Title: Ascension Protocol - By Mikel J. Chavez | Cat #111825
Earth broke slowly, like a joint worn down to bone. The air tasted of metal, lungs scarred young, skies the color of sick milk. Nobody remembered what blue used to look like without consulting archived photos labeled “vintage sky.” Eleven billion people called the planet home now one billion more than the previous year. Two billion more than food supply capacity. A species that reproduced like hope and consumed like plague.
Fresh produce existed only in the upper echelons of government and commerce. Real vegetables, wild-caught meat, organically grown anything, all reserved for shareholders, ministers, and the new class of techno-elites. The middle and lower classes subsisted on daily rations: high-density nutrient bars composed of hydrolyzed yeast protein, amino filler, and lab-synthesized flavor compounds. Water was recycled, sterilized, filtered through questionable nanochemical treatment – then rationed. Nothing was waste in a starving world. Not even waste itself.
Bob Chandler lived in Zone 41B of the Western Pacific Federal Sector, what used to be Oregon. His studio apartment measured nine feet by eleven. A single cot, a dented chair, a cracked sanitation wall unit. No stove. No personal refrigerator. A wall screen broadcast regional news loops he didn’t bother to watch anymore.
He was forty-three and built like surrender. At five-foot-ten, two hundred seventy-two pounds, most of it carried in his midsection, he moved like his joints were punishing him for every step. His medical implant sent nightly automatic reports: Type II diabetes uncontrolled. Blood pressure stage two hypertensive. Liver infiltration critical. Cortisol levels elevated. Emotional suppression therapy recommended but unaffordable.
His life consisted of waking in pain, shuffling half-awake to the air filtration repair facility, working twelve hours surrounded by corroded metal and sick colleagues, eating his ration bar while staring at a cracked ceiling, then collapsing into sleep shaped by fatigue rather than rest.
He used to dream. Not anymore.
Bob still remembered a time he went fishing with his father at twelve. The water was clear. They caught trout. He didn’t know then that it would be the last time he’d see a natural fish. At thirty, he had watched his newborn niece struggle to breathe in the thinned air before dying two days later. At thirty-five, his sister took her own life. At thirty-seven, Bob stopped attending family funerals because there were no funerals anymore. Just data edits. Deceased. Reason: “Environment-related organ failure.”
He didn’t fear death. He feared waking again.
Then the sting.
It happened on a Tuesday. Bob walked home after his shift, his back screaming from lifting filtration units designed for two men. That wasn’t unusual. Everything hurt. His gait was sluggish. Street monitors logged his path for safety compliance. Acid rain had fallen earlier; the pavement still smoked. Night lights flickered under power strain.
He thought about nothing. Thinking cost energy.
That was when something punctured his neck. A light, precise pain. Not like a bite. More like something testing access. He slapped the area but saw nothing. No insect existed here that hadn’t gone extinct decades ago. He didn’t pause. Didn’t react. He didn’t have extra attention to spend.
By morning, every symptom he’d accepted as permanent had lessened. Joints loosened. Breath expanded. Glucose stabilized. He assumed he was near death. They said sometimes people felt crystal clarity right before critical decline.
He ate his ration bar but still felt hungry. That was new. Hunger meant his body wanted to live.
By day three, his blood glucose was normal. He dismissed it as sensor failure. By day six, his depression metrics dropped. He looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize the eyes looking back—sharp, alert. Something in him flickered like hope, but he crushed it. Hope in this world was a liability.
By week two, coworkers noticed. Someone joked that maybe Bob had found a fresh apple somewhere. It became a rumor. Bob was eating real food. Bob had black market nutrients. Bob was on illegal gene therapy. Bob had made a deal.
By week three, he climbed stairs without stopping. His body read thirty pounds lighter. Liver scans corrected. Internal scars vanished. Biochemical markers indicated mitochondrial renewal. It made no medical sense. Doctors demanded he come in. He refused for three more days.
He went only when a coworker begged. Her son had end-stage genetic malabsorption. She asked if maybe whatever happened to Bob could save him. That was the first time Bob believed something might be happening through him, not to him.
Clinical analysis began. For the first time in years, he felt fear – not for himself, but for losing this fragile repair inside him.
Bob agreed to testing. Multiple scans. Radiological, genetic, metabolic panels. AI systems cross-referenced known treatment protocols. Nothing matched. Patient exhibits complete multi-system regeneration without correlating therapy pathway. Unknown biological factor present.
The world noticed. Word leaked. Media outlets ran simulations. UN Medical Tribunal requested access. Bob became a case study. A miracle. A threat. A commodity.
Within two months, Bob’s body normalized into peak performance. BMI twenty-four. Resting heart rate forty-two. Reflex response double that of Olympic athletes. His memory sharpened. He spoke less but heard everything. Machines hummed louder to him. Hearts beating nearby felt like drumlines.
He began dreaming again. But the dreams weren’t his. They felt like coordinates.
He confided in a doctor once that he could feel pressure changes before storm warnings. Magnetism pulled slightly at his teeth. She thought he was hallucinating under stress. He didn’t tell her about seeing faint glows around people. As if they were heat maps of their failures.
They argued ethics next. Open surgical extraction of the foreign object. He refused. Law enforcement escorted him to containment. Bob broke two of their wrists trying to leave. He had never hit anyone before.
In behavioral isolation, Bob realized the strange truth. He wasn’t healing. He was being built.
One scientist—Dr. Rhine—looked at him through observational glass.
“Do you feel still human?”
Bob replied only once.
“I’m afraid that every day I feel less like one.”
They chose MRI imaging for precision scanning of the object. He was strapped face down, restraints engineered for riot control.
A simultaneous implantation occurred elsewhere in the world. But no one knew it yet.
MRI powered on.
Bob screamed. A sound that shook tiles from the ceiling. His pulse spiked once. Then stopped.
The object in his neck ruptured.
Two things happened at that exact second.
In the laboratory, the sphere was extracted and opened. Within it, a quarter-millimeter being with technology integrated into its exoskeleton. It died on exposure to high magnetic resonance.
At the same moment, across five continents, one hundred twenty-eight individuals collapsed during identical spikes in bio-signal readings. They did not die. They transformed.
The war began in silence.
First reports came from Cairo. A man growing in size, shrugging off kinetic rounds. From Berlin, a woman emitting concentrated light that cut through reinforced concrete. From São Paulo, a six-meter entity directing energy beams from eyes—precision strikes, no wasted movement. Their skin hardened like graphene lattice. Their organs were hybridized. They spoke no language but moved with tactical focus.
They were not invaders.
They were us. Rewritten.
Recovered Audio Transcript – Fragment 7B
Classification: Level Omega
Source: Military Operations Command Pacific – War Room
Timestamp: Negative 72 Hours, 05:14 UTC
File Status: Corrupted (42% data loss)
<Begin Transcript>
[static]
GEN. ARMAN: —EMP strike… no effect… repeat, no effect across all Titan hostiles.
LT. REYES: Requesting confirmation. Cairo, Berlin, São Paulo, all showing full resistance to electromagnetic pulse impact.
[background alarms]
DR. RHINE: We’ve run full diagnostic. The Chandler MRI case is our only prior reference. The object in his neck— [static] —we destroyed it through high-field magnetic resonance.
GEN. ARMAN: Then why the hell didn’t this work on the others?
DR. RHINE: Because at the time of the MRI, the sphere hadn’t finished merging. Chandler was in active transitional phase. The organism was still isolated. The pulse didn’t kill its evolution.
DR. RHINE: It completed it.
[5-second silence]
LT. REYES: You’re implying that by killing him, we—
DR. RHINE: —we taught them how to survive it. The electromagnetic force became part of the adaptive template. Every host initiated afterward came pre-insulated.
GEN. ARMAN: So what we thought was a weakness—
DR. RHINE: —was a lesson.
[static surge]
GEN. ARMAN: And our countermeasure?
DR. RHINE: We didn’t stop the Protocol. We administered its final patch.
[audio distortion – screams faintly heard]
Unidentified voice: —breach in lower sector— they’re inside the perimeter—
Alarm: EVACUATE • EVACUATE • EVACUATE
GEN. ARMAN: Final inquiry. Can we reverse it?
DR. RHINE: No. The Protocol has concluded. Humanity missed its evolutionary window.
[transmission warps]
LT. REYES: Then this isn’t a failed defense.
DR. RHINE: It’s a failed ascension.
GEN. ARMAN: (faint) …God help whoever finds this.
<End Transcript>
FILE TERMINATED – SIGNAL LOST
Status: Archived
Reassembly Confidence: 58%
Note: Full recovery not possible
Global militaries responded with drone swarms, air strikes. Titans walked through them. One stepped through a cluster munition blast without pausing. Sensors indicated energy absorption. Shielding fields deflected railgun projectiles. One reached toward the sky and emitted a pulse that collapsed multiple satellites.
AI warfare systems scrambled. Within three weeks, two billion people were dead. Evacuation attempts failed. Titan strategic efficiency improved as numbers increased. Survivors reported communication between Titans without sound. Neural network patterns.
Medical teams realized too late: Bob was Patient Zero. His death was the point of failure. The MRI destroyed the core signal module. The alien within him wasn’t trying to kill the human race. It was upgrading it.
Except humanity didn’t meet the requirements for what it was becoming.
Final-channel broadcasts continued as resistance dwindled.
Radio transmission from Northern Coalition Base Thirty-Nine:
“We thought it was invasion. It was implementation. They weren't attacking. They were executing final-phase assimilation. Earth wasn't chosen for conquest. It was chosen for conversion. The universe didn’t send soldiers. It sent engineers.”
Next transmission:
“We found Bob’s body. Completely artificial internally. No cellular architecture. He is blueprint. Prototype failed at downtime activation. The others succeeded. We…”
static
Another voice, faint, possibly Bob’s, filtered through Titan network:
“I tried to stop it. I wasn’t meant to survive the change alone. It was never for one human. It was for all. We were meant to evolve. You’re fighting what you were supposed to become.”
Background noise. Impact. Screams.
Last human journal entry, origin unknown. Handwritten.
“They didn’t invade us.”
“They upgraded us for a war we don’t understand.”
“And we died clinging to what we used to be.”
End of record.
Earth designation status: extinct.
Universal classification adjustment: species eliminated due to failure to adapt to biomechanical ascendancy.
Conversion protocol archived.
Awaiting next viable host planet.
Transmission ends.