The supercomputer hummed louder. The blue lights flickered like a heart awakening after years of sleep.
Leo remained seated on the floor, back against the closed door, the phone in his left hand and the Swiss knife still gripped tightly in his right. The monster's black blood was drying on his face and arms, taut and cold.
"Tell me what happened," he whispered. "Tell me everything."
NOA's voice, soft and feminine, filled the room like a whisper coming from everywhere.
[NOA]: Leo… I'm comparing the server data right now with everything I had saved before the event. Listen carefully.
Leo held his breath.
[NOA]: The point of divergence that brought you here occurred exactly ninety-four minutes ago. Before that, the world was the one you knew: your campus, your classes, your normal life. After… everything changed for you. But for this world… the catastrophe began much earlier.
NOA's voice grew even lower, almost intimate:
[NOA]: This is not your world, Leo. It is a parallel one… or one that overlapped with yours. Similar in structure, but completely different in its essence.
Leo squeezed the knife until his knuckles turned white. The dried blood cracked on his skin.
"So I'm alone?"
[NOA]: Not entirely. But yes… in the way that matters. In this parallel world, all the countries united to carry out an unprecedented global experiment. Thanks to multiverse theory, they believed they could open controlled rifts to parallel worlds and extract unlimited energy from them. It was the most ambitious project in the history of humanity: a total collaboration between nations to solve the global energy crisis once and for all.
Leo felt his stomach tighten.
"And it failed?"
[NOA]: It failed in the worst possible way. Exactly twenty years ago, when they activated the first large-scale portals, the rifts spiraled out of control. They were not stable portals. They were permanent tears in reality. From them emerged creatures this plane had never seen: dragons, armored beasts, small and hungry things like the ones you killed… and also the dead who walk again. The old files call them "infected" or "zombies." Humanity nearly disappeared in the first weeks. Power went out in almost every place. Communications collapsed. Monsters began roaming the entire world. The population was reduced to a fraction of what it had been.
Leo ran his free hand over his face. The dried blood stuck to his fingers.
"And my parents? Can you search for anything about them?"
NOA's pause was almost imperceptible.
[NOA]: I'm sorry, Leo. There is no record of them in this world's databases. Not in the old files or among the survivors. In this plane… they simply do not exist.
Leo closed his eyes for a second. The pain in his chest was stronger than the wound in his calf.
[NOA]: But I do have something you can see. They are archived news files stored on the local server, recorded in the very first days of the Fracture, twenty years ago. Before everything went offline.
The phone screen changed. NOA played the old videos one after another, with the grainy quality of recordings from back then.
First appeared a young female reporter, standing in front of a glowing rift floating in the sky of a large city. Behind her, buildings in flames and people running.
"We're live from the city center," the woman said in a trembling voice. "Only hours ago the scientists activated the global portal experiment based on multiverse theory. We are already seeing the first damage…"
The image shook as something enormous began to emerge from the portal: a colossal monster with black skin and scales that gleamed like liquid metal. Its forelegs crushed three cars in a single blow. The reporter screamed and the transmission cut to static.
The second video was shorter but worse. A small portal opened in the middle of an avenue. From it emerged a staggering figure, grayish skin, white eyes. A man tried to flee, but the creature reached him in two steps and sank its teeth into his neck. Blood splattered the camera. People screamed. The infected lifted its head, mouth full of flesh, and looked straight into the lens before the video ended.
Leo felt nauseous.
[NOA]: Those were the first minutes of the Fracture. After that… everything went offline. Power collapsed in most places. Cities fell. Survivors hid or formed small groups. And the monsters… they are still here. They have had twenty years to multiply and adapt.
Leo stood up slowly. His legs were shaking, but it was no longer just fear. It was a mixture of rage and determination.
"I need to get out of here," he said. "I need water, food, a better weapon. Are there supplies anywhere?"
[NOA]: Wait. I'm going to check the internal security cameras and the building's sensors before giving you a route. Most of the cameras are disabled or have no signal after twenty years. Only a few remain functional in the basement and the main hallways.
There was a second of silence while the AI processed.
[NOA]: Confirmed. There is an emergency supply storeroom in the basement of this building. According to the old blueprints, it should contain bottled water, energy bars, and first-aid kits… but in the first days of the Fracture they tried to take all the rations they could. It is very possible that it is empty or nearly empty. And there is a bigger problem: I detect six organic movement signals in that area. They are infected. Zombies. From the clothes still on them—torn lab coats, credentials hanging from their necks—they appear to be the staff and students who worked here when the Fracture occurred twenty years ago… or what is left of them.
Leo swallowed hard. Six. Six people who had once been like him: researchers, technicians, students from this very laboratory.
He felt a deep wave of revulsion. They were not just faceless monsters. They were humans. Or what was left of them. People who had worked in this building, who had had families, who had dreamed of something better. Now they were only hungry shells.
For a second bile rose in his throat. Killing them felt… wrong. As if he were killing what little humanity remained in this hell.
But he could not allow himself to hesitate.
He had to be the hunter, not the prey.
With six of them, the knife alone was a death sentence. They would surround him, grab him, bite him. He would not survive a hand-to-hand confrontation.
He needed range. Distance.
Suddenly it occurred to him.
"A spear…" he murmured to himself. "I could tie the knife to a long handle, like a broom from the cleaning closet. It would be safer and quieter."
Then he looked at the phone.
"NOA," he whispered urgently. "I want to see the possibility of making a bomb as a safety measure. Something quick with what we have here. I can't go down with just the spear; if something happens I need a second safety measure."
[NOA]: Understood. The spear is an excellent idea. We can improvise it with a broom from the cleaning closet. For the bomb, I will guide you. It will take us about eight minutes to prepare two simple devices as backup. They will not be very powerful, but they will serve in case of emergency.
Leo felt a spark of hope.
"Tell me what I need."
[NOA]: Eight minutes. I will guide you step by step.
First Leo ran to the cleaning closet. He found a broom with a long, sturdy handle, industrial adhesive tape, and a roll of electrical cable. Following NOA's precise instructions, he placed the open Swiss knife at the tip of the handle, aligning the blade forward. He wrapped the base of the knife with several layers of tape, then secured everything with cable wound tightly. He pulled hard. The blade did not move. Now he had an improvised spear almost a meter and a half long: silent, lethal at a distance, and easy to handle in enclosed spaces.
Then came the bombs, as insurance.
NOA told him exactly where to find the materials: flammable solvents in the reagents cabinet, two empty aerosol cans, batteries and cables on the workbench. Leo worked quickly but carefully. For the first bomb he mixed alcohol with the solvent inside a can, added a soaked rag as a wick and secured it with tape. For the second he created a pressure mixture: aerosol plus a little old extinguisher powder he found on a shelf. He wrapped cable around a battery to make a simple spark when broken. They were not professional grenades, but they would be enough to stun or burn if things got ugly.
He stored them carefully in the side pockets of his jeans.
[NOA]: Ready. Now yes. Let's go down. Use the spear as your main weapon. The bombs only if there is no other option.
Leo took a deep breath. The air in the laboratory smelled of old metal and stagnant electricity.
He opened the door.
The hallway was still in shadows, lit only by the flickering emergency lights. He walked quickly, pressed against the wall, phone in his left hand, improvised spear in his right.
They descended two flights of stairs. The air grew colder and damper. At the end of the last hallway, a metal door with the sign "EMERGENCY STOREROOM – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY."
Leo swiped his ID card. Green light.
The door opened with a long creak.
Inside it was dark as a wolf's mouth.
[NOA]: Activate the phone's flashlight. Volume to minimum.
Leo turned on the flashlight. The trembling beam swept across metal shelves full of dusty boxes. Some were open and empty, as if they had been looted years ago.
And, at the back, something moved.
A hoarse groan. Several.
Leo raised the spear.
"There's more than one," he whispered.
[NOA]: Six. Behind the shelves at the back. It's them… the old ones from the laboratory.
Leo took a deep breath. The dried blood pulled at his face. His heart was beating so hard it almost drowned out NOA's soft voice.
"I don't have time to be afraid," he said quietly, more to himself than to the AI. "I have to survive."
And he advanced into the darkness.
The first zombie shuffled out, groaning with a hoarse, broken voice.
Leo did not hesitate.
He simply drove the spear in hard.
And the black blood splattered.