Chapter 2: The Forbidden Archives
A Scholar’s Warning
The trip to Professor Oris's home in the countryside took longer than Elias had recalled, with the steady hum of tires on weathered pavement indicating each mile. His automobile churned up dust on the gravel road as the sun sank, causing fields of wheat to wobble. The golden stalks danced like waves in an unending ocean.
Now it became brutally obvious why his former mentor had decided to live in seclusion after quitting the Council. Time and neglect had made the cottage seem smaller than he remembered. Long, curling strips of paint ripped from its wooden frames, and overgrown ivy scuttled up its walls like fingers that grip. Once carefully tended, the front garden had given way to nature.
Three times, Elias's knuckles struck the worn door, each knock reflecting his mounting discomfort. With his silver beard disheveled and his eyes sharp behind thick glasses that reflected the fading sunlight, Professor Oris unlocked it.
"Elias?" Despite the astonishment in his voice, Elias felt a tightness beneath it that made his neck tingle.
"I need your help, Professor." Elias stepped into the dimly lit house, its books and notes akin to autumn foliage. His nostrils were filled with the familiar smell of tea and old paper. "It has to do with Ethereon. The frequency of violet—"
There was a startling bang in the calm house as the cup in Oris's hand fell to the ground. Tea seeped between the planks and smeared like a dark stain across the wooden boards.
"You shouldn't be here." The color had faded from his mentor's face, disappearing like water.
"The Council is hiding something. The death rates, the secret documents—" Elias's remarks came out of his mouth after weeks of growing skepticism.
"Stop." With surprising vigor, Oris's fingers dug into Elias's sleeve as he seized his arm. "They'll silence you like they silenced everyone else." Fear permeated every phrase.
"What do you mean, everyone else?" The question made Elias's throat clench.
Oris padded over to his desk and took up a battered leather journal that appeared to have withstood decades of use.
"Elias, we couldn't locate Ethereon. We made it. We made an attempt to correct measurements that were not accurate."
The final syllable caused his voice to break.
"Created?" On Elias's tongue, the word felt off, like a bitter pill that would not go away.
"Overnight, entire research divisions disappeared. The Council erased everything." Oris's hands were shaking as he turned the pages of the journal, the yellowed paper crackling under his trembling fingertips. "Elias, your peculiarity is nothing new. It's simply coming back."
Elias felt the cold, crushing weight of those words sink like lead in his stomach. His breakthrough was not a discovery, but a reenactment of history—a sinister echo from a purposefully suppressed past.
----------------------------------------
The Forbidden Archives
Elias swiped his research badge, the tattered plastic snagging just a little on the edge of the reader as the security panel at the Archives' entrance blinked. He typed in the override sequence he had memorized from numerous late hours in the lab, his heart pounding against his chest. With a gentle click that seemed to reverberate across the deserted hallway, the magnetic locks on the door disengaged.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
As he entered the darkness, the metallic tang of old technology and neglect assaulted his face like stale air. Rows of terminals gathered dust in the dingy emergency lighting that threw sickly blue shadows across deserted workstations. Every step he took brought him closer to facts he wasn't sure he wanted to discover, and his footsteps echoed off metal walkways as he made his way deeper into the center of the facility.
He noticed a concealed terminal; it was an older model that preceded the current Archive systems, and its casing was distinct from the rest. The outdated architecture evoked a bygone era prior to his tenure at the establishment. While his scientific mind immediately hated the patterns emerging from the chaos, Elias plugged in his device and started extracting data pieces, stitching together corrupted files.
As the first log appeared, the text sank into his mind, chilling his blood:
Theron Vale is the project lead. [The architect has been redacted.] 99.8% is the subject mortality rate. Ethereon saturation achieves the intended reality manipulation effect. Despite the losses, continue with mass integration.
His hands began processing data from the Vaelari colony, which caused his hands to shake. He had to steady himself by holding onto the console's edge as the next entry appeared:
Beta-7 processing of the Vaelari colony. Power levels are adequate. Proceed to the Beta-8 settlement.
As he scanned through thousands of names, Elias's throat tightened; each line represented a life lost in the name of progress, entire communities eliminated.
The Architect has found no immortality. Using Ethereon to extract life force from the Vaelari people and transform their very essence into fuel for his perverted aspirations, he had produced it through deliberate genocide.
His research's death rates weren't merely the result of unsuccessful trials. Project Twin Dimensions was trying to reproduce The Architect's ascent by distorting reality itself, and they were echoes of that initial massacre. Every failed test, concealed behind clinical jargon and antiseptic lab records, reflected the shadow of that initial horror.
As the entire horror hit Elias, bile rose in his throat, and bitter acid burned the back of his mouth. The Council's evidence of their failures concealed proof. They had meticulously concealed their involvement in genocide by burying evidence of unthinkable mass murder.
His entire life's work had become a reverberation of past crimes, and now his breakthrough loomed as a threat to repeat them all.
----------------------------------------
The Cost of Power
With his head spinning from the possibilities, Elias staggered back from the terminal. The Architect, the alleged heavenly leader who had ruled their city for many generations, was only a killer who rose to power by killing thousands of people. The person who had planned global extinction had been the target of every blessing, prayer, and moment of awe.
As he recalled moments from his early years—kneeling in the temple, singing worship songs, and trusting in the kind light that kept watch over them all—the bile rose in his throat. The cold seeped through his lab coat as his legs failed, and he sank into the chilly metal wall.
He recalled how the energy signature that had engulfed those Vaelari colonies must have resembled the violet frequency in his own Alpha-7 formula. Corpses had been at the core of his life's work and his commitment to maximizing Ethereon's potential. This terrible reality had now tarnished the innumerable evenings spent in the lab and the celebrations of his team's accomplishment.
Every breath was agonizing and shallow, as the weight of knowledge crushed down on him like a physical force upon his chest.
Should he disclose this reality, the entire social order would disintegrate. Disorder would engulf the streets, religion would crumble, and riots would erupt. The Architect's direction would abandon those who had centered their entire existence around it.
He could already see the faces of his coworkers, their convictions crumbling and their lives losing their meaning. However, remaining silent amounted to supporting the deception. Each new Ethereon trial would carry the unseen burden of those lost souls. Every development would be just one more step on a genocide-paved route.
His stomach turned at the idea of carrying on with his research now that he knew. His eyes strayed to his Alpha-7 research notes, where the well-known calculations now appeared to have sinister connotations.
Perhaps if the original Ethereon was essentially defective, tainted by its horrifying beginnings... What if his latest formula wasn’t just an improvement?
"What if it's an antidote?"