Origin Protocol
616 Words
"Memories are data. Data can be altered. But the truth—the truth is always written in the blood."
— The Architect, Classified Log #17
Nolan couldn’t sleep.
He sat still in the damp shelter, staring at a faded photograph.
The child in the image was him. No mistake about it. The face, the eyes. But the man standing beside him—the one who signed as "A"—who was he?
He had heard that name in dreams blurred by static: The Architect. Creator. Betrayer. The one who made Red Pulse.
And now, the dreams were no longer just dreams.
Three days later — Sublevel 9, New Century City
Beneath the city, below the power plants and luxury districts, existed a forbidden place: The Archive.
Here, HELIX stored all biological data from banned experiments. And tonight, Nolan was breaking in.
He wasn’t alone.
"Didn’t think you’d survive," a woman's voice buzzed through his earpiece. "But I guess Red Pulse doesn't pick just anyone."
Her name was Lira—a former biotechnician who once worked under The Architect. She found Nolan after tracking the anomaly his revived pulse triggered. She claimed she wanted to help. Whether she meant to save him or study him, Nolan couldn’t tell.
Either way, he needed her.
They crept through the outer locks, slipped past derelict labs, past rusted equipment and decomposing test subjects floating in shattered vats.
Lira led him to a DNA-encrypted data core.
"Place your hand here," she instructed.
As Nolan touched the scanner, the screen blinked:
IDENTITY CONFIRMED: NOLAN / SUBJECT CODE: A-0X
CLEARANCE GRANTED — PROJECT ORIGIN
Nolan stepped back. "A-0X... What does that mean?"
Lira stared. "You’re the prototype. The Architect made you using his own DNA, fused with the original Red Pulse genome. You’re a hybrid—half synthetic intelligence, half legacy blood."
He was speechless.
"And my mother...?"
"She smuggled you out. Not your birth mother. But she loved you like her own. That part was real."
The core unlocked.
A flood of files appeared: genetic schematics, failed clone logs, trial footage. Screams. Children in restraints. Injections. Electroshock.
One survived.
In the footage, a toddler—Nolan—draws a strange spiral in blood on the sterile floor. No one had taught him. The same spiral marked the Architect's personal logs.
"You weren’t just created," Lira whispered. "You were designed to remember what he knew. Red Pulse doesn’t just enhance—it unlocks ancestral memory."
But before they could extract the data, sirens howled.
"We’re compromised," Lira hissed. "MOVE."
From the vents above, skinless humanoids dropped like spiders. Echoforms. Failed experiments left to guard forbidden zones.
Nolan didn’t hesitate.
He felt their movement, heard fluid shift in their veins, saw impact vectors before they landed.
Red Pulse rewrote his mind into a living combat algorithm.
An Echoform lunged. Nolan twisted, elbowed its throat, ripped a spinal fiber from its back, and used it as a whip.
Lira watched, stunned. "You’re mapping strategy through inherited memory... no one has ever done that."
"No one ever lived through what I did," Nolan growled.
They escaped with a copy of the core.
As they limped through a maintenance shaft, Lira murmured, "HELIX will come for you now. But if you really are the Architect’s heir... you might finish what he couldn’t."
"You mean destroy them?"
"No," she said. "Free the others like you."
On a rooftop in the Heap, Nolan stared out at New Century's gleaming skyline. In his hands: a map of HELIX's hidden Red Pulse factories—next-gen versions designed for mental control.
The wind smelled of rust, ozone, and old blood.
"If I’m the last key... it’s time to unlock hell."
- Writer
