The zombie climbed up to the window ledge. Inside were three of the last remnants of a town that had been nothing but a cruel experiment carried out by the occupation - a superior force. Well at least that's what they said before the tv stopped and the electricity went down.
The occupation was thought to have come from an alien world light years from ours and yet connected to us via our own experiments in quantum chain theory. This happened right after quantum wormhole research went dark. No publications since the event.
It is ten years before the event and Evan Jones is plugging numbers into his quantum tunnel - a basic send and receive project funded by DARPA. They called it remote viewing. Open a wormhole anywhere and instantly spy on your adversary. Know what he knows see what he see's. Well at least that was the idea before it happened.
The anomaly.
Something was dialing into the quantum event moving it across time and space to an unknown location and literally sending information gigabytes that would just fill up Evans hard drives. The lab was about to pull the plug. DARPA had complained that the feasibility study hadn't born out. Evan didn't care. He knew this was bigger than him the institute and DARPA bigger than the whole fucking planet.
He called it the cascade. Janet redridge NSA called it a quantum chain. She ordered the hit on Evan. But this was no ordinary hit. They took his mind and everything he touched in that lab and put it all on ice.
This wasn't just national security this meant the world the very fate of mankind and she knew it. The NSA already possessed the files about them. They called them the fringe. They lived out there beyond space and time. Travelling instantly between neighbouring systems using the dark web. But earth was unconnected protected from the dark web. Disconnected.
The CIA started its experiemnts MK-Ultra they tapped the human minds capacity for quantum chains. Our innate capacity to transcend ordinary reality and touch the darkness beyond our world. Bringing home the possibility of another race. Another superior race of beings that were only just out of reach.
The zombie crawled through the open window and fell onto the landing. Knocking a childs toy onto the floor. Breaking the silence and alerting the three survivors of its presence.
Its mind virus began to wind its way through the building - ethereal trails that oozed dark matter fell like black paint on the deadly stillness of the abandoned house. It smelt like death. Cold and rotten.
It sought them out. Marking them as a fresh kill attracting others. The zombie would now open its head to the dark web. Drawing them to this perhaps the very last place on earth that humans still existed.
Buried deep beneath the earth beneath the very town that had been infested and occupied was the enclave. But they wouldn't know it not with what was coming.
There was no way that the enclave would open her doors and reveal herself to the occupying forces who would stop at nothing to claim every one of them. Those three would have to perish. Were it not for one man that lived above ground and killed the monsters from beyond.
Nathen Brookes. He'd been a scientist working alongside Evans but he got out early on. He knew that DARPA was way to much heat, way too much agency. He knew it wouldn't end well. He got out early. Kept the data. Changed his name. Went off grid. Conducted his own experiemnts. He didn't wat to make contact he wanted to know how to break contact how to severe the link with the dark web. He had read Mk-Ultra he knew nearly as much as Janet. He had found a way to kill the fringe after the blackout and after the event.
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