Ren Élias didn't remember leaving the Ascension Chamber.
One moment, he had been standing in front of the cold, empty pod where Kaela had vanished. The next, he was stumbling through the rain-slick streets of Echelon City, his mind a haze of static.
She was gone.
The thought kept looping in his head, but it refused to make sense.
Kaela Élias had walked into that machine with the promise of immortality, her consciousness set to ascend beyond the limitations of flesh. They told him she would transcend—become something more.
Yet when the process was over, there was nothing.
No messages. No digital presence. No proof she still existed.
Ren clenched his jaw as he weaved through the lower district's labyrinth of neon-lit alleys, his boots splashing through puddles reflecting the artificial skyline above. He should have never let her do it.
He should have stopped her.
The rain fell harder, washing the filth off the towering megastructures, filling the gutters where forgotten people huddled beneath the glow of electric billboards.
> ASCENSION PROTOCOL – THE NEXT EVOLUTION OF HUMANITY
YOUR FUTURE AWAITS
Lies.
Ren kept walking, heart pounding. He had spent years inside Zenith Dynamics, building the very infrastructure that powered their corporate utopia. He knew their systems. Their security. Their deception.
And he knew when they were hiding something.
He wasn't grieving. Not yet.
Because Kaela wasn't dead.
She was somewhere inside the network. And if that was true—then he could find her.
----------------------------------------------------
Ren's apartment was a hole in the wall—barely more than a darkened tech cave—but it had everything he needed. The moment he locked the door behind him, he activated his neural rig, a heavily modified decryption deck linked to a set of outdated—but highly illegal—hacking programs.
Multiple holo-screens flickered to life, bathing the room in shifting blue light as the system booted up.
Ren sat down, exhaling slowly. He only had one lead—Kaela's Ascension logs.
His fingers danced across the interface, bypassing standard security protocols, navigating through the deep layers of Zenith's network infrastructure. He wasn't foolish enough to breach their mainframe directly—not yet—but every user left behind data fragments.
And Kaela had to have left something.
He found her file after nearly an hour of searching, buried beneath layers of encrypted metadata.
> SUBJECT: KAELA ÉLIAS
ASCENSION PROTOCOL UNIT-07
STATUS: SUCCESSFUL
NEURAL SYNC: 100%
FINAL DATA TRANSFER: ERROR
POST-ASCENSION LOG: [RESTRICTED ACCESS]
Ren's stomach twisted.
There was an error.
Zenith had labeled her transfer successful, but something had gone wrong.
He pulled up the system logs, scanning the raw data line by line. That's when he saw it—an echo.
A faint, fragmented remnant of corrupted code. Almost invisible.
Ren's pulse spiked. This was Kaela's signal.
A trace of her consciousness, left behind.
With shaking hands, he began reconstructing the fragment, isolating its corrupted sequences, running deep-structure recovery algorithms to reassemble what was lost. The screen flickered as the process worked, piece by piece, pulling the echo back into form.
Then—
A voice.
Distorted. Broken. But unmistakably hers.
"…Ren…"
The sound sent a jolt through his spine.
The signal cracked, words warping between bursts of static.
"…don't… trust them…"
Then silence.
Ren's breath caught.
Kaela's voice had never been transferred.
She wasn't in the network's official Ascension records.
Which meant Zenith had lied.
Which meant—they had taken her.
----------------------------------------------------
Ren sat in silence, his hands still gripping the edge of his desk.
He had spent years writing security protocols for Zenith's neural systems, and he knew how their data worked. If Kaela had properly Ascended, there would be records—logs of her consciousness within the network.
But there was nothing.
Except that corrupted echo.
Zenith hadn't uploaded her.
They had erased her.
And now, he had only one option left.
If he wanted to find Kaela, he had to follow her.
Into the void.
----------------------------------------------------
Unauthorized Ascension wasn't just dangerous—it was suicide.
The process required a complete neural severance, transferring consciousness into the digital realm with no physical tether. If anything went wrong, there would be no coming back.
But Ren had spent years building the system. He knew the loopholes.
And he knew someone who could help him break in.
Nova.
She was a legend in the hacking community—one of the few people capable of bypassing Zenith's network security. If anyone could help him Ascend without corporate oversight, it was her.
Her underground lab was hidden beneath an abandoned warehouse, an illegal tech sanctuary filled with prototype hardware, tangled cables, and flickering neon monitors. Nova sat cross-legged in front of her rig, her dark blue dreadlocks woven with bio-fiber strands that pulsed with faint light.
She barely looked up as he entered.
"You're either desperate or suicidal," she muttered. "I'm guessing both."
Ren exhaled. "I need an Ascension link. No corporate controls. No oversight."
Nova raised an eyebrow. "You want to plug in without a safety net?"
Ren pulled a small device from his jacket—a rogue reentry tether.
"I have my own."
Nova whistled. "You really think she's still in there?"
"I know she is."
Nova studied him, her cybernetic eye flickering. "You do realize no one comes back the same, right?"
"I don't care."
She sighed, gesturing toward an old Ascension pod in the corner of the room. Unlike Zenith's sterile versions, this one was modified—custom enhancements designed for hacking, not corporate compliance.
"This is the best I can do," she said. "No guarantees."
Ren stepped forward.
"No turning back once you go in."
He climbed onto the platform, feeling the neural filaments connect to his spine, his temples, his fingertips.
A mechanical voice filled the air.
"Initializing unauthorized Ascension. Consciousness transfer commencing in T-minus ten seconds."
Ren closed his eyes.
Nine.
His heart pounded.
Eight.
Kaela's last words echoed in his mind.
Seven.
Don't trust them.
Six.
The empty Ascension Chamber flashed in his thoughts.
Five.
Zenith had lied.
Four.
If they had taken her—
Three.
—if they had trapped her inside something worse than death—
Two.
Then he would burn their entire system down.
One.
The neural link surged.
The world fractured into pixels.
Ren Élias Ascended.
And the void swallowed him whole.