From Hollow Song to Living Breath

The city of Enoch-Prime glittered with the cold efficiency of polished steel and artificial suns. It was the jewel of the Continuum—where science had conquered death, or so they claimed. Beneath the surface of its gleaming towers, in the sterile halls of the Ascension Labs, the greatest minds worked tirelessly to refine the process that had reshaped humanity. It was here that consciousness was freed from the decaying husks of biology and transferred into perfect, undying vessels.

For most, the transition was seamless.

Dr. Kieran Vasquez was one of the first to undergo the transfer. His original body had been failing—his heart a dying ember, his hands unsteady. But the Ascension Labs had promised something better. He stepped into the Transfer Chamber, felt a moment of disorientation, and then… clarity. His new body was indistinguishable from the old, only perfected. No weakness. No decay. His mind, his memories, his sense of self—all intact. He went home, kissed his wife, and returned to his research. Life had not ended. It had simply continued.

That was the promise.

That was the lie.

Beneath the ruins of St. Ignatius General, a hospital abandoned after the first Cybernetic Wars, the Lazarus Collective worked in the shadows. The air was thick with the scent of old antiseptic and damp concrete. Rusted IV stands leaned against walls scrawled with old emergency codes. Flickering monitors, salvaged from scrapyards and black markets, illuminated the makeshift lab with an eerie glow. Power surged unpredictably, threatening to plunge them into darkness at any moment. But they kept working, pushing against the inevitable, because they believed in something greater than survival.

They believed in resurrection.

Not the digital ghosts of the elite, not consciousness stored in sterile mainframes. They sought something real. Something impossible.

Dr. Cassian Reed had once been one of the Continuum’s rising stars, a biomedical engineer groomed for greatness. But that was before he saw what should not have been possible. Before the night, a patient coded on the table—flatlined, declared dead—only to wake minutes later, not just alive, but changed. He spoke of things no one should know. Of a place no scan had ever recorded.

The report was sealed. Cassian was ordered to forget.

He didn’t.

Now, he and his team—exiles, rogue scientists, believers in what the world had deemed impossible—operated in secret, their work a direct violation of the Continuum’s absolute decree: Death is permanent. Resurrection is forbidden.

Tonight, they stood at the edge of everything.

Liora Voss, their latest subject, had been dead for 72 hours. The body was beyond hope when they found her discarded in the city’s underbelly. According to every law of nature, every law of science, she should be nothing more than a husk.

But as Cassian watched, her chest rose. Not a shallow twitch of post-mortem muscle movement, but a full inhale, deep and deliberate. The brittle, grey pallor of her skin shifted as if something beneath the surface was rekindling life. Her fingers flexed, the motion sluggish at first, then stronger.

Then, impossibly, her eyes opened.

Not the dull, mechanical flicker of a reanimated shell. Not the cold, glassy stare of a memory stored in synthetic flesh. No—her eyes burned, golden and bright, as if something vast and unknowable had cracked through the fragile boundary of mortality itself. The air in the room shifted, humming with something electric, something *alive.*

Liora gasped, a ragged sound as if dragging breath from the void itself.

Her gaze snapped to Cassian. And then, before he could say a word—

“You have to leave,” she rasped, voice raw but urgent. “They know.”

The words slammed through the lab like a shockwave.

The monitors flashed red. The power flickered. A low hum vibrated through the underground facility, growing into a roar.

The Continuum was here.

Cassian’s pulse pounded. They had been careful. No transmissions, no data leaks. And yet, somehow, they had been found.

A voice boomed through unseen speakers.

“Dr. Reed. You are in possession of stolen technology. Surrender, and you will not be harmed.”

A lie. Cassian knew how this ended. He’d seen what happened to those who defied the order of things. The Continuum didn’t forgive, and it didn’t forget.

He grabbed the drive containing all their research. Years of work reduced to a single chip, small enough to slip into his palm. If he lost it, the Lazarus Collective was finished.

The others were already moving. Elena, their surgeon, shoved a case of medical supplies into a bag. Malek, their hacker, muttered curses as he scrambled to wipe their system. Aaron, the youngest of them, gripped a makeshift weapon as if they stood a chance against the enforcers’ cybernetic precision.

The walls shook. Dust rained from the ceiling.

“We don’t have time,” Elena hissed.

Cassian looked to Liora, the woman who should not be alive. She was watching him with strange, steady eyes. Eyes that saw more than this room, this moment.

“There’s another way out,” she said.

Cassian didn’t hesitate. He gripped the drive tighter and nodded to his team.

The resurrection had begun.

From Hollow Song to Living Breath
(shorter version)

The city of Enoch-Prime glittered with the cold efficiency of polished steel and artificial suns. It was the jewel of the Continuum—where science had conquered death, or so they claimed. Beneath the surface of its gleaming towers, in the sterile halls of the Ascension Labs, the greatest minds worked tirelessly to refine the process that had reshaped humanity. It was here that consciousness was freed from the decaying husks of biology and transferred into perfect, undying vessels.

For most, the transition was seamless.

Dr. Kieran Vasquez was one of the first to undergo the transfer. His original body had been failing—his heart a dying ember, his hands unsteady. But the Ascension Labs had promised something better. He stepped into the Transfer Chamber, felt a moment of disorientation, and then… clarity. His new body was indistinguishable from the old, only perfected. No weakness. No decay. His mind, his memories, his sense of self—all intact. He went home, kissed his wife, and returned to his research. Life had not ended. It had simply continued.

That was the promise.

That was the lie.

Beneath the ruins of St. Ignatius General, a hospital abandoned after the first Cybernetic Wars, the Lazarus Collective worked in the shadows. The air was thick with the scent of old antiseptic and damp concrete. Rusted IV stands leaned against walls scrawled with old emergency codes. Flickering monitors, salvaged from scrapyards and black markets, illuminated the makeshift lab with an eerie glow. Power surged unpredictably, threatening to plunge them into darkness at any moment. But they kept working, pushing against the inevitable, because they believed in something greater than survival.

They believed in resurrection.

Continue reading the full story here.