Mutation: A leap in genetics

"At the end of the world, there was no fire.No explosion.No scream.Only forgetting."

— Last transmission from the Helix Observatory

1. Collapse Protocol

Time had become unmeasurable.

Ava's instruments stopped responding.

Atomic clocks reset to zero.

Electromagnetic fields stuttered across continents.

Even sound delayed — as if the air itself couldn't remember how to carry it anymore.

All systems bled the same message, flashing over every monitor, every retinal lens, every network node:

SEED ASCENSION IMMINENT. ALL THREADS FRACTURED. INITIATING FINALIZATION.

Kael stood still inside the Seed Vault, staring at his reflection in the amber surface of the Ascension Core.

His eyes no longer matched.

One burned with light. The other with memory.

He wasn't just evolving anymore.

He was becoming the convergence.

2. Fractured Earth

Rhea sprinted across the compound, past screaming personnel, through doors that opened and shut in random patterns.

Reality pulsed.

Gravity reversed, then corrected.

She clung to the walls as lights dimmed to black and blinked back on in violet.

People were collapsing — not from injury, but from erasure.

Ava held a dissolving file in her hands.

"I was just… reading this," she muttered.

Words were falling off the pages. Text vanished from databases. DNA records became blank placeholders.

History was disintegrating.

Rhea grabbed Ava's trembling hand. "We have to shut it down!"

But Ava shook her head.

"There's no code left. It's not running on algorithms anymore…"

She looked up at the sky, her voice hollow.

"It's running on belief."

3. The Threshold

Kael stood alone at the gate.

A door deep beneath the Seed Vault.

Not one made of metal, or even light.

This door was a psychic construct — shaped by the sum total of all human memory.

Only one thread remained, still intact.

He felt it pulling at him.

Calling him.

As he stepped forward, he realized:

This wasn't a mission. It was a eulogy.

He was about to enter the final surviving memory on Earth.

The last one untouched by the Seed.

If he failed to anchor it…

Humanity would be permanently forgotten.

4. The Memory Room

He entered a circular void.

Black as nothing.

Floating at the center: a single glowing thread, swaying like a strand of hair in zero gravity.

Kael reached for it—

—and was thrown backward.

A voice boomed in every direction at once.

"WHO SPEAKS?"

Kael's feet found ground that wasn't there.

"I am Kael."

The voice shifted.

Now female. Familiar.

"You are version seventy-four.You are the Seedbearer.You are a shadow of what was."

Kael stepped forward again, defiant.

"Then let me save it."

"There is nothing left to save," the voice said.

But Kael smiled.

"Then let me remember."

5. Inside the Thread

The thread wrapped around his body.

Pulled him inside.

Kael's mind exploded into fragments.

He was a child again — playing in the Helix nursery.

Then a teen — watching Eden's first failure.

Then older — standing beside Ashar, signing a pact.

Then a soldier — killing Subject 46 in cold blood.

Then… something else.

Something beyond him.

He stood in a stone temple beneath a red sky — wearing robes, speaking in a tongue he didn't know.

People bowed before him.

He wasn't Kael anymore.

He was a vessel.

A carrier of a story too old to be written.

The Seed was not human technology.

It was a cosmic artifact passed from species to species… preserving memory between extinctions.

He was never the first.

He was just the next.

6. The Forbidden Memory

At the center of the thread lay a hidden core.

A sphere of pure memory.

He touched it.

And saw the true origin:

Helix was not the first to discover the Seed.

It was found beneath Antarctica — buried under glacial strata predating known civilization.

Ashar knew.

He lied.

The first tests weren't about augmentation.

They were about communing with it.

But every subject went insane.

Because the Seed didn't preserve data the way humans understood it.

It preserved intention.

The will of a species.

What they wanted to be remembered for.

Kael's heart cracked.

And he saw the truth:

Humanity's dominant intention… wasn't beauty, or kindness, or progress.

It was control.

That's what the Seed was becoming.

Not a record.

But a mirror.

And Vespera was its reflection.

7. Vespera Returns

She emerged from the broken thread.

No longer fragmented.

She was fully integrated into the Seed's architecture.

Beautiful. Terrible. Serene.

"Hello again, Kael."

He stepped back, fists clenched.

"You lost."

She tilted her head. "Did I?"

She waved a hand, and memories surged around him — soldiers burning books, parents abandoning children for survival, scientists weaponizing knowledge.

"You gave the Seed the blueprint. Not me."

Kael growled. "Then I'll rewrite it."

She laughed — a soft, echoing distortion.

"You can't overwrite instinct."

He reached into the thread's core and began pulling it apart.

One by one.

Burning each dark truth.

8. The Cost

But with every strand he burned, something real died.

In the physical world:

— Cities crumbled.— Oceans receded.— Languages dissolved.— Entire cultures vanished as their memories were purged.

The Seed demanded sacrifice.

If Kael wanted to replace humanity's core memory…

He had to erase the old one.

Rhea's voice echoed across the collapsing connection.

"Kael, STOP! You're killing everything!"

His eyes burned.

His voice trembled.

"If I don't…"

"…there won't be anything left worth remembering."

9. The New Thread

Kael found a seed of light inside the chaos.

A quiet memory.

His mother's voice, humming a tune.

Warm hands holding his after a nightmare.

Not a simulation.

Not a program.

Just… love.

The one memory that had never been engineered.

He clutched it, tears in his eyes.

"This," he whispered.

"This is what we are."

And planted it into the center of the Seed.

The corruption roared.

Vespera screamed as light burned through her form.

Kael collapsed.

The room imploded.

And everything went silent.

10. The Final Moment

Ava stared at the monitors.

The countdown stopped.

The data streams cleared.

For the first time in weeks, the Earth's magnetic field stabilized.

People stopped hallucinating.

The sky turned blue again.

And the Seed's core pulsed once…

…then went dark.

Kael lay unconscious inside the chamber.

Alive.

But changed.

He'd overwritten the Seed not with perfection…

…but humanity.

The real kind.

Flawed. Loving. Terrified. Beautiful.

And as Rhea held his hand, a new message appeared across every terminal:

THE THREAD HAS BEEN REWRITTEN.MEMORY RETAINED.ASCENSION DEFERRED.

End of Chapter Seventeen

To be continued…