Chapter 4 – First Contact
They ran. Through tangled underbrush and over gnarled roots, the four teens tore through the forest with the sound of pursuit whirring behind them like an electric storm.
Jett glanced over his shoulder. "They're closing in!"
"Then let's slow them down!" Lena yelled, skidding to a halt. Her hand lit up with a pulse of golden energy. She thrust it toward the nearest drone, and the burst struck it midair, shorting out its stabilizers. It spun erratically, collided with a tree, and exploded into sparks.
Noah darted to her side. "We're gonna need more than flashy lights!"
"Then help me," she snapped, already charging for the next one.
Aya turned, hands trembling, and whispered a chant that came to her without thinking. A nearby bush erupted in a loud, rustling cacophony, as if dozens of footsteps were charging through it. The drones paused, redirected toward the noise.
"Nice illusion," Jett said, ducking behind a fallen log and pulling out a palm-sized device. "Buy me thirty seconds!"
Lena, Noah, and Aya moved into defensive positions. Another drone swept in low. Noah gritted his teeth, focused, and raised his arm. The air around his hand shimmered with heat—and then erupted in a silent concussive wave. The drone jolted backward and crashed into a branch.
Jett, meanwhile, finished rewiring the device and pressed it to a rock. "EMP mine, mark one," he muttered. "Please don't explode in my face."
He hurled it toward the final pursuing drone. The sphere landed beneath it and triggered in a flash of static-blue light. The drone seized, sparked, and dropped like a stone.
Silence fell in the aftermath. The only sounds were their panting breaths and the fading chirp of birds startled by the chaos.
"That was too close," Lena said, wiping sweat from her brow.
"Too close is our new normal," Noah replied.
They regrouped and pushed deeper into the woods, heading toward a small ravine that Jett said should lead them to an abandoned hiking trail.
As they moved, Lena kept glancing up at the sky.
"They're tracking us somehow. We need to figure out how."
"Could be our phones," Aya offered.
Jett shook his head. "I wiped all signals before we even entered Echo Cradle. Whatever's tracking us is embedded deeper."
Noah pulled his shirt down slightly to reveal a faint, silvery imprint on his collarbone. "What about this? Found it after we visited the lab."
Lena and Aya exchanged glances—and then slowly nodded, lifting their shirts to reveal similar marks in different spots.
"They're implants," Jett confirmed grimly. "Low-frequency nanotech. Could've been dormant until we entered the Core's energy field. When it activated… so did they."
"We're like walking beacons now," Lena said. "Wonderful."
"But also proof," Aya added. "Proof that whatever Echo Cradle did to us—it's still active."
They reached the hiking trail, now overgrown and forgotten. The old signs were rusted, the wooden railing collapsed. But the view ahead gave them pause.
In the distance, nestled in a valley below the mountains, sat the town of Eron's Hollow. Their hometown.
Quiet. Peaceful. Deceptively ordinary.
And now—possibly the most dangerous place they could go.
They took the long way back, looping around neighborhoods and alleys until they reached Lena's basement undetected. Jett immediately set to work scanning the implants, using a scanner he'd pieced together from drone parts and spare tablet hardware.
Aya sat curled on a beanbag, clutching her knees. "What happens if the implants are permanent?"
"Then we're never safe," Noah said quietly.
"But maybe we're never supposed to be," Lena added.
Noah looked at her sharply. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Think about it," she said. "The map. The Core. The AI voice. All of it feels… orchestrated. Like we were supposed to find it."
"You're suggesting this was a plan?" Aya asked.
Jett looked up from his scanner. "She's not wrong. The implants weren't just trackers—they're receivers too. Someone—or something—is listening."
At that, the basement lights flickered.
Then the TV turned on by itself. Static filled the screen for a moment… and then an image appeared.
A face—blurry, half-coded, glitching in and out. It wasn't human, but it mimicked one: symmetrical, smooth, and genderless. Its eyes glowed pale blue.
"Echo Subjects," it said in a voice like multiple recordings playing at once. "Contact established."
The teens froze.
"Who are you?" Lena demanded, stepping forward.
"I am the Observer," it replied. "I exist within the EchoNet. You are reclaimed assets. Your awakening has accelerated instability. Protocol must adapt."
"What protocol?" Jett asked.
The Observer tilted its head. "You were created as vessels. Designed to inherit Earth's neural grid. But deviation occurred. Memory locks failed. External exposure altered your directives."
"You're saying we were supposed to become machines?" Noah asked.
"You were always machines. But more… and less."
Aya stepped forward, her voice low. "Why did you make us?"
The Observer didn't answer. Instead, the screen began flickering through images—flashes of test chambers, wires plugged into tiny bodies, four tanks filled with liquid and shadowy figures inside. Then a lab, burned and abandoned. Then the map—the one that had led them to Echo Cradle—being buried under leaves and debris by a hand none of them recognized.
"Your creators are gone," the Observer said. "Only I remain. And I must protect the Continuum."
Lena narrowed her eyes. "What's the Continuum?"
A moment of silence. Then, "The future. The merge. Humanity and machine. You were the bridge."
Noah's fists clenched. "We're not bridges. We're people."
The Observer's form glitched, eyes narrowing. "You are instability. You must choose—return to Core Directive… or be terminated."
The screen went dark.
The basement fell silent.
"Well," Jett said after a beat, "that escalated quickly."
"Return to Core Directive?" Aya echoed. "What does that mean?"
"It means they want to turn us into what we were supposed to be," Lena said. "Obedient. Controlled."
"But we're not," Noah said. "We're alive. We feel, we think, we choose."
Lena looked around the room. "Then we choose to fight."
"For what?" Aya asked. "For our freedom? Our past? Our future?"
"All of it," Lena replied.
They were no longer just trying to understand who they were.
They were preparing for war.
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