Part 3: Eden Compound
The Eden Initiative site wasn't listed on any map.
Buried deep in a valley carved out by ancient glaciers, it stood like a broken lung beneath a sky choked with frost. Half the dome was collapsed, swallowed by ice and time. The other half still clung to life—barely. Wind howled through a fractured support strut, making a sound like something whimpering in the dark.
The outer door was sealed with rust and decay.
Kairo didn't open it, he just walked through it.
His shoulder made contact, and the door gave way with a bone-shuddering crunch. Steel and polyglass shattered inward. The corridor beyond was dark, lit only by flickering emergency nodes, dying pulses of red light that smeared against bloodstains decades old.
He didn't speak, he didn't reduce pace, he just kept walking.
Every footstep echoed in waterlogged meat.
Eden had been a dream once. A Paragon experiment in post human biology. A vault of genetic ambition gone feral. Inside, vats held the remains of attempted gods—creations left to rot. They hadn't all died.
The first room he entered was lined with glass tubes. Inside, abominations.
One twitched, a lump of translucent tissue shaped like a child, covered in mouths that breathed in unison. Another had no face—just a smooth oval of flesh that pulsed like a heart, its hands scraping endlessly at the tank.
Kairo looked at them and felt nothing.
He passed a wall of embryos that had grown past viability, forming tumors that pressed against the glass. A machine in the corner whispered on loop:
"Do not open. Do not open. Do not—"
The floor turned wet.
A failed vat had cracked open. Fluid, thick, amber looking, stinking—covered the tiles. Something dragged itself across it, leaving streaks like veins.
It wasn't hostile. It wasn't alive. It was remnants. Breathing meat.
He walked past it.
The hallway pulsed. Somewhere deeper, a turbine hummed—ancient and dying. The air tasted like amniotic rot. Every breath dragged through his throat like old wire.
Ahead, an atrium once used for testing adaptive behavioral interfaces, Now a mass grave.
The ceiling was high and cracked. Long tables stood covered in restraint gear—bloodstained, rusted. The walls were covered in fingernail gouges. Dried handprints reached up like they had tried to climb away from something horrendous.
At the far end of the room stood a single intact tank. Inside it, a humanoid mass of twitching limbs. No eyes. Dozens of ears. A single heart visible through translucent skin. It stared without seeing.
It pressed a hand to the glass.
Kairo didn't break it.
He bowed his head. Then moved on.
And then—
He felt it.
A pulse in the air. A tension in the marrow. Something close. Something coming.
He turned. Eyes narrowed. Back straightened.
Like a cat on high alert.
The scent wasn't blood. It wasn't even heat.
It was synchronization.
Whatever was out there…
Was made of the same code.
He stepped through a shattered decontamination seal, dust rolling around his legs. The far wall trembled. A shadow moved—blurring fast, too fast.
0 had arrived.
The clone vats behind Kairo hissed as temperature sensors shorted from proximity.
Somewhere, a speaker crackled. A single word echoed through the ruined chamber, voice raspy and dry but threathening:
"Kairo."