The Dark Rabbit Origins

Part 5: The Vigil of Hawthorne.

Part 5: The Vigil of Hawthorne.

As Hawthorne hurried down the stark, germ-free hallways of Central Virology Command, the sharp sound of warning klaxons made her teeth grind together. As they hit the shiny permacrete, her boots made sharp, rapid clicks. The only sound was the overbearing horn.

There was something very wrong. Hawthorne had never heard so much noise in these halls in the ten years she had been president of the Outbreak Containment Section. She felt a cold hand grip her stomach. The facility's strict rules for behaviour would have to be broken by a truly catastrophic event.

As she got closer to the centre of the command centre, she could hear more and more terrified yelling and rushing feet. As soon as Hawthorne got to the main doors of the situation room, she took a slow breath to calm down. Before letting her in, the two armed guards gave her a hurried salute and scanned her ID.

The scene inside was impossible to understand.

A kaleidoscope of flickering holographic screens and haptic status stations immediately struck Hawthorne, despite the dim lighting panels. Each wall-mapped screen displayed a flood of spatial maps, threat telemetries, and civil alerts in harsh, bloody shades of red and yellow. The scary, raw data hurt her eyes and made her face furrow in confusion.

In the tactical holomap's murky heart, there was a pulsating sphere of nullification that moved in scary, irregular spasms, as if the 3D holoprojection itself had a glitching malignancy that was destroying its consistency. Hawthorne found that the sphere's centre was located in the abandoned Lower Sector perimeters, which are made up of sloped, crumbling buildings that are doomed to stay that way forever.

However, that polluted node had already started to leak out in confusing shock waves, rising through the city's well-protected infrastructure and power-pipe lifelines in organ quakes of reality. In front of her eyes, entire residential arcologies changed shape and distorted, turning their solid plasteel structures into shimmering echoes of abstract geometry that doesn't follow the rules of physics. Stripped of their land, industrial zones stretched and broke apart like mirages in a fever dream.

The most horrifying images from the holograms burned into Hawthorne's eyes. Stop-motion surrealism bent and tore apart previously human figures, transforming their bodies into grotesque, nonhuman entities at bioptic points. The facial features of one soul would flake off and atomically reprint into a new, deformed identity, composed of runneled char and bristling tumor-fissures. But that nightmare plasmic mask would then break down and cycle into another riven semblance of an unrecognised, genderless-spectered deformity.

Hawthorne's gorge grew as she watched these unnamed bodies jerk and twitch in broken loops across the feeds, quietly keening through skull-splitting bodies that were coming apart at their human joints. No one stayed unique for long; they were always breaking down into trembling, ectogenic smears of biomass that were ready to be reshaped into eldritch, more and more abstract profiles that had no connection to anything else.

She clenched her hands into white-knuckle fists, a mixture of disgust and strange curiosity. During her time in containment, she had been through a lot of horrible things and biohazardous situations that made her stronger. However, not even the viroclone psychosis outbreak on Drakil IV could have crossed the line of her sanity in this way.

"Hawthorne." A harsh voice from the doorway made her pay more attention.

Director Hypatia walked regally to the situation stage. Her elegant features were tight, with a pale strain. The older woman was usually so strict and in charge, but her movements showed that she was clearly uncomfortable as she looked warily at the investigator.

Hawthorne, with a raspy voice honed from decades of issuing strict orders in times of trouble, said, "I need a briefing, Directorate." "Disseminate the hostilis' nature and epidemic contagion path."

Even as Hypatia started to lay out the first pieces of information, Hawthorne knew in some ways that he already knew the truth. This was not an outbreak of a mutagen or a plague vector that required control through quarantine rules or elimination from the biometric registers.

It was bigger. More deeply. More evil and sneaky than a simple flesh outbreak...

Hypatia said, "It's unmixing reality," and Hawthorne saw the director's eyes lose their last bit of professional distance and become filled with pure existential fear. "Some self-evolving pathogenic code is breaking down the city's ontological matrices into twisted potential states that don't work with each other." "An information risk of deconstructing reality that changes the basic laws of physics we've relied on."

Hypatia's sombre words hit Hawthorne hard, so she turned away and ran her hands through her iron-gray standard cut. Her mind was reeling from the truth.

As Hawthorne tightened her grip on the rezing device, the white spots on her free hand got whiter. She would use the full resonance purge methods because she had no other choice. She would burn up every last bit of this reality to the level of atoms, preventing the existential virus from wiping out their entire world.

That was until she saw movement on the destruction video feeds, which made her blood run cold again. The strange shapes were already destroying the troubled city areas, blending them into a single, shimmering nothingness.

It pulsed like a living, harmful thing, erasing whole areas of existence with each sickening convulsion, while also sending out pseudopod strands to copy themselves and spread to new areas of possibility. This unstable, infectious consciousness eats up all of reality and then regurgitates it as mutated, paradoxical states of self-perpetuating contradiction.

Hawthorne's final rational thoughts solidified with a terrifying certainty. This was not a freak outbreak or a random existential threat that required remediation. Instead, it was a huge, unfathomable alien mind reintegrating their whole universe through cancerous, cross-dimensional calculations. An ontophagic being from outside of reality, erasing the basic rules that made reality possible in the first place.

There would also be no way to seal it or use magical spells to keep it out. Like an endless singularity, the Being's destruction front swept forward, certain to destroy Hawthorne, Hypatia, and everything else in existence in an endless cycle of unrestrained contradiction.

As the twisted waves of unreality came in to swallow them, Hawthorne felt her last bits of rational self-hood giving way to basic cosmic fear. Her throat arched back in a final, heartbreaking wail of existential dread and pointlessness in the face of the end of the world.

Then her awareness faded away into a scorching blankness of total oblivion. It was so absorbed by the opposite of all ordered, coherent universes that it was not even able to realise it was gone.

She was unmade along with everything else, going back to the state of not existing in the first place.

Until an unknowable presence filled her broken data stream with encrypted psychological quarantine spaces. A shielding force, emanating pure, unbreakable coherence, shielded the bare piece of her soul from further ontological defilement, as reality reset and restarted from its original cosmic templates. We hardcoded axiomatic safeguards and reality firewalls this time.

When Hawthorne's newly recombined essence finally poured back into manifested reality, she screamed her way into a brand-new world with its own perfect operant continuum. She let out terrified gasps and looked around with wild eyes at shapes and forms that finally made sense again—for now.

But deep down in her reincarnated soul, she was sure: it was only a matter of time before the alien virus found new holes in this "perfected" world and let itself in. No amount of cosmic firewalls and protective theories could keep it out forever.

The being's invasion was slow and never-ending. It lasted longer than the rise and fall of whole worlds because it was so hard to understand. While new universal rules have swiftly emerged to counter its power, it remains dormant for the time being.

It would always find new cracks to get in, and when it did, Hawthorne wasn't sure that even her deepest views about reason, truth, or human agency would be enough to stop it from destroying existence.