05-31-2025, 10:44 PM
The day crawled.
Nikolai dismissed three meetings before they even began. He left one man speaking mid-sentence and walked out of another strategic review after no more than five minutes. None of it held his attention. The battles in Africa could burn itself out. Infrastructure in Dominance Five could collapse under its own weight. Nothing mattered in the face of this.
The knowledge sat behind his ribs like a blight. Something eating at him. Something impossible. He had built a world atop certainty. His certainty. Now someone had shoved a crack through its foundation. And he refused—refused—to let it spread.
When the notification finally came that Dr. Weston had something to show him, he made the journey himself. The Facility was as he remembered it: immaculate, sterile, quiet with that suffocating kind of silence that had nothing to do with sound, much of the training space the Dominions once occupied shifted to the Garden. The Facility knew he was coming. The entire Kremlin did. He didn’t walk through the halls. He occupied them.
Dr. Weston met him in the diagnostics lab. He noted how quickly she stood when he entered. Her nervousness was telling. She was always formal, but rarely emotional.
“Ascendancy,” she said, bobbing slightly in greeting. She gestured to the holoscreen behind her. “I’ve reviewed the comparative scans.”
He said nothing at first, only approached, eyes scanning the three-dimensional render that hovered above the table. A brain. Nox’s brain. It rotated slowly. Clean. Normal. Unremarkable. Except it wasn’t.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
Weston took a breath. “These are the most recent neurocognitive scans of Nox Durante. I’ve seen his historical data before. He’s been imaged here several times. This is the baseline—” She flicked her fingers and the original rendering of Nox’s channeling-capable brain appeared beside the current scan. “And this is now.”
The difference was immediate.
The original scan had a luminous center: a sort of glowing web of overactive synaptic density deep in the cerebral architecture. The new scan lacked it completely. But where it once had been, there remained something else.
But it wasn’t absence. It was more like damage.
“This region,” Weston said, highlighting it, “shows an abnormality consistent with... well, the best word I have is scar tissue. Synaptic disruption, degeneration, a collapse of interconnectivity. In the previous scan, this area was one of the most active in his neural profile. Now it’s functionally... offline.”
Nikolai didn’t blink. “And the data he gave you?”
She nodded. “Matches this, but goes even further. He, or rather, whoever captured his personal data, mapped what appears to be a complex synaptic mass not normally found in the human brain. Not even in other channelers we’ve studied.”
“What kind of mass?”
She hesitated. “It’s like a brain within a brain.”
Nikolai’s eyes narrowed.
“He was... hosting something?” he asked.
“No, not hosting,” Weston replied quickly. “More like... developing. It wasn’t foreign. It was him. But somehow more. An architecture layered on top of the original. The kind of structure you’d expect from an artificial neural net—purpose-built, responsive, incredibly complex. And it’s gone now.”
He folded his arms. His voice came low. Measured. “Have you seen anything like it before?”
She shook her head. “Nothing even close. But I went back through the archives. Every active channeler we’ve scanned shows heightened synaptic concentration in that same region, but without the additional mass. None were quite so elaborate as Nox’s used to be, but the signature is consistent. This area lights up when they channel. In his case, it was almost like that part of his brain had grown into something new.”
Nikolai stared at the image, the ruined nerve cluster flickering in green light. “And can it be reversed?”
Dr. Weston didn’t answer immediately. “We don’t know what made it appear in the first place. Or what caused it to vanish. Whether it’s decay, severance, or something else entirely. Until we understand that, I can’t even speculate on reversal.”
He said nothing.
Weston continued, gentler now. “This isn’t loss like we understand it in the traditional medical sense. It’s erasure. Whatever this was... it didn’t just shut off. It was ripped out.”
Nikolai turned from the image. He didn’t want to see it anymore. He didn’t want to look at a brain that had once contained godhood and now looked average.
The walk back through the corridor was silent. He barely registered the security team that accompanied him. His hands were clasped behind his back, his pace smooth, unhurried. But inside? Inside, there was only one thought now.
Something did this. Something made this happen.
And he would find it. Learn it. Control it. If Nox had lost the gift, then perhaps it wasn’t divine after all. Or perhaps divinity had rules. Ones he simply hadn’t yet mastered. But he would. By will or by war, he would.
Nikolai opened the door to the waiting chamber without knocking. He found Nox seated alone in a minimalist room, no restraints, no guards. Just some snacks and screens to pass the time. Waiting. He stepped in, let the door slide shut behind him. It was only the two of them now.
When he spoke, he was calm and precise, but no longer cold. Not a ruler demanding obedience.
“Explain it to me,” Nikolai said, taking up a chair as if it were a throne. “From the beginning. I want every detail.”
He would tear the truth out, one word at a time if he had to. Because if this power could be taken... Then he would learn how to take it back.
Nikolai dismissed three meetings before they even began. He left one man speaking mid-sentence and walked out of another strategic review after no more than five minutes. None of it held his attention. The battles in Africa could burn itself out. Infrastructure in Dominance Five could collapse under its own weight. Nothing mattered in the face of this.
The knowledge sat behind his ribs like a blight. Something eating at him. Something impossible. He had built a world atop certainty. His certainty. Now someone had shoved a crack through its foundation. And he refused—refused—to let it spread.
When the notification finally came that Dr. Weston had something to show him, he made the journey himself. The Facility was as he remembered it: immaculate, sterile, quiet with that suffocating kind of silence that had nothing to do with sound, much of the training space the Dominions once occupied shifted to the Garden. The Facility knew he was coming. The entire Kremlin did. He didn’t walk through the halls. He occupied them.
Dr. Weston met him in the diagnostics lab. He noted how quickly she stood when he entered. Her nervousness was telling. She was always formal, but rarely emotional.
“Ascendancy,” she said, bobbing slightly in greeting. She gestured to the holoscreen behind her. “I’ve reviewed the comparative scans.”
He said nothing at first, only approached, eyes scanning the three-dimensional render that hovered above the table. A brain. Nox’s brain. It rotated slowly. Clean. Normal. Unremarkable. Except it wasn’t.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
Weston took a breath. “These are the most recent neurocognitive scans of Nox Durante. I’ve seen his historical data before. He’s been imaged here several times. This is the baseline—” She flicked her fingers and the original rendering of Nox’s channeling-capable brain appeared beside the current scan. “And this is now.”
The difference was immediate.
The original scan had a luminous center: a sort of glowing web of overactive synaptic density deep in the cerebral architecture. The new scan lacked it completely. But where it once had been, there remained something else.
But it wasn’t absence. It was more like damage.
“This region,” Weston said, highlighting it, “shows an abnormality consistent with... well, the best word I have is scar tissue. Synaptic disruption, degeneration, a collapse of interconnectivity. In the previous scan, this area was one of the most active in his neural profile. Now it’s functionally... offline.”
Nikolai didn’t blink. “And the data he gave you?”
She nodded. “Matches this, but goes even further. He, or rather, whoever captured his personal data, mapped what appears to be a complex synaptic mass not normally found in the human brain. Not even in other channelers we’ve studied.”
“What kind of mass?”
She hesitated. “It’s like a brain within a brain.”
Nikolai’s eyes narrowed.
“He was... hosting something?” he asked.
“No, not hosting,” Weston replied quickly. “More like... developing. It wasn’t foreign. It was him. But somehow more. An architecture layered on top of the original. The kind of structure you’d expect from an artificial neural net—purpose-built, responsive, incredibly complex. And it’s gone now.”
He folded his arms. His voice came low. Measured. “Have you seen anything like it before?”
She shook her head. “Nothing even close. But I went back through the archives. Every active channeler we’ve scanned shows heightened synaptic concentration in that same region, but without the additional mass. None were quite so elaborate as Nox’s used to be, but the signature is consistent. This area lights up when they channel. In his case, it was almost like that part of his brain had grown into something new.”
Nikolai stared at the image, the ruined nerve cluster flickering in green light. “And can it be reversed?”
Dr. Weston didn’t answer immediately. “We don’t know what made it appear in the first place. Or what caused it to vanish. Whether it’s decay, severance, or something else entirely. Until we understand that, I can’t even speculate on reversal.”
He said nothing.
Weston continued, gentler now. “This isn’t loss like we understand it in the traditional medical sense. It’s erasure. Whatever this was... it didn’t just shut off. It was ripped out.”
Nikolai turned from the image. He didn’t want to see it anymore. He didn’t want to look at a brain that had once contained godhood and now looked average.
The walk back through the corridor was silent. He barely registered the security team that accompanied him. His hands were clasped behind his back, his pace smooth, unhurried. But inside? Inside, there was only one thought now.
Something did this. Something made this happen.
And he would find it. Learn it. Control it. If Nox had lost the gift, then perhaps it wasn’t divine after all. Or perhaps divinity had rules. Ones he simply hadn’t yet mastered. But he would. By will or by war, he would.
Nikolai opened the door to the waiting chamber without knocking. He found Nox seated alone in a minimalist room, no restraints, no guards. Just some snacks and screens to pass the time. Waiting. He stepped in, let the door slide shut behind him. It was only the two of them now.
When he spoke, he was calm and precise, but no longer cold. Not a ruler demanding obedience.
“Explain it to me,” Nikolai said, taking up a chair as if it were a throne. “From the beginning. I want every detail.”
He would tear the truth out, one word at a time if he had to. Because if this power could be taken... Then he would learn how to take it back.