THE ASCENSION SYSTEM

CHAPTER 32

The First Remnant

I woke to the taste of blood in my mouth.

For a second, everything was wrong—blurry, twisted. The world flickered like a broken screen, and shadows stretched in directions they shouldn’t. My heartbeat was loud, too loud, like it was trying to hammer its way out of my chest. Then, just as quickly as it started, the distortion snapped back into place, leaving me gasping on a cold, cracked floor.

Kane's voice cut through the haze. "Tony."

She was crouched beside me, eyes sharp, body tense. There was dust in her dark hair, and a thin cut ran along her jaw, but she looked intact. Alive.

"You're okay," she said, like she was trying to convince herself. "I caught you before you hit the ground. Mostly."

My head throbbed. I forced myself upright, biting back a groan. "Define 'mostly'?"

"You didn’t die. You’re welcome."

I let out a weak, breathy laugh. "Guess I owe you one."

She stood, scanning the room we’d landed in. It was some kind of hideout—low ceilings, metal walls, the scent of old paper and rust hanging in the air. The place felt… abandoned. But not empty.

Kane took a slow step forward, her fingers twitching toward her knife. "Someone lived here."

I followed her gaze. There were papers scattered across a desk, some pinned to the walls with jagged handwriting scrawled in ink. A monitor sat in the corner, dark and silent, a thin layer of dust coating the screen. Next to it, a chair was tipped over, as if someone had left in a hurry.

No signs of struggle. No blood. Just absence.

I moved toward the desk, my fingers brushing over the notes. Diagrams, coordinates, erratic messages that made my pulse stutter.

"The system will not let you leave."

"I saw myself today. The other me."

"Reality is a construct. But who is constructing it?"

My stomach twisted.

"Tony," Kane called.

I turned to see her standing near the monitor. The dust on the screen had been disturbed. Someone had touched it recently.

Before I could say anything, the screen flickered to life.

Static filled the room, sharp and crackling. Then, an image appeared—grainy, distorted, but human. A man sat in front of the camera, his face gaunt, eyes sunken with exhaustion. His clothes were torn at the edges, and his hands trembled as he reached for something off-screen.

He leaned forward. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, like he hadn’t used it in a long time.

"If you’re watching this… then you’re already too deep."

A chill crawled down my spine.

Kane crossed her arms, but I saw her jaw tighten. "Who is he?"

"I don’t know," I murmured. But I had a feeling we were about to find out.

The man exhaled shakily. "I tried. God, I tried. Years of breaking, bending, rewriting… but the system doesn’t let go. It adapts. It learns. Every time I thought I was close to escaping, it rewrote me back into its design."

A muscle in my jaw twitched. His words weren’t just desperate—they were resigned.

"I left this recording because maybe… maybe someone else will see what I couldn’t. Maybe you’ll find a way where I failed." His fingers curled into a fist, knuckles going white. "But you need to understand—the Core isn’t just data. It isn’t just some code holding this world together."

The screen glitched, the image twisting before snapping back into place.

"The Core is watching."

My breath caught.

Kane muttered a curse under her breath. "Not again."

The man leaned in closer, his face filling the screen, his eyes hollow and unblinking. "And if you see them… the ones who shouldn’t be here… don’t trust your eyes. The system doesn’t just erase people. It repurposes them."

The screen cut to black.

Silence.

The kind that weighed too heavy, that pressed against my ribs like a hand squeezing the air out of my lungs.

Then—

A whisper.

Not from the recording.

From behind me.

I spun, heart slamming against my ribs. The room was empty. Kane was the only other person here. And yet—

I saw them.

Flickering at the edges of my vision.

People.

Not whole. Not real. Faint outlines, translucent like ghosts, walking in and out of existence as if they had never been gone.

A woman with short hair, flipping through a book that wasn’t there. A man leaning against a wall that had crumbled years ago. A child skipping down an aisle that had never existed.

My throat went dry.

"Tony," Kane said slowly, and I could hear it in her voice—cautious, careful, like she was trying not to startle a wild animal. "What do you see?"

I blinked hard. The figures remained. They moved like echoes, stuck in time loops only they could hear.

"I don’t—" My voice faltered. I turned back to Kane, my hands clenched into fists to stop them from shaking. "They’re here."

She frowned. "Who?"

I swallowed. "People. But they shouldn’t be."

She glanced around, then back at me. "Tony, there’s no one else here."

My stomach dropped.

I looked again. The figures were still there.

Repeating the same motions, the same actions, like a glitch stuck in a broken program.

I lifted a hand toward one of them—a woman who stood near the desk, her lips moving as if she were speaking, though no sound came.

The moment my fingers passed through her, the world warped.

A sharp, ear-splitting screech filled my head, and suddenly, I wasn’t in the hideout anymore.

I was everywhere.

Overlapping spaces, overlapping times. Streets I’d walked before, people I’d known, but distorted, hollowed out. Reality twisting, stretching, pulling apart at the seams.

I staggered back, gasping, and in an instant, it snapped back.

The hideout. Kane.

The figures were gone.

I collapsed against the desk, my breath ragged.

Kane was at my side in an instant, gripping my arm. "What the hell just happened?"

I shook my head, swallowing the nausea clawing at my throat.

"I don’t know," I whispered. But that was a lie.

Because deep down, in the part of my brain I didn’t want to acknowledge, I knew exactly what had happened.

I hadn’t just seen remnants.

I had been one.

For a split second, I had existed in all versions of reality at once.

And now I couldn’t be sure if the one I was standing in was even real anymore.