Aris
The phone call with Patrick ends. The silence in my apartment is a physical weight. I drop the phone on the bed as if it’s contaminated. My hands don’t shake. My breathing is even. The panic from before is gone, burned away by a purpose so cold and clear it feels like a shard of ice in my chest.
I sit at my desk, the sleek laptop a relic from a forgotten civilization. My fingers fly across the keyboard. Logins, passwords, security questions I haven’t thought about in five years. Mother’s maiden name. First pet. Street I grew up on. Ghosts of a dead girl.
I find my financial advisor’s number. I dial.
“Thorne Capital, this is Michael,” a cheerful voice says.
“Michael, it’s Aris Thorne.”
“Dr. Thorne! To what do I owe the pleasure? Calling to celebrate the Aethel stock surge?”
My stomach twists. “No. I’m calling to liquidate.”
The cheerful silence on the other end is deafening.
“Liquidate?” he finally says, his voice a few octaves lower. “Aris, your portfolio is up seventeen percent this quarter. Liquidating now would be… financially irresponsible.”
“I’m aware of the tax implications, Michael. Sell everything. My stocks, my bonds, my 401k. All of it.”
“All of it? Aris, is everything alright? This is your entire life’s savings. If you’re in some kind of trouble…”
“The only trouble I’m in is having my assets in the public market. Once it’s liquidated, I want the full cash balance wired to this account number.” I read him the details for a newly created shell account.
“That’s an international account with very high fees,” he says, his voice laced with professional concern. “And it offers very little federal protection.”
“That’s the point,” I say. “I want you to initiate the sale today.”
“It will take a few days to settle. I have to advise you against this, Aris. This is madness.”
“Your advice is noted. Just get it done.” I hang up before he can argue further. He thinks I’m throwing away my future. I’m trying to buy one.
Next, I open an encrypted browser. My fingers move with a muscle memory I thought was long gone. I find the forums, the dark corners of the web where preppers and engineers trade schematics and supplies. In my first life, it took me two years of scavenging to find a working water purification system. Now, I buy three industrial-grade units with a few clicks.
My shopping list is precise. Heirloom seed banks from a specialized vault in Norway. Technical manuals for everything from field surgery to hydroponic farming, all downloaded onto encrypted drives. Medical equipment that will be priceless in a world without factories: autoclaves, surgical steel instruments, broad-spectrum antibiotics, and centrifuges. No guns. No ammo. Those will be plentiful. Knowledge is the currency of the new world.
I pay with untraceable crypto, routing it through a dozen anonymous wallets. The deliveries are scheduled for a series of private storage units I’ve rented under a fake name. It’s a fortune. Everything I have. It feels like nothing.
Once the logistics are handled, I move to the most important part of the plan. I still have a flicker of hope. A stupid, naive part of me that died in that alley thinks maybe, just maybe, I can stop it before it starts.
I compile a data package. The specific research notes Patrick buried. The predictive models showing catastrophic mutation rates. I strip my name from the metadata, scrubbing it clean until it’s an anonymous ghost. I send it from a secure email address to one man: Ben Carter, a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist known for taking on corporate giants.
The subject line is simple: ‘The End of the World is Scheduled for April.’
He responds in twenty minutes.
*Carter: Who is this?*
*Me: A source. Read the attachment. Run the models. Aethel Corp is about to unleash a plague.*
*Carter: These are serious allegations. We need to meet.*
My heart gives a small, painful leap. He’s listening.
We agree on a coffee shop downtown. I wear a simple gray hoodie, a baseball cap pulled low. I use a burner phone. I watch him walk in, a man in his late forties with tired eyes and a rumpled suit. He scans the room, and I give a slight nod toward my corner booth.
He sits down, placing a small audio recorder on the table between us. “You can’t be serious,” he says, his voice a low rumble. No greeting. No small talk.
“Deadly serious,” I reply, keeping my voice even. “Project Chimera isn’t a vaccine. It’s a mutagen. It rewrites DNA. For sixty percent of the population, it will be a death sentence. For the rest… it creates monsters.”
He stares at me, his journalistic skepticism a palpable force field. “The data you sent me… it’s compelling. But it’s just data. It could be faked. I need a source. A name.”
“The source is Aethel’s own internal research. The name you want belongs to a dead woman. Giving it to you would get me killed before this conversation is even over.”
“Then give me something else,” he presses, leaning forward. “Leaked internal memos. A whistleblower who’s willing to go on record. A paper trail. Anything.”
“The trail has been erased. The man in charge, Dr. Patrick Croft, is an expert at burying his mistakes. The data is all I have.”
He leans back, a sigh of frustration escaping his lips. “Ma’am… people send me conspiracy theories every day. Aliens in the White House, secret societies running the stock market. A biotech company intentionally engineering a plague to… what? Sell the cure?”
“There is no cure,” I say, my voice dropping to a whisper. The words feel like acid. “That’s the point. It’s population control disguised as a public health miracle.”
He shakes his head slowly, a look of profound pity in his tired eyes. It’s a look I’ve never seen before. No one ever pitied me in the hellscape. They feared me.
“I can’t print this,” he says softly. “Without a verifiable source, a human being to attach this to, it’s just a wild story. My editor would laugh me out of the building. I’d be ruined.”
“So your career is more important than billions of lives?” I ask, the ice in my chest cracking.
“My career is my credibility! Without it, I’m just a crackpot shouting on a street corner. No one listens. Nothing changes. You want to stop this? Give me something I can use. Give me proof.”
“The proof is coming in six months,” I say, my voice hollow. “But by then, it’ll be too late.”
I stand up, my chair scraping against the floor. His face is a mask of professional regret.
“I’m sorry,” he says. And I know he means it. But his sorrow is useless.
I walk out of the coffee shop and don’t look back. I drop the burner phone into a storm drain. It’s over. The world doesn’t want to be saved.
I stand on the street corner, the city buzzing around me with a life it doesn’t know is temporary. People hurry past, laughing, talking on their phones, living in the final sun-drenched moments of a world on the brink of collapse.
On a massive digital billboard across the street, an advertisement flickers to life. It’s Patrick. He’s smiling that perfect, camera-ready smile, wearing a pristine lab coat. The Aethel Corp logo gleams beside him.
The tagline appears in bold, elegant letters: *Aethel Corp: Building a Better Tomorrow.*
A bitter laugh escapes my lips. It’s a raw, ugly sound.
They won’t listen. You can’t save people who are sprinting toward their own executioner with open arms.
My plan was flawed. I can’t save the world. The world is a lost cause.
But I can save a few. I can build a sanctuary. A fortress. An ark to ride out the coming storm.
I need more than supplies. I need scale. I need resources, manpower, and security on a level I could never achieve alone. I need someone who builds impenetrable fortresses for a living.
My mind flashes to the first year after the fall. The fragmented news reports. The whispers of fortified zones that held out longer than any government facility. Zones built with brutal efficiency and cutting-edge technology.
Vanguard Solutions.
And its formidable, ruthless CEO.
Caelan Huxley.
