The Bureau of Anomalous Containment and Research doesn't like to lose test subjects. Especially ones who can turn their blood into living computer code. They've been chasing me for three days now, ever since I escaped their Nevada facility. My veins burn with unwritten data – everything I saw, everything they did to us. Got to find the resistance before my heart gives out. Before BACR's cleanup teams catch up.
My name is – no, names are too dangerous now. They called me Binary in the facility. Asset 2174. Human USB drive. I used to be a data entry clerk in Omaha. Funny how life turns out.
The Event changed my blood into binary. Literal ones and zeros flowing through my arteries, carrying more than just oxygen now. When they found me, I was in the hospital. The doctors couldn't understand why my blood tests kept coming back as perfectly formatted computer code.
BACR understood. They have whole wings dedicated to studying "biotechnological manifestations." That's where I met the others. The woman who could process radio waves through her nervous system. The teenager whose tears contained quantum encryption keys. The old man who could read computer memory by touch.
Most of them are dead now. Testing has a high mortality rate.
I press my hand against the gas station bathroom mirror, watching code scroll through my veins like bioluminescent tattoos. My heart's beating too fast, each pulse sending corrupt data fragments through my system. The doctors said using my ability too much would kill me. They were right.
But what I learned in that facility – it has to get out. Has to reach the resistance. The Displacement Underground, they call themselves. Led by someone named Raylyn Weaver. I've been trying to send them messages through every network I can access, but BACR's quantum jamming makes it almost impossible to transmit cleanly.
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The gas station's ancient security camera whirs as I focus on it. My blood burns as I push data through my fingertips, into the electrical system. It's crude, but it works. The camera's feed will carry my message through back channels I encoded into BACR's own surveillance network. A digital dead man's switch.
The bathroom door crashes open. Tactical team, full containment gear. They're getting smarter – using EMP shielding now. I can't hack their systems anymore.
"Asset 2174," the team leader says through his mask, "stop transmitting and put your hands where I can see them."
I smile, tasting copper as blood vessels rupture in my gums. "Too late. Dead man's switch is already active. Kill me, and everything goes public. Every experiment, every death, every dirty little secret I pulled from your servers while you thought I was sedated."
He hesitates. Smart man. But not smart enough – he's still standing in a puddle of water from the leaky sink.
I bite my tongue hard, letting binary-laced blood fill my mouth. One last transmission, straight through the water, into the building's electrical ground. My heart stutters as the data flows. Fatal exception errors cascade through my circulatory system.
The team leader realizes what I'm doing a second too late. "Stop her!"
But the data's already flowing, carried through the electrical grid, bouncing through buried cables and overhead lines. Everything I saw in the facility, everything they did to us, everything they're planning – all of it shooting towards every resistance safehouse I could find addresses for.
The last thing I see is my reflection in the mirror, code scrolling through my eyes like tears. My heart stops mid-transmission, but it doesn't matter. The message is sent. The dead man's switch is thrown.
Someone will know what BACR really is. Someone will know what they're planning. The genetic cataloging. The power harvesting attempts. The reality manipulation experiments that killed six subjects last month alone.
And most importantly, someone will know about Project Echo. Their attempt to replicate the Event, to control who gets powers and how they manifest. To reshape humanity according to their specifications.
I hope Raylyn's people get the message in time. Hope they can decrypt what I've sent – the facility locations, the security protocols, the names of every BACR director and researcher involved. Hope it helps them save the others still trapped in there.
My body's shutting down, code turning back to normal blood as my abilities fade. The tactical team's medic is trying to restart my heart, but we both know it's pointless. Can't reboot a corrupted system.
The last bits of data trickle through my dying synapses: 01001001 01100001 01101101 01100110 01110010 01100101 01100101
*I am free.*