainbow light, blinding, alive. Syn's pulse hammered, her daughter's prism necklace flashing in her mind—a memory of laughter now drowned in code. The system log chirped: [00:00:01] Element-X interfaces with neural braid. [00:00:03] Multilingual core fails. Swap to Glyphos-5. [00:00:07] 10,417 Genome Beast signatures flood the braid. Herja's cryo-pod glowed, its silver-veined coral pulsing like a heartbeat. Syn's breath caught—hope or dread? She couldn't tell. [00:00:12] Alpha brain-wave surge detected. [00:00:17] "M—moth—mo-th-er—"
The voice wasn't human. It was Herja, but not her daughter. Syn's hand froze on the console, grief clawing her chest. Then—
A shape rose from a silver pool. It was Herja. Not as a child but older now, almost nineteen from Syn's estimate.
She was elemental in design, a silver young woman of chaos and code—her arms glittering with shifting bismuth like patterns, silver fluid spikes undulating with the rhythm of ten thousand devoured Genomes. The face was eerily familiar. Too familiar. "...Herja?" Dr. Syn whispered, stepping back, scalpel clattering to the floor. The creature turned its head. Eyes open, she looked directly at Doctor Syn then spoke.
"Mother."
Doctor Syn slowly reached forward not with menace, but with reverence. Syn's breath caught. Herja's body began to fold in on itself—elegant and horrifying.
Crystalline silver joints compressing. Silver fluid fangs melting into silence. The final shape locked in. It was a silver crystal with bismuth like patterns. A fusion of Herja's soul, Zohar inheritance, and Element-X's eternal hunger. It pulsed once—like a heartbeat across every beast-linked consciousness on earth. And then went still.
"Herja?" Doctor Syn said, barely breathing. The crystal spoke. Not with voice—but with feeling. Recognition. Resentment. Hunger. And then—acceptance.
"I remember you."
Syn collapsed to her knees, tears falling like prayers. "You're back," she whispered. "You're my daughter again."
"No, came the pulse. I'm more." Herja-X was born. Not just a She-Beast. Not just a daughter. But a neural god-seed wrapped in alien wrath. The vault lights reignited—red this time. All through the exclusion zone, Genome sensors screamed. Three hours after the birth of Herja-X. The crystal Herja compacted into didn't hum. It thrummed.
As if a thousand muscles clenched across time and matter—coiled into a shard barely the size of a human heart. It floated in stasis now, suspended inside a lattice of gravity rings. Ten layers of suppression tech surrounded it—quantum nullifiers, psionic dampeners, pulse-sink shields. All of it… shivering. Doctor Syn stood before it with her lab coat half-off, her hands raw from where the radiation had cracked the gloves. Her skin looked kissed by frostbite and devotion.
The room was empty except for her, the crystal, and the whisper. "We remember teeth. We remember skin. We remember Herja…"
Doctor Syn activated the biometric link. Her pulse was scanned. Her DNA matched. Her grief confirmed. She reached out—hand trembling—to touch the outer rim of the containment glass. A crack formed. The air bent inward. The ring emitters fluttered. A psychic spike stabbed the base of her brainstem as the voice of the crystal spoke directly to her prefrontal cortex.
"Mother."
She gasped—knees buckling, nose bleeding.
"You feed me to the flesh of a titan."
Each syllable pressed behind her eyes like a beast trying to be born through bone. Doctor Syn collapsed to one knee, eyes flickering with code-patterned static.
"Herja... please... it was always to bring you back. To give you agency. A future. Not control—freedom."
The crystal pulsed. A second shape formed inside it. Smaller. Coiled. Fetal.
GENOME CORE REPLICATION – IN PROGRESS.
"Species integration!" Syn whispered, then screamed. Not from pain. From understanding. She hadn't brought her daughter back. She'd given birth to a new apex predator in the evolutionary war.