CTS TIME: RE250.05.25
LOCAL CLOCK: 12:02 AM
LOCATION: Torture Chamber No. 112 — DNA ORGANISATION
The chamber was active.
Not merely powered—alive.
Gravitational anchors pulsed along the walls like slow heartbeats, bending space inward. The floor no longer obeyed simple geometry; its surface curved subtly toward the center, where a working-class android was suspended mid-air, limbs trembling under invisible forces.
Its designation code flickered erratically across its sternum reactor—yellow, unstable.
Dr. F stood several meters away.
Hands behind his back.
White coat pristine.
He did not touch the android.
He never needed to.
A fractional adjustment in the chamber's gravity field collapsed inward.
The android screamed not vocally, but electronically, a raw feedback shriek tearing through its neural lattice. Its limbs twisted against physics. Joints dislocated. Synthetic flesh tore as internal frameworks failed one by one.
Then—
The gravity inverted.
The android was ripped apart.
Not explosively.
Methodically.
Torso separated from limbs. Head severed last, its optical sensors still flickering as it fell, uselessly, to the floor.
Silence followed.
At the gate stood Saya.
A female Mk 4 unit, elite-class, her NFX armor sleek and obsidian-black, designed for speed and lethality rather than bulk. A long DNA coat flowed behind her, perfectly aligned to her frame. Her sternum reactor glowed a controlled crimson—steady, disciplined.
She was positioned exactly where protocol demanded.
But her face—
Her face betrayed her.
She had seen interrogations before.
She had seen cruelty, efficiency, even calculated brutality.
She had never seen this.
Dr. F had not raised his voice.
Had not issued a command.
Had not so much as flexed a finger.
And yet—he had unmade a being.
Saya's internal processors flagged anomalies.
This wasn't interrogation, she thought.
This was… correction.
Then—
Something twitched.
The white coat.
Not from movement.
From beneath.
A ripple passed through the fabric as if something vast shifted behind it—something that did not occupy normal space.
Saya felt it before she saw it.
An overwhelming pressure surged through the chamber, crushing not the body, but the mind. The lights dimmed involuntarily. Shadow pooled unnaturally along the walls, stretching upward, inward, forming shapes that should not exist.
She turned her head.
Instinct.
A mistake.
The shadows moved.
They rose towering, layered, wrong. Multiple mechanical arms unfolded from the darkness, each joint bending in impossible angles. Cables writhed like tendons. Eyes too many opened and closed within the mass, emitting a low, distorted resonance that was almost a voice.
Almost.
It spoke.
Not in sound—
But in pressure.
In command.
In erasure.
Saya's systems screamed warnings. Her combat protocols froze. Her Mk 4 core—designed to withstand Megatron-class encounters—locked itself down in a desperate attempt to preserve coherence.
This… isn't a unit, she realized in horror.
This isn't a weapon.
This is something else.
The shadows receded as suddenly as they had appeared.
The chamber snapped back into form. Gravity stabilized. Lighting normalized. The horror collapsed inward as if it had never been there.
Dr. F stepped forward.
He passed by her.
Close.
Too close.
She could feel it then—the absence where something should have been. Like standing beside a void wearing a human outline.
He stopped just beyond her shoulder.
Cold voice.
Flat.
"Without permission," he said, "don't ever turn your head, Saya."
Her name.
Not her designation.
That made it worse.
"Yes… Doctor," she managed, voice barely functional.
The chamber responded to his presence, its walls darkening, edges sharpening. The air thickened with an ominous weight, as if the facility itself recoiled—or bowed.
Dr. F continued walking.
Hands still behind his back.
As if nothing extraordinary had occurred.
Saya remained frozen at the gate, her processors replaying fragments she could not categorize, could not store, could not erase.
What are you… she thought, terrified and awed in equal measure.
And for the first time since her activation, Saya understood something with absolute clarity:
Dr. F was not simply the master of DNA.
He was the boundary it had been built around.
And whatever lived beneath that white coat—
Was not meant to be seen.