Program Zero

The unveiling of the Unified Grid was designed to feel like certainty. Runes woke in towers like veins, taking their first pulse. Alloy ribs gleamed beneath glass skin. In every city that mattered, screens showed the same choreography—engineers at consoles, officials at podiums, members of the Trinity poised at the platform's edge like emblems of consent.

Then the picture shook.

Color slid sideways into static. A heartbeat later, every feed on Earth was seized by a different voice.

"Do not cut transmission," a young woman said, clear and even, the kind of calm that has already looked at death and made arrangements. "Let the world watch."

The image snapped into a new frame: a boulevard that should have been an avenue of speeches, now a corridor of smoke. Civilians had already been moved. In their place, ranks gathered in black, masks painted with a broken circle. Not dozens. Not a ragged handful. Hundreds, then swelling into thousands, each with a plasma rifle, a blade, bodies filled with nanites, and a purpose.

The camera shifted, as though nudged upward by someone's shoulder. Far down the street, a wall bulged, collapsed outward, and from its rubble shouldered a figure built like an answer.

Hoarder did not run. He advanced. Every plasma round fired flowed into him harmlessly. He palmed an overturned truck, set his fingers into its steel as if it were bread, and pressed it aside to clear the way.

"Our gods," the young woman said. "These are our gods. The ones our mothers prayed to without names when storms came. The Persequions are the faces of those prayers. They are our gods."

Mirage flickered into the frame. The air beaded light on him like dew, and then the beads snapped into needles. Rifles cut themselves in half. Helmets split with polite precision. Men turned to shout positions, and rays of light pierced their throats before the syllables formed. Mirage was not everywhere; he was exactly where he needed to be, exactly when he needed to be.

A measured voice entered. "Hear us. We do not fight our gods. We fight for them. The demons of Firmatha Sangaur dress slavery in etiquette and call it peace. They speak contracts, treaties, and salvations with polished smiles. They demand our gods compromise with evil to spare us." The measured voice paused. "We confess: it is our weakness that forces those compromises."

Bloody Mary fell through smoke like an omen, the color of wine. Her wire drew a single curve. Where she cut, bodies realized too late. Red mist trailed her like a veil. Her face was not mad; it was grace, a dancer exhibiting a miracle she had practiced to perfection.

A middle-aged woman, breath hitching: "We are the leash. We admit it. We have begged them to be gentle to monsters so that monsters would be gentle to us. And so they have bound themselves—for our sakes. That ends today."

Siren walked into a cross street with the unremarkable grace of a woman going to fetch water. She did not sing. She hummed. The note was low, patient. It rolled along concrete and climbed steel. Men opened their mouths to curse and found no sound. Blood wet their ears, and they fell like sacks of stone in water.

A boy's voice—still rounded with youth, smoke-rasped, too honest to remember to be careful—tumbled in. "We believe in them. We know this attack will fail. We found the strength to fight monsters. And yet see us break beneath their might. See what our gods are when they do not carry us."

Manic screamed with laughter from the crown of a psionic machine shaped like a spearhead. Smaller psionic drones raced around him like a school of bright, disobedient fish. When one of his drones strayed and tore a hole through his own flanking line, he laughed harder.

"We are not asking them to be kind," the gravel-voiced man said, the words heavy as a spade blade. "We are asking them to be free. We are asking them to meet Firmatha Sangaur as gods should meet demons—without our trembling hands on their sleeves."

The camera widened and climbed enough to show scale.

Bumi stepped into focus from the right side of one pane. He lifted his hand, and a collapsed support column un-collapsed, rebar writhing from the rubble like metal grass to braid itself into a cable. With his other hand, he made the pavement rise into a clean wall and caught a volley of plasma blasts; the wall broke, then knit back together, then grew a tooth that slammed down onto the team that had fired the shot. Bumi did not look triumphant as he rescued a sagging building with a gentle push. He looked occupied.

"Our gods mend and cut in the same breath," the teacher said quietly. " We have asked them to do both while dragging our fear like a chain."

The Conductor lifted his hands, and the air trembled with a charge that didn't belong to the storm. Plasma fire shrieked across the boulevard—but it didn't reach him. The beams unraveled mid-flight, their containment collapsing as the ions bled away. Rifles stuttered in confusion; one by one, their barrels glowed red as magnetic fields bent inward, cooking the charge before it left the chamber. Men screamed as their weapons became furnaces in their grip. He opened his palm, and the failed shots curved like obedient serpents, whipped around by fields only he could see, redirected into the very squads that fired them.

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"Order is holy only when it is free," the chorus intoned, voices braided now: the young woman's bright steadiness, the teacher's measure, the gravel man's bluntness, the middle-aged woman's iron, the boy's breathless heat. "Firmatha Sangaur offers order without freedom."

And as if to answer that truth, Amaterasu crossed the roofline with a runner's economy. Six shooters snapped their plasma sights to her. The beams withered before they reached her, collapsing as she siphoned their heat. Their rifles bent down in molten arcs, barrels drooping like wax as the chambers boiled from within. Before they could recover, she cut a smooth horizon across their throats. A billboard at the block's end fell apart in two molten halves.

The silence left in its wake carried only the echo of power—until Shango stepped forward, walking with the easy posture of someone listening to a song no one else can hear. His fingers opened. Resonance stepped out across the square like a tide. Rifles split in clean seams in men's hands. Knee joints went soft. He set his palm toward an armored car and pressed, not the car, but the air around it—it buckled inward.

"We are not here to move them," the middle-aged woman said. "We are here to remove ourselves. We die so our gods do not have to carry our fear into war."

The silence quivered on the broadcast, waiting. Then the young woman said, "Name yourselves. Not for them. For us."

Names flooded the sound—Kiara, Maro, Danilo, Ruth, Ebele, Tomas, Anika, Hassan, Lindiwe, Yuriko, Mateo—too many to honor, too many to hold, enough to make a litany.

"Understand us," the gravel man said, scraping truth bare. "No one forced us. No god asked this."

"We believe in our gods," the boy said, soft for the first time. "We love them. That is why we leave their hands. That is why we go."

Bloody Mary spun her blade in a vertical circle. The people in front of her realized too late that they had been cut in half. She blinked red, glanced at the blood on her palm, wiped it on her thigh, and kept moving. Three more fell as easily as fruit taken from a branch.

Bumi raised pillars to steady a leaning tower. A crack split one, and he made a low sound; the stone sealed. A squad charged, plasma rifles burning. He nodded once, swept his arm, and the street buckled like a wave. The squad vanished beneath the rolling earth.

"Paradise is not a favor," the measured voice said. "We earn it when our gods are no longer forced to cosign our fear."

The young woman came back into the foreground, her mask split across one cheek, dry blood like mascara under one eye. Her voice held steadiness the way a blade holds an edge. "We will die here today. Many more will die in the war to come. We are not asking you to be unafraid. We are asking you to be unwilling to kneel."

Amaterasu and the Conductor crossed sightlines. Heat and ions braided in the air between their gestures, and the plasma bolts aimed at them guttered out, collapsing into steam mid-flight.

Shango traced a small circle with his hand. The wave rippled outward through the chassis of a heavy plasma gun. The weapon shook apart, seams splitting, screws and coils vibrating loose until it exploded in the operator's grip.

Siren's hum dropped low. Men froze, hearing their own hearts thunder. Then she raised the pitch, and those hearts seized.

"We do not die to prove they need us," the middle-aged woman added. "We die to prove they do not."

Manic spun his tank on the dome of a civic building until the stone cracked, then launched off, leaving a crater. His psionic drones fanned out and shredded a rooftop with fire.

"In every city," the gravel man said, and the panes briefly showed it: the same flood of masks, the same banners, the same deliberate march into the same devices of correction, each city a cathedral with a different dialect. "In every city, we remove the leash."

The chant began not as defiance but devotion. It rose under the speeches like a river under a bridge until the words rode it or drowned. Demons bleed. The three syllables had the rhythm of a hammer. Demons bleed.

The chant shook the square itself, and Shango opened his fingers. The air between them rippled. A line of masked men in the front rank staggered, then steadied, then kept chanting through blood pouring from their ears.

Mirage wrote a straight, thin line the length of a block with light. It lingered after he was gone, like the line a finger draws on skin hours after the touch.

Bloody Mary stepped into a pool of red that had been a man and lifted her eyes to the camera.

Bumi put his palm to a wall, and the wall sighed and stood sturdier and taller.

The Conductor closed his fingers. The air between two armored carriers ionized, their circuits seizing. Both machines shuddered, locked together under his magnetic grip.

Hoarder continued to wade through the plasma fire.

Amaterasu ended one life with a stroke of her plasma blade and was already on another before they had time to process what happened. Siren raised her hum until skulls rattled and ears bled, then held it steady, a single terrible note.

The camera jolted. Static nibbled the corners of the frame. The ranks pressed forward. The banner the small woman had lifted caught the wind; the broken circle cracked further down its length before tearing free. Someone in the rear shouted the names again, and the names threaded the chant like beads.

Demons bleed.

"Rise," the young woman said.

The sound stretched thin. The image frayed at the edges. The chant swung once more through the throat of the world.

Demons bleed.

The feed lurched, static clawed the frame—and then nothing.