Neron: Doctor of Silent Nights

If anyone had told Elif Koral that her life would change at three in the morning under cold fluorescent lights, she wouldn’t have believed it. At 03:02, she was doing something extremely ordinary for a young scientist: staring into a microscope and fighting sleep. The lab was quiet in that heavy, artificial way. The ceiling lights hummed softly. Incubators blinked with small green LEDs. A centrifuge somewhere in the corner made a low, continuous sound like distant traffic. Outside, rain hammered against the tall windows. The research facility stood on a hill at the edge of the city, away from houses and lights. In the dark glass, Elif could see nothing but her own reflection and a few blurred red dots from cars far, far below. She adjusted the focus. On the screen connected to her microscope, the cells came into view: pale shapes, stained with weak color, crowding together like a small, quiet city. The problem was that they weren’t quiet at all. They should have been dying. This was AION – Phase II, a series testing how long certain modified cells could survive. A control group always started to break down around hour thirty-six. That was what the textbooks, the literature, and the project notes said. These cells were at hour forty-eight. They weren’t dying. They were… glowing. Not literally. Not like a movie. But here and there, a faint ring formed around the nucleus, as if the cells were drawing some invisible line and refusing to cross it. “Come on,” Elif muttered under her breath. “You’re not supposed to be this stubborn.” She took a screenshot, saved the image, and checked the automatically generated file name. AION_PHASE2_SERIES_09 AION. She knew what the name meant: “age,” “eternity,” “time.” When the project had started, everyone had laughed about it. Of course the immortality project would get a dramatic name. Officially, they weren’t working on immortality. They were “exploring cellular resilience and age-related disease.” Unofficially, everyone still called it the immortality project. Elif moved her chair back and rubbed her eyes. She had been in the lab since late afternoon. She was tired, hungry, and her phone screen, lying face down beside the keyboard, hadn’t lit up once. Her father had sent a message earlier in the evening: “Don’t work too hard. Sleep is also science.” She’d sent back a laughing emoji and kept working. The door clicked softly. Elif looked up, half expecting the night technician, Murat, to walk in with another terrible coffee from the machine downstairs. No one came in. She frowned and turned to the security panel on the wall. A small light flashed green above the door. The card reader had beeped, but the handle hadn’t moved. Probably just the system testing itself. It did that sometimes. She tapped the screen beside the microscope and opened the security camera view anyway. Four small windows appeared: – Corridor outside the lab – empty. – Stairwell – empty. – Elevator lobby – empty. – Main entrance – rain, darkness, and the faint shape of the glass doors. She watched the entrance camera for a moment. The rain blurred everything. The parking lot lamps turned drops into bright streaks, like falling needles of light. She was about to close the window when something shifted. A shadow separated itself from the darkness near the fence. Elif leaned closer. The camera resolution was terrible, and the rain made things worse. Still, she could see a tall shape moving slowly along the line of the fence, staying just outside the direct light. It looked like a man at first. But his shoulders seemed too broad for his height, and the way he moved wasn’t right. Too low, too fluid, as if his center of gravity was shifting between two different bodies. The shape stopped. It turned its head toward the camera. Elif held her breath. For a brief second, two small points seemed to catch the light — like eyes reflecting a car’s headlights at night. The entrance camera flickered. A warning message flashed in the corner of the screen: WARNING: ENTRANCE CAMERA – SIGNAL WEAK The image glitched, turned to gray static for half a heartbeat, then returned. The fence was empty. The shadow was gone. Elif exhaled, a short, nervous laugh escaping her throat. “Great,” she whispered. “Now I’m hallucinating.” She switched off the camera window. It was stormy. Cameras glitched. Shadows moved. That was all. The card reader above the door beeped again. This time, more sharply. She turned her head fast. “Murat?” she called. No answer. She stood up, walked to the door, and peered through the small glass square into the corridor. Empty. Just the pale floor, the white walls, and the emergency exit sign glowing green at the far end. She pressed her lips together. Her heart was beating faster than it should for such a simple thing. Nothing is happening. You’re just tired, she told herself. Don’t be stupid. Her gaze drifted to the only thing on the workbench that didn’t belong to her: a gray folder with a red label. AION – PHASE III – DRAFT (AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY)