Chapter 9: The Keres Mandate**

Chapter 9: The Keres Mandate

The walk down the impossible hallway was a journey through the anatomy of a nightmare. The beam from Liam’s flashlight cut a nervous, trembling swathe through the oppressive dark, illuminating details that his dreaming mind had mercifully fuzzed over. The rust-colored stains weren’t dry. They glistened with a sickening, viscous sheen, and as he drew closer, he saw they weren't just on the surface of the concrete. They were in it, a web of dark, branching capillaries that seemed to pulse with a slow, unhealthy rhythm in time with the hum. The stench of decay and ozone was so thick he could taste it, a metallic tang on the back of his tongue.

The hum was no longer a sound; it was the medium through which he moved. It pressed on his skin, vibrated in his bones, and felt as if it were actively trying to shake his thoughts apart. His own heartbeat was a frantic, terrified counter-rhythm to the station’s monolithic pulse. He held the crowbar in a white-knuckled grip, the cold steel a pathetic ward against a horror that defied physical confrontation.

As he ventured deeper, he noticed other details. Thick, black cables, rubbery and organic-looking, snaked along the junction between the floor and the walls, like the major arteries of some gargantuan, slumbering beast. They were slick with the same condensation that coated the walls, and they pulsed with the same slow, tidal rhythm as the stains. He was not in a sublevel. He was in the gullet of the machine.

His light flickered. For a terrifying second, he imagined the batteries dying, leaving him blind in the heart of the abyss. But the light returned, just as strong as before. It was the darkness itself that seemed to be fighting back, thick and hungry, trying to smother the beam. In the dancing shadows, he thought he saw it—the tall, slender shape of the figure, a fleeting afterimage at the edge of his vision. He whipped the flashlight towards it, but there was nothing there. It was just an echo, a psychic scar left on this place. An echo of Elias Vance. An echo of what he was becoming.

The hallway terminated not in a wall, but in a chamber. The narrow corridor opened into a cavernous, circular space, and the source of the hum was at its center. Liam stopped at the threshold, the flashlight beam shaking violently, the sight before him so monstrous, so fundamentally wrong, that his mind buckled under the strain of processing it.

It was a machine, but it was also a throne. And it was also a tumor.

It rose from the floor in a grotesque fusion of bone-white ceramic and pulsating black polymer. Chitinous plates, like the carapace of some deep-sea insect, shifted and ground against each other, emitting the grating, mechanical component of the hum. Thick, glassy conduits snaked through its body, filled with a sluggish, bioluminescent fluid that cast a sickly green-blue glow on the surrounding darkness. From its core, dozens of the black, arterial cables he had followed snaked outwards, plunging into the walls and floor, feeding the entire station with this unholy energy. This was the heart. This was the engine of his madness.

And seated upon the throne, integrated into the very structure of the machine, was a man.

Liam didn't need to see the face clearly to know who it was. The thin frame, the tattered grey jumpsuit, the way his head was tilted at that unnatural, listening angle from the archived footage. It was Elias Vance.

He was not dead, but he was long past living. His skin was pale and translucent, stretched taut over his bones. His eyes were wide open, staring into the middle distance at something Liam couldn't see, the pupils so dilated they had swallowed the irises entirely. The black tendrils of the machine were not holding him; they were one with him. They emerged from the throne and plunged directly into his flesh—at his temples, his spine, the base of his skull—disappearing under the skin. A faint, rhythmic pulse was visible beneath the surface of his pale arms, in perfect time with the thrumming of the machine.

This was Phase 2. Not termination. Assimilation. Vance hadn't been removed from the station; he had become a permanent part of its hardware. A human CPU, his mind and soul repurposed to fuel this abomination. The figure in the frame hadn't been a ghost. It was a psychic projection, a distress call from a man being digested by a machine, a warning that Liam had been too rational to understand.

A low beep drew his attention. To the right of the throne, a single monitor glowed in the darkness, its screen a stark contrast to the organic chaos around it. It was the only piece of conventional technology in the room. Liam forced his leaden feet to move, drawn by a desperate need to understand the name of his executioner. The crowbar slipped from his numb fingers and clattered to the floor, the sound swallowed instantly by the overwhelming hum.

He stood before the monitor. The screen displayed a simple, corporate-looking interface. At the top, in bold, sans-serif font, was the project title. The name of this entire, elaborate hell.

THE KERES MANDATE

Below the title was a series of system diagnostics, most of them incomprehensible strings of code and fluctuating energy readings. But at the bottom, one line was displayed in a large, clear font, a status update on the entire grotesque operation. A status update on him.

STATUS: AWAITING NEW HOST. SYNCHRONIZATION AT 98%.

Liam stared, the air punched from his lungs. It all crashed together in a moment of perfect, horrifying clarity. The isolation. The hum. The psychological erosion. The dreams. It was a calibration process. Baseline resonance. His mind, frayed by fear and solitude, was being tuned to the same frequency as the machine, prepared for the connection. They had brought him here, starved him, terrorized him, and broken him down until his psyche was compatible. He wasn't a watcher. He wasn't a victim. He was a component. The next component.

As he watched, paralyzed, the number on the screen flickered.

STATUS: AWAITING NEW HOST. SYNCHRONIZATION AT 99%.

A new sensation, sharper and more terrifying than the hum, shot through him. It was a feeling of being seen. Not by Vance’s dead eyes, but by the machine itself. A psychic hook, cold and sharp, latched onto the deepest part of his consciousness, a feeling of immense, ancient intelligence focusing its full, undivided attention on him. A subtle, irresistible pull began to emanate from the throne, tugging at his mind, at his very identity.

The trap was no longer a abstract concept. The gate had just slammed shut behind him. The Keres Mandate had found its new host, and it was beginning to reel him in.