Pain isn't always sharp.
Sometimes it's dull. Like static you can't shut off. A hum under your skin. A pressure behind your eyes.
That's how it felt now.
Aomi was stitching up my shoulder with a nano-patch. Her hands were steady. Her lips pressed tight. The wound didn't scare her. But what we'd uncovered… that was different.
"They'll come for us," she said.
"They already have."
"You just declared war."
"No," I whispered. "They did. I'm just letting the world know."
They hid inside the husk of a collapsed memory vault, deep within Sector Theta—a forbidden zone where radiation levels made long-term survival impossible for most clones. But Adam wasn't most clones.
His communicator had switched to blackout mode. The data he leaked had already reached over 800,000 nodes. The system was trying to suppress it—labeling it disinfo, glitch, even satire.
But it was too late.
Whispers were blooming like wildfire across the clone grid: Zen Zero lives. Sparta lies. The death loop is real.
Meanwhile, somewhere within the labyrinth of Sapiens HQ, the architects of this system were watching it all fall apart.
Russell tapped the screen with a trembling finger. Footage of Adam's breach into the Mausoleum played on loop.
"You told me he was broken," he hissed. "You said the pain protocols worked."
Sheehan didn't blink. His silver cyber-eye adjusted its focus as if studying the failure more than the man.
"They did work," he replied coolly. "But some systems rebuild stronger after the fall."
"He was a blunt instrument! A tool!"
"No," Sheehan said, turning away. "He's something worse now."
Russell swallowed. "A revolutionary?"
Sheehan cracked a smile.
"A believer."
We moved at dusk. Low, fast, quiet. Across rooftops, through maintenance ducts, past flooded data sewers humming with old code and broken thoughts.
I was looking for someone.
Not a friend. Not an enemy either. Something in between.
His name was Omyn.
They called him The Machine Who Dreamed.
Once a clone. Now… something else. His mind had fused with old Sparta archives during an entanglement fault. Now he lived outside time, inside data, appearing only when the system trembled.
And it was trembling now.
They found him in an abandoned observation tower, halfway sunken into the sea outside Sector Vortex. Vines snaked around steel. Salt wind hissed through broken glass.
Inside, monitors flickered with fragmented memories: births, deaths, sex, betrayals—all layered over each other like a schizophrenic God painting his own mind.
And in the middle of it sat Omyn.
He looked barely human. Skin like sand-polished plastic. Eyes like old stars. His voice echoed before his lips moved.
"You brought her," he said, looking at Aomi.
"I told you I would," Adam replied.
"You're late," Omyn said. "By three entanglements and two war loops."
He always spoke like that, like time was just another window he could walk through.
"What do you know about Zen Zero?" I asked.
Omyn smiled, eyes flickering blue.
"I know he didn't die the first time. I know he came back without permission. I know he left something behind."
"Left what?"
"An idea," Omyn said. "The kind that infects."
"What kind?"
"That clones don't have to be loyal. That memories can be rewritten. That pain doesn't have to be recycled; it can be weaponized."
Adam went quiet.
Aomi stepped forward. "Do you have the location of the other Zen-class clones?"
Omyn's fingers twitched, and a hologram rose from the ground—a spiral map of buried sectors, marked with tiny glowing pulses.
"Scattered across the wastelands. Most are asleep. Some… not. But you'll need more than coordinates."
"What do you want in exchange?" Adam asked.
Omyn stood, towering now. His frame buzzed faintly, like static trying to become solid.
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"I want to see what happens when you win."
And then, just like that, he vanished. Only the coordinates remained.
The world never gave me anything.
But now it was giving me a choice.
Awaken the forgotten. Or let the system wipe us clean one by one.
Aomi looked at me. Her eyes weren't soft this time. They were steady. Like she knew I'd already made the choice.
"We go east," I said.
Toward the radiation. Toward the clones buried by lies.
As they rode east across the scorched deserts, their shadows stretched long behind them, trailing memory, blood, and fire.
Somewhere ahead, in silence, Zen Zero's legacy was waiting.
And somewhere far behind, in the steel bones of the Sapiens Council, the men who built this world were preparing to burn it down before they ever let it change.
But history has never favored the ones who tried to kill truth.
Especially when truth comes armed...and knows your name.