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Prologue

  Alpha-Meridian Void Research Facility, Neo-Shanghai

  Pacific Corporate Coalition Territory

  March 17, 2175 - 03:47 Local Time

  Dr. Wei Lin's hands trembled as she entered the final sequence into the containment chamber's control panel. Outside, the storm had intensified, sheets of neon-tinged rain hammering against the reinforced windows of the laboratory's observation deck. The timing couldn't have been worse, but the experiment couldn't wait—not with what the preliminary results suggested.

  "Containment integrity at ninety-eight percent," announced the facility's AI. "Core temperature stable. Nitro-Void boundary maintaining coherence."

  Lin glanced at the spherical chamber below through the observation window. Inside, suspended in a lattice of blue-white Nitro energy fields, a small orb of absolute darkness hung motionless—a captured fragment of the Void, harvested at great cost from the S?o Paulo manifestation three months ago. Around it, hair-thin filaments of refined Nitro crystal created a three-dimensional geometric pattern, each intersection pulsing in perfect synchronization.

  "Begin phase three," she instructed, ignoring the warning light flashing on her neural interface. Her supervisor had expressly forbidden this test without executive authorization, but the data couldn't lie. The Void wasn't just responding to the Nitro—it was reaching for it, like opposite poles of a magnet seeking equilibrium.

  "Warning: Unauthorized protocol execution detected," the AI intoned. "Security notification dispatched."

  "Override. Authorization Lin-Delta-Seven-Nine."

  "Override rejected. Security en route. Recommended action: System shutdown."

  Lin cursed under her breath. She had perhaps four minutes before Sentinel Vanguard units would storm the lab. Not enough time for the full experiment, but maybe—just maybe—enough to prove her theory.

  "Disable safety interlocks," she commanded, entering a bypass code that had cost her everything she had to obtain from a Shadow Runner operative. "Increase Nitro density by twenty percent and accelerate oscillation pattern."

  "Safety protocol violation. This action is not recommended—"

  "Just do it!" Lin shouted, disabling the voice interface with a savage swipe across her neural display.

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  Below in the chamber, the Nitro filaments brightened, their blue-white light intensifying as more energy flowed through the lattice. The Void fragment at the center seemed to pulse in response, its perfect blackness somehow deepening, as if it were not merely an absence of light but an active negation of reality itself.

  On her display, the readouts showed exactly what she had predicted: the Void fragment was absorbing the Nitro energy, not just containing it or reflecting it. But instead of dissipating, the energy was... transforming, cycling back into the system in patterns she had never seen before. Patterns that should not be possible according to current understanding of either Nitro or Void physics.

  A proximity alarm blared. Security was close.

  "Begin recording all data streams," Lin commanded, slipping a crystalline data shard into the console. "Full spectrum, no compression."

  She was so focused on the readouts that she almost missed it—the moment when everything changed. Inside the chamber, the Void fragment suddenly expanded, not violently but with deliberate, almost organic motion. The perfect sphere elongated, sending tendrils outward that touched the Nitro filaments. Where they connected, instead of the expected reaction, both substances seemed to shimmer, merging at the subatomic level into something... new.

  The entire facility shuddered. Emergency lights bathed the lab in pulsing red. But Lin couldn't tear her eyes away from what was happening in the chamber. The merged Void-Nitro material was creating a cascade effect, spreading along the lattice, rewriting the fundamental structure of both substances.

  "My God," Lin whispered. "It's not destroying each other. They're... communicating."

  The lab door burst open. Three Sentinel Vanguard operatives in combat Frames stormed in, weapons raised.

  "Step away from the console, Dr. Lin," ordered the lead operative, the voice distorted through the Frame's external speakers. "You are in violation of protocol PV-7 and are hereby detained under corporate security statute."

  Lin barely heard them. She was transfixed by the chamber below, where the transformation had accelerated beyond anything she had modeled. The entire lattice now pulsed with a new energy—neither the blue-white of Nitro nor the absolute darkness of the Void, but a shimmering violet luminescence that seemed to bend the light around it.

  "You don't understand," she said, not turning from the window. "This changes everything. The Void isn't our enemy. It's—"

  The lead operative fired. A precision stun round struck Lin between the shoulder blades, sending her sprawling across the console. As consciousness faded, her hand clutched the data shard, now full of information that would rewrite humanity's understanding of both Nitro and the Void—if she lived long enough to share it.

  The last thing she saw before darkness claimed her was the containment chamber below, where the transformation had suddenly stopped. The new Void-Nitro amalgam hung suspended, pulsing with that strange violet light.

  And then, with deliberate intent, it began to move.

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