Subject 02

In the year 3002, Detective Bishop knew the promises of a brighter future were nothing but lies, another rotten fairy tale spat from the mouths of bureaucrats and scientists drunk on their own arrogance. Bishop piloted his battered hovercar over what remained of the city, his eyes tracing the sprawling abyss below—dark tendrils creeping outward, consuming streets, buildings, people—everything disappearing quietly, leaving only a flat, endless black nothingness in its wake.

From high above, the landscape looked cancerous, an infected wound slowly devouring itself. Lights flickered in the distance, desperate signals of those fleeing to cities not yet devoured by the void. Hovercraft convoys snaked across crumbling highways, headlights casting ghostly beams through the smog-filled twilight, panicked families crammed inside. Entire skyscrapers leaned crookedly toward the spreading darkness, steel frames groaning like dying animals as they sank into oblivion.

Warehouse 9 loomed ahead, at the epicenter of ruin. Bishop set down at the edge of the spreading blackness. His boots sank slightly into the surface of the ground as if reality itself had grown soft, yielding to the void. He lit a cigarette, stale smoke curling bitterly down his throat, and approached the towering, rusted building.

Inside, he felt the chill immediately, a cold deeper than winter. The doors creaked open reluctantly, the darkness inside far heavier than mere shadow, more tangible, more alive. The projection room, once hailed as a marvel of human innovation, now breathed despair. It swallowed sound, swallowed hope, swallowed the very air from Bishop's lungs.

At the center of the black void, bathed in a sickly halo of pale artificial light, sat Subject 02. He was barely recognizable as human—skin stretched tight over brittle bones, veins tracing blue and purple rivers beneath translucent flesh. His mouth hung open, lips cracked and bleeding, a vacant stare aimed into nowhere. Around him, the ground was stained black-red with congealed blood, an island of misery within an endless sea of darkness.

From the abyss, she emerged. A female shadow, elegant yet hideous, beautiful yet grotesque, her silhouette drifted softly as if composed of smoke and nightmares. Her presence filled the room, black tendrils of hair flowing weightlessly around a face of infinite emptiness. Long fingers, sharp as razors, caressed Subject 02 tenderly before plunging a blade, long and curved like a crescent moon, rhythmically into his spine. In. Out. Slowly, mechanically, eternally.

Bishop's gut tightened. Behind him, the terrified whispers of a surviving doctor trembled like dry leaves.

"It feeds off his suffering," the doctor whimpered. "The machine—it became him. His anguish is infinite. We can’t stop it, detective... it’s taking everything."

Bishop had seen it himself. On the horizon, he’d watched entire cities vanish as though erased by the sweep of some indifferent god's hand, replaced only by this quiet, black void. The closer he got, the louder his blood thundered in his ears, screaming at him to flee, to join the hopeless exodus toward distant settlements that hadn't yet fallen victim to man's self-inflicted nightmare.

"You thought you could dissect the soul," Bishop spat bitterly, "and you got exactly what you asked for."

He drew his pistol, an ancient revolver of burnished steel. When he fired, the echo of gunfire drowned in silence. The bullets disappeared into her without so much as a ripple. The shadows turned to him slowly, eyeless, mouthless, yet Bishop felt the smirk she gave, cold and merciless, like steel pressed against bare skin.

The room seemed to shrink as she approached, the darkness thickening like syrup, heavy and suffocating. Shadows grasped Bishop’s legs, crawling upward like icy vines, forcing him painfully to his knees. His cigarette fell into the blood, extinguishing itself with a soft hiss.

Then she was there, leaning over him, whispering voiceless threats and seductive promises of oblivion. She raised her knife, the blade glistening with Subject 02’s endless suffering. She plunged it deep into Bishop’s shoulder, and pain roared through him, tearing a scream from his throat that disappeared instantly into the hungry void.

His radio crackled urgently through the haze of agony:

"Detective, we’ve lost two more sectors! Thousands fleeing, nowhere to run! The void—it’s everywhere!"

But Bishop knew already. He could feel it. The cold, empty vastness spreading beyond the warehouse, swallowing factories, homes, schools, hospitals, swallowing humanity itself.

Subject 02 never moved, never blinked, the blade still plunging rhythmically into his spine, an endless loop of despair. Bishop felt consciousness fade, sinking downward, deeper into darkness. As the city crumbled around them, he knew one truth clearer than ever:

In trying to understand humanity's innermost depths, they'd discovered only the horror that lurked within—cold, infinite, and unstoppable.

Mac had always been the kind of man who wore his sadness quietly, carrying it around like a coat that never quite fit. Life had worn him thin, each year stripping away another layer until all that remained was a hollow man, pale and fragile, trapped within himself.

When they first recommended the machine, it sounded like salvation—cutting-edge therapy, a miracle of the year 3002. His therapist, a cold woman in a pristine white office with smooth chrome furniture and screens that hummed gently with false serenity, promised him peace. She spoke softly of a chance to explore his innermost feelings, to face his trauma safely within the walls of an experimental facility.

Mac didn't believe in miracles, but desperation had a way of drowning out skepticism. So he agreed, signed away his life in small black letters on pages he never read, unaware of the true nature of the monster he was feeding.

He was given the subject designation "02" and moved swiftly from clean, sterile therapy rooms into the cavernous halls of Warehouse 9, a building medically lit with brutal fluorescents and humming quietly with the whispers of technology. It wasn't long before they dressed him in the suit—a tangled nest of wires, sensors, and electrodes, pulsating with dim, unnatural life—and connected him to the vast machine, humming quietly, waiting hungrily in the shadows.

When they activated it, it felt like drowning. Memories flooded him, dark and merciless—every loss, every disappointment, every bleak night he spent wishing for escape. The machine had been designed to visualize and dissect human emotion, to heal by exposure, to free by confrontation. But Mac’s darkness was too deep, his wounds too raw. Instead of liberation, it found something else buried in him, something ancient and primal, and when it awoke, the shadows swallowed everything.

Doctors watched from behind glass panels, fascinated at first, then horrified. The machine projected Mac’s mind, raw and exposed, turning his pain into a tangible force, a blackness that spread and twisted around him, protecting and punishing simultaneously. The shadow woman emerged—both tormentor and guardian—an embodiment of Mac’s tortured psyche.

Soon, the warehouse grew dark, isolated. The world outside began to collapse inward, devoured by the same agony the doctors had promised to cure.

And Mac sat there, silent and vacant, imprisoned within himself, forever trapped as Subject 02, as his personal hell slowly became everyone else's reality.

Bishop clawed his way free from the oppressive grip of the shadows, staggering backward through the suffocating blackness until he burst from the warehouse doors, collapsing onto asphalt that was rapidly dissolving into the abyss. Blood poured down his shoulder, staining his coat a slick, greasy red. Behind him, Warehouse 9 rose like a twisted monument to mankind’s arrogance, its rusted steel walls bending inward, pulsating softly like the heart of some corrupted beast.

Everything else had vanished. The sprawling cityscape that once glittered with electric lights and neon signs had been stripped bare, swallowed whole by a darkness so deep it ached to look at. Bishop’s hovercar rested just a few feet from the warehouse, precariously perched at the edge of reality itself. There was nowhere else to run, nowhere else to go; beyond the warehouse was nothingness—pure, empty void stretching endlessly in every direction.

His breath ragged, Bishop hauled himself into the hovercar, slamming the cockpit door shut. He flicked on the dashboard console, desperately scanning for any sign of life, any satellite beacon, anything still tethered to a sane world. The screen spat static, angry white noise flickering and pulsing erratically. He slammed his fist down in frustration, smearing blood across cracked glass.

“Come on!” he roared at the lifeless screen, his voice swallowed instantly by the oppressive silence. He lit another cigarette with trembling fingers, inhaling the decades old bitter smoke as he waited. Minutes stretched into hours, hours into eternity. He sat, helplessly staring at Warehouse 9 through the fogged glass, watching as the walls shifted and trembled, breathing in sync with whatever monstrous heartbeat lay at the core of Subject 02’s torment.

No satellite signal ever came. Just silence—absolute, suffocating silence, broken only by the dull rhythmic thump, faint but relentless, echoing from within the building. Bishop knew it was the sound of Subject 02’s perpetual punishment, the blade sinking endlessly into flesh, and he knew it would never stop.

He waited, chained to the warehouse by sheer hopelessness. The hovercar’s battery slowly drained, lights dimming, heat failing, his breath frosting the windshield in patterns that mirrored the spreading darkness outside. Bishop leaned back, wounded and alone, eyes never leaving the pulsating structure, watching as tendrils of black slowly, patiently crept forward, inching ever closer toward him.