MistNovel - Read Web Novel Stories & Fiction Online

The laboratory's sterile silence was a constant, broken only by the soft hum of processors and the distant, filtered echo of the Warden's evening address. The speech, piped through every speaker in Aethel like a daily prayer, was a familiar soundscape to Dr. Elias Houston. He no longer processed the words themselves, just the cadence of their delivery, the same platitudes about sacrifice, order, and humanity's last bastion of hope. They were the background noise of his life, as consistent and ignorable as the purified air cycling through the vents.

He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, the smooth plastic cool against his skin, and leaned closer to the primary display screen. Its blue-white glow cast his pale features in a ghostly light, reflecting the endless columns of data that were his world. At twenty-eight years old, he had never seen sunlight that was not filtered through Aethel's atmospheric processors, a perfect and unwavering golden hue. He had never felt rain that had not been purified and rationed, and he had never known a home beyond these pristine walls, which seemed to press in on him with the weight of impossible questions.

The pre-Blight epidemiological data scrolled past, a river of forgotten numbers and statistics. His official assignment was simple enough: catalog and verify the archives, a task most of his colleagues considered digital housekeeping. For Elias, however, it was an obsession. His passion was to find the one detail everyone else had missed, the single data point that could unlock the truth.

"There has to be something," he muttered, his voice a dry whisper in the quiet room. His fingers danced across the holographic interface, manipulating data streams with practiced ease. "Forty years of data, and they want me to believe it was just a random mutation? Statistically improbable."

The Warden's voice continued its distant sermon, a soothing baritone designed for mass comfort. "...through discipline and unity, we preserve the light of civilization..."

Elias had been hearing that message since his childhood in Aethel's academic sector. He was a product of the system, fast-tracked through medical school and handed a prestigious research position. His life had been carefully controlled and meticulously monitored. Every breakthrough he made was immediately classified, every question that strayed too far from approved parameters was quietly and politely redirected by his superiors. He was supposed to be grateful. Most of the world’s survivors, if the official reports were to be believed, lived in squalor in the Outlands, assuming they lived at all. He had climate control, synthesized nutrition packs, and access to what remained of humanity's collective knowledge. In exchange, he was supposed to stop asking why.

The diagnostic program he had written, an act technically against protocol, finished its sweep of the archived viral samples. He had been careful to hide its signature within legitimate system maintenance routines. Elias expected the same results he always received: degraded data, corrupted files, and the digital detritus of a world that had collapsed before it could properly document its own death.

Then the screen flickered. A single line of text appeared, stark against the scrolling columns. ANOMALY DETECTED.

Elias straightened in his chair, his heart rate ticking upward with a sudden, sharp rhythm. A fragment, flagged by his program. It was heavily corrupted and barely readable, but it was there. He opened the file with trembling fingers, his knuckles white.

The data was a mess of broken code and missing sections, a digital ghost. Yet what remained made his breath catch in his throat. It detailed cellular regeneration patterns, but not the cancerous, uncontrolled growth that characterized the Blight. This was something different. The viral behavior did not match any known strain. And then there was a designation, a project name that sent a chill down his spine: Project Seraphim.

"What is this?" he whispered, his voice tight.

He ran the fragment through every analysis tool he had, both official and custom-written. The results that came back were staggering. The fragment showed evidence of induced cellular immortality, not the mindless, destructive immortality of the Blighted, but something controlled, even engineered. The notation referenced a "stable vector" and a "controlled substrate." This was not a product of natural mutation. This was deliberate design.

Elias sat back, the ergonomic chair offering no comfort as his mind raced. The official narrative, the one taught to every child in Aethel, was that the Blight had emerged from global environmental collapse, a perfect storm of climate change and viral evolution. It was a random, tragic, and inevitable event. This single data fragment suggested that narrative was a lie.

He checked the fragment's metadata, his hands shaking as he typed. The origin was a private research facility in what had been the northern industrial sector. The area was long since abandoned, lost to the Outlands decades ago. The timestamp was the most damning piece of evidence. It was dated three months before the first documented Blight outbreak.

This was it. The breadcrumb he had been searching for his entire career. It was proof that someone had known, had been working on something related to the virus, and had maybe even created it. He pushed that thought away. It was too far, too paranoid.

But the data was also too important to ignore.

Elias initiated a secure isolation protocol, copying the fragment to a shielded partition of his personal workstation. His rigorous training screamed at him to report his findings through the proper channels. A discovery of this magnitude could change everything about their understanding of the Blight. His instinct, however, honed by years of watching his research disappear into bureaucratic black holes, told him that reporting it would ensure it was buried forever.

The Warden's address reached its crescendo, his voice filling the lab. "...and we must never forget that order is the price of survival. Chaos is death. Unity is life."

Elias stared at the corrupted data fragment, this whisper from a dead world. For the first time in years, he felt something other than intellectual frustration. He felt a profound sense of purpose. And beneath that, barely acknowledged, was a deep and primal fear. He already knew, deep down, what this meant. If Project Seraphim was real, if someone had been experimenting with this virus before it destroyed the world, then everything the Warden had built Aethel upon was a lie. Lies that big, he suspected, were always protected by those who told them.

He saved his work, encrypted it with a custom algorithm he had designed himself, and shut down his workstation. Tomorrow, he would begin digging deeper. Tonight, he needed to think, to plan, and to decide whether finding the truth was worth losing everything he had ever known.