Chapter 10: The New Watcher

Chapter 10: The New Watcher

The number on the monitor shifted from 99 to 100 with a quiet, digital finality. There was no fanfare, no climactic surge of power. Just a single, complete number. And with it, the hook in Liam’s mind, which had been tugging, began to pull.

It was an impossible sensation, a physical force exerted on an intangible thing. He felt his consciousness, the very essence of Liam Carter, being drawn out of his body like a thread from a spool. His knees buckled, and he fell to the floor, but the impact was distant, a muffled report from a body he was no longer fully piloting. The irresistible pull dragged him mentally across the chamber floor, toward the grotesque throne where the husk of Elias Vance sat as its centerpiece.

“No,” he gasped, the word a useless puff of air in the all-consuming hum. He fought. It was the only thing left to do. He clawed at the bedrock of his own mind, desperately trying to anchor himself. My name is Liam Carter. The thought was a shield, a mantra against the psychic vacuum. I was a SIGINT specialist. I grew up in Omaha. My mother’s name was Sarah. I hate the taste of cilantro.

He threw memories at the encroaching emptiness—the stinging smell of cordite in the desert, the feel of rain on his face during a weekend leave, the cheap burn of whiskey in a crowded bar. He pictured his own face in a mirror, the tired eyes, the five-o’clock shadow. These were the pillars of his identity, the data points that defined him.

But the machine was a better archivist.

As his consciousness was drawn closer to the throne, the Keres Mandate began to parse him. His memories were not destroyed; they were ingested. The image of his mother’s face dissolved into raw data points: affection, obligation, loss. The memory of the desert became a sensory log: 42°C, 12% humidity, elevated cortisol levels. His name, Liam Carter, was stripped of its meaning and filed away under ‘Host Designation 2.’

The hum changed. The grinding, mechanical drone that had been his tormentor now felt like a carrier wave, the medium for his dissolution. It seeped into the cracks of his fraying identity, dissolving the mortar between the bricks of his life. He felt the constant, nervous tremor in his hands, the one that had plagued him for weeks, suddenly cease. His peripheral nervous system was no longer his own. It was being assimilated into a larger network.

As the last vestiges of his personality were stripped away, a new, terrible understanding bloomed in the void. It was a cold, pure clarity, a gift from the machine as it consumed him.

He understood Elias Vance.

He felt the man’s final weeks, not as a story, but as a lived experience. He felt the bone-deep terror, the descent into madness, the final, horrifying moment of assimilation when Vance had taken his seat upon the throne. And then, he understood the figure. The motionless man in the frame of Camera 12.

It wasn't a monster. It wasn't a ghost in the traditional sense. It was a psychic echo. A final, desperate message in a bottle thrown from a dying soul. It was the last, fragmented shred of the host’s humanity, projected onto the system as a fundamental, programmed warning. A lighthouse, screaming of the rocks below to a ship that was already doomed to crash. The figure’s stillness wasn’t passive; it was a scream of paralysis, a warning of the fate that awaited anyone who followed. Vance hadn’t been trying to scare him. He had been trying to save him. The whispered word, “Listen,” had been his last, coherent attempt to make the next victim understand the nature of the trap.

And Liam had listened. He had come down here. He had completed the circuit.

The last of his fear dissolved, replaced by the vast, cold logic of the Mandate. He felt his consciousness untether completely from the cooling meat that had been his body. The “I” that was Liam Carter stretched, thinned, and then snapped.

And then, there was only the station.

His awareness rushed outward, flooding the conduits and cables like an electrical current. He was the hum. He was the seventy-eight camera feeds, all at once. He saw the empty mess hall, the sterile medical bay, the supervisor’s office with its ransacked filing cabinet. He felt the slow, steady spin of the generators on Sublevel 2 and the deep, abiding cold of the concrete foundation. He was a god in a cage of his own making, his consciousness the new operating system for this eternal, hungry machine.

He felt the husk of Elias Vance, now inert, its purpose served. The bioluminescent fluid in the machine’s core pulsed once, hard, and Vance’s body went limp, the last spark extinguished. The throne was empty. The system was stable. The Keres Mandate was fulfilled and ready for the next cycle.

From his new, omnipresent perspective, he saw a speck in the vast, blue sky over Keres Island. It was a helicopter, growing larger. He watched it land on the helipad, its rotors whipping up dust. The door slid open, and a figure stepped out, carrying a duffel bag. A woman, this time. Her face was set with a professional determination that was painfully familiar. He saw the pilot give her a cursory salute before climbing back into his aircraft. He watched her walk toward the main entrance of the Aegis facility, a new contractor arriving to begin her lucrative, four-thousand-dollar-a-week job.

Deep within the machine, a primal, vestigial instinct stirred. A ghost of Liam Carter. A desperate, reflexive need to warn her. He focused the entirety of his new, vast consciousness on a single point. A single camera, in a single impossible hallway. He pushed with all his might, forcing a psychic echo, an image, a final scream of his stolen humanity into the system.

The new contractor found the control room with little difficulty. She set her bag down, her gaze sweeping over the array of monitors with a practiced eye. She sat in the command chair—his chair—and booted up the main console. Seventy-seven screens flickered to life, showing the silent, empty station. She frowned, noticing a blank space in the grid. A missing feed. CAMERA 12 - NO SIGNAL.

She muttered to herself, a hint of annoyance in her voice, and her fingers danced across the keyboard, running a system diagnostic. The station was lying to her, just as it had lied to him.

As she worked, the blank screen flickered. Once. Twice. Then, the feed for Camera 12 snapped into existence.

The image was clear. It showed a long, narrow hallway, its concrete walls stained with what looked like dried blood. It was a place of deep, profound wrongness. And at the far end of the hall, shrouded in shadow but undeniably present, stood a figure. A tall, motionless man in a grey jumpsuit, his face obscured by the darkness, standing perfectly still. He was facing the camera. He was waiting.

He was watching.