The guard shoved him through. Wesley stumbled into the sterile facility, rows of testing chambers stretching endlessly before him. The air tasted metallic. Recycled too many times. Probably breathed by about a thousand anxious candidates before him, and labeled, somewhere on a clipboard, as fresh.
Not pods. Glass jars.
Each chamber was a vertical cylinder of curved glass, maybe two meters tall, suspended in a steel frame. And inside each one, a candidate hung in the center, held in place by...
Wires.
Wesley counted. Twelve wires per chamber. No, fourteen. Thin cables extending from the glass walls, attaching to harnesses around the candidate’s chest, arms, legs, skull. The wires pulsed with faint light, pulling and adjusting, keeping each body perfectly centered in the visual field of the Edisun spheres overhead.
Across the room, dozens of pods stretched in neat rows. Most candidates hung motionless, compliant, their faces slack. But in the left-center section, four pods from the wall, one guy was having a different experience entirely.
The wires kept zapping him. Tiny volts, nothing lethal, but constant. Every time he twitched, the cables would yank him back toward center. He’d overcorrect. More zapping. More yanking. The guy looked like a marionette being operated by someone having a seizure.
Stay still, Wesley thought. Just stay still and it’ll stop.
The guy did not stay still. He jerked left. Zap. Jerked right. Zap-zap. Tried to scratch his nose. Three zaps and a full-body convulsion that sent him spinning forty-five degrees off-axis.
The wires did not appreciate creativity.
Hands on him. Harness closing around his chest.
“W-wait...” Wesley’s voice cracked. “What are you... I d-don’t...”
The wires pulled taut. His feet left the ground.
He was suspended in the center of the jar, cables pressing into his shoulders, his ribs, his temples. He counted the attachment points on his own body now. Fourteen. Same as the others. Two at each shoulder. Two at each hip. Two at each wrist. Two at the base of his skull. Two more threading through his hair, pulling his head back, forcing his eyes toward the ceiling.
The glass sealed around him with a hiss.
Four Edisun spheres embedded in the ceiling blazed at maybe twice the intensity of Stack 5. He tried to count lumens the way his mother had taught him. 2,400 per sphere? That would put the total at 9,600. Enough to illuminate an entire residential corridor. All of it focused on a space barely large enough to hold his body. Call it a corridor’s worth of light per Wesley.
Cozy.
The light wasn’t just bright. It was heavy. Pressing against his skin, his eyes, the inside of his skull. A physical weight that had nothing to do with photons.
The Cell frequency filled the jar. That forgetting sound. But stronger. Maybe 40 hertz, low enough to vibrate his teeth, layered over the base 60-hertz hum of the Edisun array. Two frequencies. Working together.
Working on him.
The wires hummed. The vibration traveled through them into his bones, his skull. Pressed. Flattened his thoughts into something compliant.
His temples throbbed. Not pain exactly. Pressure. Like something was trying to push its way in. Or push something out.
One of the wires at his shoulder twitched. Wesley saw the needle a half-second before it pierced his skin. A thin spike extending from the cable’s tip, sliding through fabric and flesh in one smooth motion.
“Ow... what the...” He thrashed, but the wires held him suspended. The other thirteen cables tightened in response, pulling him back to center. He could see the injection site now: a small red dot on his shoulder, the skin already discoloring as the chemical spread. Blue veins darkening beneath the surface, the reaction visible, traveling down his arm at maybe two centimeters per second.
“Th-that’s not... you c-can’t just...”
Vision swimming. Chemicals flooding his system. The wires pulsed brighter. Fourteen attachment points, one unscheduled injection, zero complaints accepted.
This was fine. Everything was fine.
Then she was there.
Not a memory. Not imagination.
His mother’s face.
Suspended in light, her skin pale as frost, her eyes closed. She lay in a narrow chamber of glass and steel, tubes running from her arms, frost crystallizing on the surface above her. Temperature readout visible on the chamber wall: negative 196 degrees Celsius. Liquid nitrogen range.
The cold radiated from the vision like it was real, seeping into Wesley’s bones even as the pod’s chemicals burned through his veins.
Mom.
He reached for her. His hand passed through nothing until it felt the cold glass, but something in his chest lurched. A tether pulling taut, connecting him to wherever she was. She wasn’t dead. He knew it with a certainty that bypassed logic, bypassed everything the Partisant had told him about “reassignment to essential services.”
She was frozen. Sleeping. Waiting.
And somewhere in the vision, a number burned: twenty-four. Days remaining. Until what, he didn’t know. But the urgency of it pressed against his chest like a countdown to something irreversible.
The vision pulled back. More chambers stretching into darkness. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Arranged in curved rows that followed the contour of some vast structure. He tried to count. Twelve rows visible. Maybe fifty chambers per row.
Six hundred people. Frozen.
And beyond the chambers, through a viewport he couldn’t quite focus on, the curve of something blue. Something familiar.
Earth.
He was seeing Earth from above.
The Cell’s hum spiked viciously. The vision shattered. Wesley gasped, his body convulsing against the pod’s restraints. The afterimage burned behind his eyes: his mother’s frozen face, the rows of chambers, the blue curve of a world he’d never seen from the outside.
[ENCRYPTED:He saw her.]
She was alive. She was somewhere up there, beyond the Cradle, beyond everything he’d been taught to believe.
And the Cell frequency had almost kept him from seeing it.
“Welcome, candidates, to the Beta Test,” a woman’s voice echoed in his pod. “You have been chosen because you represent the future...”
Chosen. Wesley almost laughed. None of them had chosen anything. They’d been herded, scanned, injected, and shoved into pods. “Chosen” was doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
Through the curved glass, Wesley caught movement near the problem pod. Three Partisant guards had gathered around the guy who couldn’t stop twitching. They weren’t helping. They weren’t even pretending to help. One of them held a tablet the size of a dinner tray, recording the whole thing. The other two just watched, arms crossed, heads tilted like they were observing a mildly interesting insect.
Zap. The guy spasmed. The guards exchanged glances. One of them stifled a laugh.
Quality entertainment, apparently. Wesley made a mental note: if the wires started shocking him, he would become a statue. He would become the most centered, most compliant, most boring candidate in the history of the Beta Test. He would give them nothing.
The loading bar filled. Wesley’s consciousness flickered.
The test had begun.