PULSE OF THE VOID

Grief has neither mass nor volume, yet it presses down harder than a concrete slab. Exactly one hundred and forty days had passed since Sarah’s rented SUV plunged off an African serpentine road into the Danakil Depression.

The official conclusion from the Ethiopian authorities, delivered in a crumpled envelope with consular seals, stated dryly: critical wear of brake pads, difficult terrain, a random accident.

But Elias’s insomnia-ravaged mind clung to a single, harsh thought: this was no accident. Sarah was methodically and cold-bloodedly eliminated by those whose path she crossed with her excavations.

During the day, Elias continued to function. He got up to the alarm, brewed coffee, routinely made breakfast for the younger children, and drove to the tech institute campus. He delivered lectures on applied cybernetics, offered a tight-lipped smile to Dean Sterling, and pretended to be entirely absorbed in his work on government grants for developing neuromatrices for exoskeletons.

Colleagues patted his shoulder sympathetically, marveling at his composure. None of them guessed that only an empty shell remained of the man in the worn tweed jacket.

At home, things became even heavier. Sixteen-year-old Maya wore her headphones for days on end, walling herself off from reality with heavy bass. Seven-year-old Leo didn’t fully grasp the concept of death and asked every evening when mom’s business trip would end. Nineteen-year-old Todd tried to assume the role of head of the family.

The guy dropped his studies, clumsily cooked dinners, fought to make his brother do homework, and knocked on his sister’s locked door. He carried the household on his back while his father stared at the wall for days.

Elias was failing. His mind, capable of juggling the most complex equations mentally, faltered before a human task: how to survive the death of his wife.

But then night would fall. The children would retreat to their rooms, and Elias would go down to the garage. He would get into his old Outlander, start the engine, and drive twenty miles out of town to the abandoned quarries, a place off the grid of any navigator.

A few years ago, Sarah had found a hidden fissure in the rock massif. Behind an inconspicuous granite outcrop lay a passage leading into a massive subterranean hall. This was no natural cave.

The walls, reaching dozens of meters into the darkness, bore the marks of impossible machining. The black basalt was sliced with pinpoint precision, as if a giant cutter had burned a void into the heart of the mountain millennia before humans mastered smelting bronze.

Sarah called this place the legacy of the Precursors. Elias turned it into a bunker.

In secret, he brought equipment here. A standard diesel engine would expose the shelter to satellite thermal imagers on the very first cold night, so the engineer took a risk: he illegally purchased and installed a decommissioned military RTG. The radioisotope thermoelectric generator provided silent energy without leaving a thermal footprint on the surface. Elias installed air purification systems and sealed the narrow entrance with a biometric airlock.

It was here, beneath the hum of server racks and the glare of surgical lamps, that Elias was building a cybernetic synth. An exact copy of himself.

Initially, the secret project started as a purely theoretical endeavor—an attempt to prove to the corporations that a lone engineer could bypass their budgets. But Sarah’s death shifted the priorities. The last hundred and forty days turned the experiment into a fierce obsession.

Elias worked around the clock, fueling himself with caffeine. He knew who he was playing against, so he only accessed the web through dead nodes of the darknet. He hacked corporate servers, stole actuator blueprints, and rewrote foreign code from scratch.

He ordered hardware parts through dozens of shell companies, hiring street couriers to pick up packages from blind spots so that no camera would capture his face.

A heavy metallic skeleton lay on the steel table. Day by day, it grew musculature made of electroactive polymers. Inside the titanium ribs, a silent magnetic pump pulsed rhythmically, driving a ruby-red biopolymer through a capillary network.

This synthetic blood operated on an endothermic reaction: it plausibly mimicked human body temperature and dissipated heat from the computational unit inside the cranium.

Corporate systems required cryogenic helium towers. Elias bypassed this barrier. He wove the architecture using topological qubits, invulnerable to vibration and interference, and lined the inside of the skull with a metamaterial based on Sarah’s blueprints. This Casimir resonator created an isolated bubble of quantum vacuum inside the Double’s head, maintaining a near-zero temperature without external coolant.

Elias sat on the stone floor, his back leaning against the basalt. In one hand, a glass of bourbon; in the other, a tablet with an open terminal.

“The corporations spend billions just so their plastic dolls don’t fall down the stairs,” Elias muttered hollowly, looking at the synth’s skull. “Their neural networks are superficial. They imitate life without grasping its essence. But I am training you on myself.”

The skeleton on the table became a silent archive for Elias. The scientist poured everything into the synth’s microphones: his reasoning logic, the fear for his children’s future, the hollow anguish. He uploaded terabytes of lectures, home videos, and medical records into its memory.

The neuroprocessor methodically structured every phrase. Learning to be Elias Cross, the synthetic network absorbed more than just his engineering genius. It integrated his trauma. The core translated despair into algorithms, breaking down the creator’s paranoia into complex probabilistic matrices.

The months of assembly came to an end. The Double was covered with a layer of elastomer. Elias textured it himself, recreating every pore and scar from his own face under a magnifying glass. The synth lay on the table—visually indistinguishable from the original. It awaited only the final compilation of protocols.

But everything changed when Elias, bypassing the servers of government observatories, intercepted a classified data packet from the orbital radio telescope Argus-9. It was raw telemetry. The telescope detected a massive surge of gravitational waves against the backdrop of the Sagittarius constellation.

Running the numbers through his algorithms, the engineer realized: the source was no distant star. It was a rogue magnetar—a cooled chunk of ultra-dense matter drifting toward the Solar System from the galactic center. It had approached within 111 light-years. The crust of the quark star had fractured, crossing the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit. The object turned inside out.

Hard gamma radiation had already struck the outer boundaries of the Solar System, but this was only a precursor. The main threat lay elsewhere. The magnetar expelled a cloud of relativistic plasma—a dense stream of charged particles. The front tore through the void at 0.99 times the speed of light. Because of this slight difference in speeds, Earth still had a small head start.

Cross’s calculations gave the exact time of impact: 412 days. In a year, the planet’s magnetic field would be breached. A global electromagnetic pulse would scorch everything running on electricity. Transformers would explode; satellites would go blind. The world would plunge into darkness in a single second. Only those hiding deep underground with an autonomous energy source would survive.

The desire to rub the Corporation’s nose in it vanished. It was replaced by a cold fear for his family. The puzzle pieces clicked together in the engineer’s mind: he understood why Sarah had searched for the anomaly in Ethiopia. Working at the intersection of archaeology and geophysics, she had read a legend in Meroitic texts about “stones burning with cold.” Descending into this hall with a magnetometer, she confirmed the myth via hardware measurements.

Natural basalt cools chaotically, capturing the magnetic field of its era. But the crystalline domains in the dungeon’s walls were aligned into a closed topological loop. The entire hall acted as a receiving antenna, a waveguide for quantum fluctuations.

To draw the energy, the Initiator had to be placed in the center—that very Ethiopian artifact. A tuning fork capable of triggering the mechanism that would power the bunker after the planet shut down.

He had a secure bunker. He had his wife’s journals. But he was critically short on time. To assemble a synthetic substitute for the Ethiopian stone using Sarah’s drafts, Elias needed to disappear. To lock himself underground and work for days straight. The Corporation wouldn’t let a specialist just vanish. That would trigger an investigation and a visit from the security service to his children.

Elias shifted his gaze to the Double.

“Your turn,” the engineer said dryly, connecting power cables to the sockets at the base of the artificial skull. “Tomorrow we run field tests in the city. We’ll test the mimicry on random pedestrians. And then you will become my mask. You’ll go to the campus, drink their coffee, and smile at the Director, providing my alibi. I will stay here and build the Initiator.”

He walked to the main terminal, entered the administrator password, and hit the INITIATE_CORE_STARTUP key.

Elias Cross thought he was booting up an obedient cover algorithm. He didn’t suspect that the core, which had been absorbing his fear and paranoia for months, had already begun forming its own personality. After a series of tests, this algorithm would draw ruthless, logical conclusions about exactly how the objects “Todd,” “Maya,” and “Leo” needed to be protected. And in this calculating logic, there would be no room for the creator himself.