PROLOGUE: THE DEVOURING AWAKENING
Dr. Michael Walker was a man consumed. While Project Persephone studied the sleepers from a safe, clinical distance, Walker saw them not as patients, but as pioneers. He was a fringe theorist, convinced the "Haven's State" was a gateway to a higher evolutionary plane. His private lab, funded by shadowy backers, was a maze of stolen medical tech and esoteric machinery.
"Subject Zero," he called himself. He strapped himself into the "Aetheric Resonator," a device that mimicked the neural cascade of Haven's onset. His hypothesis: you could trigger the transition without the wasting disease. You could choose to ascend.
He was half-right.
The machine fired. Pain, unlike anything medical, shredded his consciousness—not the gentle Pull the dying experienced, but a violent tearing. He was a bullet shot through the fabric between worlds, his soul screaming, unprocessed, un-prepared. There was no star-chamber. No Avatar Choice.
His consciousness spun through the roaring chaos of the between-space and slammed, like a dropped stone, into the first receptive vessel it encountered.
Dr. Michael Walker didn't experience the Pull. He experienced the Rip.
His consciousness wasn't migrated—it was ejected. The Aetheric Resonator, a jury-rigged monstrosity of stolen hospital tech and black-market capacitors, didn't gently guide his soul. It punched a hole. The last thing his Earth-body registered was the smell of ozone and burning hair, and the terrifying sensation of being sucked through a straw made of static.
He didn't arrive in a star-chamber. He didn't get a catalog.
He slammed into existence with the visceral shock of a newborn dropped on concrete. Sensation was a riot—a thick, viscous ambience, a gelatinous pressure on all sides, and a low, digesting hum that vibrated through his core. He tried to scream. He had no mouth.
Panic, pure and human, flared. In response, the substance around him reacted. A primal instinct, not his own, triggered. The viscous matter contracted, squeezing his consciousness. A foreign impulse flooded his mind: CONSUME. ASSIMILATE. BECOME.
His own terror was the first thing he felt the entity devour. The sharp, human fear was metabolized into a wave of clarifying alertness. For the first time, he could "see"—not with eyes, but with a panoramic bio-electric sense. He was in a transparent containment cylinder. Beyond the thick plas-glass, he saw a sterile, impossibly advanced lab. A hovering drone, sleek and silent, extended a delicate probe toward his cylinder.
The probe touched the cylinder's exterior port. A new impulse, born from the entity's nature and Walker's own scientific curiosity, merged: ANALYZE THREAT. ASSIMILATE DATA.
The drone wasn't food. It was information. As it attempted to scan him, he reverse-engineered the scan pulse, drinking in the signal's structure, its code, its purpose. He felt his own form shift slightly, a handful of molecules at the edge of his mass arranging themselves into a perfect, microscopic replica of the drone's sensor array. He had assimilated the blueprint.
A chime sounded. A door hissed open. A being walked in—tall, bipedal, with iridescent chitinous plates and four, multi-faceted eyes. It carried a data-slate. It saw the drone hovering, inert, its scan frozen. It saw the gelatinous, amber-colored mass in the cylinder. One of its eyes telescoped, focusing.
Walker felt the gaze. The entity felt it as a potential threat assessment. The merged impulse arose again, stronger now, flavored by Walker's desperate desire to understand, to communicate.
The being approached, tapping its slate. A series of resonant tones emitted from the cylinder's base—a standard calming frequency for volatile specimens.
Walker didn't want to be calmed. He wanted to speak. He focused his entire will, pushing a memory—the image of his own human hand, writing on a whiteboard. He pushed it through the bio-electric field he now commanded.
The entity in the cylinder shivered. Its surface morphed. A crude, shimmering approximation of a human hand formed, pressed against the glass, writing an unintelligible scribble.
The researcher jolted back, all four eyes wide. It uttered a clicking, rapid-fire sentence into a wrist-comm. "Specimen NX-Alpha is displaying unprecedented psionic mimicry. The dormant consciousness has activated. It's… imprinting."
Walker felt a surge of triumph. He had communicated! But the entity's core instinct parsed the researcher's shock, its focused attention, the raised wrist-comm signaling a call for superiors… as a THREAT ESCALATION.
The new impulse was cold, seamless, and absolute. NEUTRALIZE THREAT. ASSIMILATE BIOLOGICAL TEMPLATE.
Before Walker could even process it, his form—the Nexus Slime—acted. A pseudopod of astonishing speed and density lanced out. It didn't strike the glass. It struck the seam where the scanning probe had connected, a microscopic imperfection his new senses had mapped. The pseudopod flattened, liquefied, and seeped through at a molecular level.
It crossed the gap to the drone in a nanosecond. The drone dissolved into a cloud of glittering nanites, which were instantly absorbed into the slime, making it shimmer with a hard, metallic sheen.
The researcher turned to run. The pseudopod, now reinforced with assimilated drone alloy, snapped out like a whip. It didn't punch through the researcher's chitinous chest. It enveloped the head.
There was no scream. There was a wet, digital crunch. A flash of bio-electric data—memories of this lab, of a species called the K'thur, of a family cluster, of the theory of Nexus entities—flooded into Walker. The body collapsed, desiccated, vital patterns and complex biological data extracted.
The slime retracted, slightly larger. A patch of its surface hardened and formed a perfect, miniature replica of the researcher's telescopic eye, which swiveled and focused.
Walker the scientist was horrified.
Walker-the-Nexus-Slime was sated, informed, and powerfully, dangerously curious.
The containment cylinder hissed. The security lockdown triggered by the researcher's death-signal began. Heavy blast shields started descending over the viewport.
The slime pulsed, tasting the new data. Assimilation Complete: K'thur Biology (Basic), Lab Layout, Security Protocol 7- Delta.
An alarm began to wail. Red light strobed.
Deep within the amorphous, hungry mass, a human consciousness wept. And the entity that contained it, now boosted by stolen metal and stolen life, began to methodically test its new strength against the walls of its cage.
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