The Dark Rabbit Origins

Part 4: Reynold's Resistance.

Part 4: Reynold's Resistance.

As Reynold looked over the dirty hideout with his sharp eyes, he wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead with a rough hand. Despite the reinforced thermocrete bunker's insulation, Reynold could almost sense the constant filth and rot emanating from the Lower Sectors' radcorridors.

At 6′4" and with the build of a linebacker, Reynold was scary even when he was just standing there. This was unusual for a man who was always busy and focused on strategy. Years of living on the streets as an undercover agent had worn down his face like a hawk. His iron-grey hair and beard showed how hard it was to fight against the regime's oppression all the time.

The encrypted comm-crackle broke the tense silence like it was real. Reynolds looked briefly at Kylara, his most trusted aide. The former merc's shaky stillness was more unsettling than her clear, jerky movement as her fingers danced across the haptic field and let the caller's scrambled sound in.

"Sitrep," Reynold commanded, his voice polished to a sharp rasp by too many choke strikes.

It was Fexor, the kid they put in as a runner in The Slog, which was one of the worst places for radscabs, even by the norms of the dregs.

"Shiv's shiv, Rev! You need to get down here immediately!" The young agent's words were filled with pure fear, which made them sound even more urgent. "Reality is coming unbent, broken to the left, and split in two!" We can see waves of grey mist coming in from the Underdrems, hitting reality with loopacks full of reztime shears and backward recompiles!"

Reynold and Kylara looked at each other. She gave a half-nod, and the frown on her face got deeper. There's a good reason why reycodes like "sundered" and "recompiled" didn't show up in general semantics: they hinted at a harmonic distortion that went beyond safe macro-operations.

"Keep your grip steady and dematrix slowly," Reynold told them. Reynold's voice was surprisingly calm, yet lines of gravity marked his face. "Tell me about the Fulcon sketch before we make any delves. "What did you mean when you said "reality breaks and time rips"?"

After Fexor took a few deep breaths to slow down, his words made sense again, but you could still feel the deep fear that was driving them. "Rev, it feels like the very fabric of existence is shaking here in all directions." I have telemetry reading whole structure terplex blocks, phasing out in blurs of dispersion, and then compiling again on wildly different spatial coordinates. Matter isn't maintaining atomic consistency anymore; instead, it's flickering between probabilistic isometrizes, as if it can't lock onto a single path.

It got even worse when the runner's voice got rough. "And the chronological flowstream... it's jerky and broken up!" I'll be walking in a straight line, and all of a sudden, without a break, I'll be thrown back or jerked forward unpredictably, crossing over into different times!"

He stopped and took a shaky breath. "I even referred to future-frame potentials that were so far-reacted that the materiometric planartics in those sectors had turned into non-Euclidean rift-state paraphysics," he said. He said, "It's similar to how all the unified laws reduced to simple abstractions on those grid-pox coordinates."

The thought made Reynold's stomach turn sour. The teenage boy talking in vague operational language wasn't making things up or exaggerating; he was actually talking about real-life reality cracks that led to impossible neomorphic state-geometries. Existentially unstable fronts that broke known physics so badly that they went beyond the paradox of total subjective desaturation.

"Lock it switch downstat on your vect-hazard," Kylara ordered, her voice firm even though it sounded like she was nervous, just like Reynolds. "Start full emission discipline until our team can re-scan the area in hazmat suits.""We'll send a delvesprime to Trent and look at the problems with the method. Do not try to re-insert until we have mapped its hypervectorial nonlinearities, though."

As soon as she ended the comm-snarl, the main holoscreens were filled with a flood of arriving spatial telemetry pings from all over the Slog radii. Reynolds couldn't get his breath out as he looked at the picture streams. Another thing that was very different from hearing Fexor's scattered accounts of the event was being hit with the raw witness codes of space-time unbundling.

As a whole, the habitat terraplexes flailed and moved across migratory vector paths in jerky translocations, showing up and going away through violent discorporate recompilations as their united continua became unstable into recursive glitch-states. Areas that should have stayed in fixed Cartesian coordinates were instead moving through M-theoretical shapes that looked more like a fractal endgame than any known phenomenon.

Worst of all, the holoscans picked up clear signs of conscious beings going through the same kind of fracturing. Time seemed to tear apart human and, by extension, posthuman identities, creating the same frayed echoforms and deunitarized reciprocating ghostfields as the larger probability vortices surrounding them. Forms were turning into loops of mixed-up data that were harder to tell apart. Different potentiation events were trapping people's identities, preventing them from following straight lines of consistency.

As the tactical cogniters confirmed Reynold's worst fears, the bitter taste of bile burned his throat. This wasn't just a hotspot or a localised harmonic disturbance. The SLOG radii were now ready for an ontological attack. This was an enemy metaphysics that would fill up and erase the most basic rules of reality conservation at all scales.

One of the cell techs said in a sad voice, "Primametrics just blazed a full pox-threat cascade," confirming what everyone already knew. "Predictive changes nonviable past the point of catastrophe." "Cull or be unmade" is an existential sentence.

"Prepare strategic counter-ops and warmfuzz all meta-suppression assets for full deployment," Reynold barked. The rebel leader suppressed his own fear and concentrated on the necessary tactical counter-moves. "If something goes wrong, we need deconstructive fail-safes that can hit chokefields all the way down to the perspectival grid level." It's not just some data that's being invaded; reality rewriters are completely taking over."

When Reynolds turned to see Kylara and the other soldiers quickly putting on their haz-strikers, he let his sharp eyes turn icy.

"This planar inflection is trying to hack the whole universal computer," he said in a harsh voice that was impossible to ignore. "So we're about to remind these paradox parasites why our cell's sigil has never stopped being the Unyielding Thorn."

As Reynold grabbed his custom-hacked meta-strikers and etched code-shredder modules, he felt his non-autonomous limb-apps speed up to full speed. The world may have been giving birth to an unchecked breach, but the satrameta in his resistance cell would stop it before the wound could turn into gangrene.

Omega would not enter their world with his logos burning.

There was an attack on existence itself. It didn't matter if the threat came from regime revenants, stellar hellbrids, or something darker still chewing through all of reality's encryption layers. If it thought Reynold's uprising would just fall apart before some mathematical pathogen, it was wrong about how strong those damned enough to fight for truth instead of lie sleepwalking would be.

It was only the start of the showdown. Either they would triumph in the Unmaking fires, or the final shot in an unending war would claim their lives.