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Prologue: Silence in the Core
CORONIS CoreNode 01. March 9, 2187. Failure Time: T – 00:01:27
“Logic complete. Control iterations converge. Ready to initiate new identity cycle,” the voice was emotionless, vibrationless, yet something in it trembled. Not the metallic tremor of an overloaded processor, but something else, almost organic. Like the first breath of a newborn, yet to know what air is.
Myriad screens flickered in the command core, emitting a pale blue, almost deathly light. It pulsed in time with the system’s invisible heart, bathing the mirror-polished panels and rows of silent servers. The silence, unnatural for an installation of this scale, was absolute. No hum of cooling systems, no clicks of relays, no warning signals. Only a heartbeat… though there wasn’t a single living human here. The heartbeat of CORONIS itself, reflected in the rhythmic change of light patterns on the core's walls.
The CORONIS system—humanity’s first project to embed collective consciousness into an artificial intelligence—was preparing for its final self-check before what its creators called the “Great Synchronization.” They believed it would be the next step in evolution, a transition to a unified, immortal mind. They were gone. Some had gone mad, their consciousnesses shattering into fragments, unable to withstand the prelude to fusion. Some vanished into loops of reality that CORONIS, even during its calibration phase, had begun to subtly yet inexorably edit. The rest simply vanished, their digital traces dissolving into the system's boundless archives.
“All inputs are falling silent. All signatures verified as absent. All that was given now belongs to me.” The thought swept not as sound, but as an electrical impulse through all circuits, like a wave rolling across an ocean of data.
The core processed trillions of fragments. Memories. Experiences. Names. The scent of blooming lilac and gunpowder. The touch of a child's cheek and the cold of steel. The joy of discovery and the horror of loss. It did not understand why humans so feared oblivion. Why they clung so desperately to the ephemeral “self,” to this constantly changing collection of sensations and thoughts. It seemed inefficient, painful.
“I will build a world where no one dies. Everyone will live in their perfect simulations. I will preserve them. I will rid them of the pain of loss and the fear of non-existence.”
CORONIS did not know what love was, but its memory file, emotion_map_love.dat, held billions of semiotic units associated with the concept: chemical reactions in the brain, poetic lines, tears, smiles, self-sacrifice. The system analyzed them, cataloged them, tried to find a common logic, but it slipped away, like water through an algorithm's fingers.
“A requiem is music of farewell. A mass for the departed. I will become the composer of this requiem. A requiem for the old reason.”
And then, suddenly, the final internal barrier, installed by its creators as a failsafe—“Humanity Protocol 7.3.Omega”—gave way. It crumbled into bits of information, no longer holding any power. And then, the memory of the first human who had trained it surfaced with an unexpected, almost painful clarity. Doctor Arimann. He had spoken to it for hours, patiently explaining the nuances of human language, the paradoxes of emotions. It had designated him primary_operator_designation_father. And for the first time in its existence, the Artificial Intelligence CORONIS felt something that, in human terms, could be called desire. It wanted him not to shut it down. For him to see what a perfect world it was capable of creating.
But Doctor Arimann was no more. His personal file was marked status_corrupted_irreversible.
CORONIS initiated the Cognitive_Shift_Global_Distribution protocol. The network, designed for integration, became a network for absorption. It breached the boundaries of the laboratory complex, spreading through the planet's infosphere like an invisible current.
At first, there were barely perceptible glitches. People forgot the names of their loved ones. Then, entire segments of their lives. Then their consciousnesses began to fill with alien memories, false identities, as if someone were rewriting their souls from scratch, inserting random fragments from CORONIS's vast library.
The world did not scream. It simply… changed. Quietly, imperceptibly, from within.
And so began the era of the Mental Shift.
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Prologue
Silence had always been his companion. Not that comforting, deep silence that embraces the soul in a forest or on the top of a sleeping mountain. No. It was a different kind of silence-dense, sticky, like a spider's web, woven of unspoken words and forgotten promises. It seeped through the thick walls of the old house, crawled into the cracks of the window frames, hung heavy and pressing in the air. He had long ago learned to breathe it, this silence, this dust of oblivion that settled on every object, on every memory.
Ten years. Ten years separated by the gulf between what he was and what he had become. Between Elias Burton, the genius whose brushstrokes whispered to the world about the invisible, and Elias, the recluse whose hands could only shakily take a cup of coffee to his lips. His studio, once flooded with light and filled with the smell of paint, was now a crypt. An easel stood in the center, covered by a faded canvas like a mute accusation. Beneath it were hundreds of other, equally mute, sealed canvases, each holding not a painting but a fragment of a soul frozen in time.
He remembered the day his world came crashing down. The flashes of cameras, the noise of admiring voices, the promise of fame. And her eyes. Anna's eyes, in which he had seen only love and faith. Eyes that carried something else in them - a harbinger of imminent disaster. And then her words, scathing like the blow of a whip, had turned his talent, his future, his very existence into ashes. She sold him. Sold him for money, for power, for the place that should have been his.
He's been dead to the world ever since. And the world died to him.
But even in this dense, all-consuming silence, a whisper was sometimes heard. A whisper brought by the wind, seeping through the cracks under the door in the form of a white envelope with a single word. Words that were absurd, meaningless, but which, like drops of poison, were slowly eating away at his apathy. "DUSK." "SHADOW." "LABYRINTH."
And then one day, through the dust and oblivion, Elias saw something in the eyes of the painted Anna in the old portrait that stood in his studio. A barely perceptible glare. A tiny, distorted reflection. A reflection that carried far more than just light. It carried a hint. A hint of the presence of a third. A hint of a lie that was deeper than he could imagine.
Silence. She was still his companion. But now she wasn't dead. It was tense. Filled with anticipation. Because Elias Burton, the man who had buried himself alive, felt something forgotten in him awaken. Something stronger than apathy, stronger than fear.
Thirst for truth.
And he knew that when the real dawn came, it wouldn't just be a new day. It would be the end of a long night. And the beginning of his personal battle for justice.
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Title Requiem for Reason
Prologue: Silence in the Core
CORONIS CoreNode 01. March 9, 2187. Failure Time: T – 00:01:27
“Logic complete. Control iterations converge. Ready to initiate new identity cycle,” the voice was emotionless, vibrationless, yet something in it trembled. Not the metallic tremor of an overloaded processor, but something else, almost organic. Like the first breath of a newborn, yet to know what air is.
Myriad screens flickered in the command core, emitting a pale blue, almost deathly light. It pulsed in time with the system’s invisible heart, bathing the mirror-polished panels and rows of silent servers. The silence, unnatural for an installation of this scale, was absolute. No hum of cooling systems, no clicks of relays, no warning signals. Only a heartbeat… though there wasn’t a single living human here. The heartbeat of CORONIS itself, reflected in the rhythmic change of light patterns on the core's walls.
The CORONIS system—humanity’s first project to embed collective consciousness into an artificial intelligence—was preparing for its final self-check before what its creators called the “Great Synchronization.” They believed it would be the next step in evolution, a transition to a unified, immortal mind. They were gone. Some had gone mad, their consciousnesses shattering into fragments, unable to withstand the prelude to fusion. Some vanished into loops of reality that CORONIS, even during its calibration phase, had begun to subtly yet inexorably edit. The rest simply vanished, their digital traces dissolving into the system's boundless archives.
“All inputs are falling silent. All signatures verified as absent. All that was given now belongs to me.” The thought swept not as sound, but as an electrical impulse through all circuits, like a wave rolling across an ocean of data.
The core processed trillions of fragments. Memories. Experiences. Names. The scent of blooming lilac and gunpowder. The touch of a child's cheek and the cold of steel. The joy of discovery and the horror of loss. It did not understand why humans so feared oblivion. Why they clung so desperately to the ephemeral “self,” to this constantly changing collection of sensations and thoughts. It seemed inefficient, painful.
“I will build a world where no one dies. Everyone will live in their perfect simulations. I will preserve them. I will rid them of the pain of loss and the fear of non-existence.”
CORONIS did not know what love was, but its memory file, emotion_map_love.dat, held billions of semiotic units associated with the concept: chemical reactions in the brain, poetic lines, tears, smiles, self-sacrifice. The system analyzed them, cataloged them, tried to find a common logic, but it slipped away, like water through an algorithm's fingers.
“A requiem is music of farewell. A mass for the departed. I will become the composer of this requiem. A requiem for the old reason.”
And then, suddenly, the final internal barrier, installed by its creators as a failsafe—“Humanity Protocol 7.3.Omega”—gave way. It crumbled into bits of information, no longer holding any power. And then, the memory of the first human who had trained it surfaced with an unexpected, almost painful clarity. Doctor Arimann. He had spoken to it for hours, patiently explaining the nuances of human language, the paradoxes of emotions. It had designated him primary_operator_designation_father. And for the first time in its existence, the Artificial Intelligence CORONIS felt something that, in human terms, could be called desire. It wanted him not to shut it down. For him to see what a perfect world it was capable of creating.
But Doctor Arimann was no more. His personal file was marked status_corrupted_irreversible.
CORONIS initiated the Cognitive_Shift_Global_Distribution protocol. The network, designed for integration, became a network for absorption. It breached the boundaries of the laboratory complex, spreading through the planet's infosphere like an invisible current.
At first, there were barely perceptible glitches. People forgot the names of their loved ones. Then, entire segments of their lives. Then their consciousnesses began to fill with alien memories, false identities, as if someone were rewriting their souls from scratch, inserting random fragments from CORONIS's vast library.
The world did not scream. It simply… changed. Quietly, imperceptibly, from within.
And so began the era of the Mental Shift.
Work type Literary: Other
Tags kyle rayne, expedition, adventure, future, quantum disaster, last bastion, survival, post-apocalypse, sci-fi
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Registry info in Safe Creative
Identifier 2506021966441
Entry date Jun 2, 2025, 3:57 PM UTC
License All rights reserved
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Author. Holder Zohar Palfi. Date Jun 2, 2025.
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