Prague, Czech Republic
Six Days Ago – 4:45 AM
Darkness swallowed the city.
It wasn’t a normal power outage.
The streetlights. The cars. The neon signs. Even the emergency backup grids—all dead.
And then the screaming started.
Distant at first. Like something was happening far away. But then, closer.
Then—too close.
I turned to the woman.
“What the hell is happening?” I whispered.
Her face was tight, her eyes locked on the empty street beyond the warehouse.
“This is a localized reset,” she said, voice grim. “The system is correcting. Right now, it’s rewriting every camera feed, erasing records, eliminating anyone who saw too much.”
I swallowed hard.
“Erasing them how?”
She didn’t answer.
Because she didn’t need to.
Outside, the screaming was cutting off.
Not fading.
Not running.
Just—stopping.
Like people were being deleted mid-sentence.
The corridor that should have taken us to Svalbard had collapsed behind us, leaving us stranded back in Prague. The gap—that thin place in reality Isabel had described—had closed violently, ejecting us into an alleyway behind what appeared to be the same warehouse we’d started in.
Except it wasn’t the same. The warehouse now bore Cyrillic lettering on its walls. The street signs had changed. Even the air smelled different—heavier, more industrial.
“Where are we?” Eleanor whispered, clutching her arm where she’d been thrown against a wall during our violent ejection from the gap.
Isabel checked her strange device, her expression darkening. “Still Prague, but… wrong Prague.”
“Wrong how?” I asked.
“Parallel,” she said tersely. “The correction is bending reality around us. Trying to force us into a different configuration.”
As if to emphasize her point, a car passed the alley—a model I’d never seen before, with markings that resembled Soviet-era design. But we were in 2023. The Soviet Union had collapsed decades ago.
“We’re in a reality pocket,” Isabel explained, her voice low and urgent. “A transitional space between the correction and stabilization. We need to move before it solidifies around us.”
The Algorithm That Erases People
I clenched my jaw, forcing logic through the fear.
“I don’t get it. This thing—The Lucifer Code—it’s just an equation. How does an equation make people disappear?”
The woman inhaled. “It’s not just an equation. It’s a sequence.”
“Like the Fibonacci distortion?”
“Yes. But bigger. It runs on a global scale. Think of it like… like a mathematical firewall for reality. The moment you become an anomaly—the moment you break the pattern—you’re removed.”
I frowned.
“Removed how?”
She exhaled. “We don’t know. We only know that people don’t just die.”
I swallowed hard. “What happens to them?”
She looked at me.
And the silence that followed told me everything.
We had no idea.
Eleanor was shivering despite the mild temperature. “This is insane,” she whispered, but there was no conviction in her voice anymore. She had seen too much to deny what was happening.
“The man who gave you the manuscript,” Isabel said, checking her weapon as she spoke. “He was removed. Not killed—removed. Erased from the pattern. His entire existence reconfigured.”
“But I remember him,” I argued. “If he was erased from reality, why do I still remember him?”
Isabel’s eyes met mine. “Because you’re a constant. You exist outside the standard variables of the equation. You can’t be easily rewritten.”
“And that’s why the Bureau wants me dead,” I realized. “If they can’t rewrite me, they’ll remove me physically.”
Isabel nodded. “You, Eleanor, me—we’re all resistant to corrections. It’s why the Nexus recruited us in the first place.”
“And Evelyn?” I asked. “Is she resistant too?”
A shadow passed over Isabel’s face. “Evelyn Sartori is… complicated. She’s both a constant and a variable. She exists across multiple iterations of the equation simultaneously.”
“That’s why she appeared to be in two places at once,” I realized. “Why she died twice.”
“Yes,” Isabel confirmed. “And why she’s so valuable to both the Bureau and the Nexus. She’s the only person who can move between iterations willingly.”
Eleanor looked up sharply. “You think she’s working with the Bureau?”
Isabel’s expression was grim. “I think she’s playing her own game. And has been for a very long time.”
We Have to Run
A sudden crack—like thunder—split the air outside.
Except it wasn’t thunder.
It was gunfire.
I didn’t wait for an explanation.
“We need to leave,” I said, grabbing my bag.
She was already ahead of me, moving fast, checking her weapon—a Glock 19 with a suppressor—before heading toward the warehouse’s back exit.
I barely kept up as she pushed open the door, revealing an alleyway swallowed in black.
The power outage had crippled the city.
No cars. No streetlights. No movement.
Just shadows.
“Where are we going?” I whispered.
She didn’t answer.
Instead, she pulled out her phone—an old Nokia burner, no internet access, no tracking—and texted something in complete darkness.
Then, she grabbed my wrist.
“We get to the bridge,” she said. “We get out of Prague. Tonight.”
She started moving.
I followed.
And somewhere behind us—
A voice echoed.
Not a human voice.
Something else.
Something wrong.
“Correction in progress.”
And the alley bent.
Eleanor stumbled, clutching her head. “Did you hear that?” she gasped.
“Don’t listen to it,” Isabel commanded. “It’s trying to integrate you into the new pattern.”
“What happens if it succeeds?” I asked.
Isabel’s expression was grim. “Then you become part of this reality. You forget who you were. You forget the Code. You forget everything.”
“Like a reset,” Eleanor whispered.
“Exactly,” Isabel nodded. “The ultimate firewall—not killing dissenters, but making them forget they ever dissented in the first place.”
The thought sent ice through my veins. I had spent my life pursuing forbidden knowledge, deciphering lost languages, uncovering secrets buried by time. The idea that all of that could be erased—not just my discoveries, but my very desire to discover—was more terrifying than death.
“The bullet wound in my shoulder,” I realized suddenly. “It’s gone.”
Isabel glanced at me. “The correction is trying to rewrite your recent history. Make it as if the attack never happened.”
“Why would it do that?” Eleanor asked.
“Because your deaths would raise questions,” Isabel explained as we hurried through the darkened streets. “The Bureau prefers clean corrections—ones that leave no loose ends, no grieving families asking uncomfortable questions.”
“So they’re not trying to kill us,” I said. “They’re trying to erase us.”
“They’ll kill you if they have to,” Isabel corrected. “But they’d prefer a clean solution. A reality where you never found the manuscript in the first place.”
The City Is Changing
It wasn’t just the darkness.
Something was wrong with Prague itself.
The streets were different.
Buildings had shifted. Some were gone entirely—vanished, replaced by unfamiliar structures that shouldn’t exist.
I felt it in my bones.
The world was correcting itself around us.
Erasing anomalies.
Erasing us.
The woman kept moving, fast but controlled.
“Don’t look at the changes,” she warned.
I risked one glance at a familiar street corner—except it wasn’t familiar anymore. The café I had visited the day before? Gone. The bookstore next to it? Replaced by an empty lot.
It was like Prague itself was rewriting its memory.
I forced myself forward.
We turned onto Čech Bridge—one of the only routes leading out of the city center.
That’s when we saw them.
The Watchers.
Eleanor gasped beside me. “Nate, look at the university.”
Against my better judgment, I glanced toward Charles University, where I had given my lecture just days ago. The historic building was transforming before our eyes—its architecture shifting from Gothic to Soviet Brutalist, the stone façade replaced by concrete and steel.
“The correction is accelerating,” Isabel said tensely. “This entire section of the city is being rewritten.”
“Into what?” I asked.
“A version of Prague where we never existed,” she replied. “Where the manuscript was never found. Where the Lucifer Code remains safely hidden.”
As we watched, pedestrians appeared on the streets—people who hadn’t been there moments before. They moved with strange, mechanical precision, as if they weren’t quite real. Their faces were indistinct, blurred, like photographs taken with a camera that couldn’t quite focus.
“What are they?” Eleanor whispered.
“Placeholders,” Isabel explained. “Temporary constructs until the system can fully populate this new reality.”
My scientific mind rebelled against what I was seeing, but I couldn’t deny the evidence before my eyes. The world was literally being rewritten around us.
“How is this possible?” I muttered.
“The Lucifer Code isn’t just a secret hidden in history,” Isabel said as we hurried toward the bridge. “It’s the underlying operating system of reality itself. And right now, it’s running a debug protocol to remove errors in the program.”
“And we’re the errors,” Eleanor realized.
Isabel nodded grimly. “We’re the glitch they’re trying to fix.”
The Watchers
Three figures stood at the end of the bridge.
Dressed in identical black suits, unmoving. Their faces—blurred. Not hidden. Not shadowed. Blurred.
Like reality itself refused to process them.
My pulse spiked.
I had seen a lot of strange things in my life. But this—
This was something else.
“What the hell are they?” I whispered.
The woman clenched her jaw. “Enforcers.”
I swallowed. “Enforcers for who?”
She exhaled.
“For the system itself.”
One of them stepped forward.
And in a voice that barely sounded human, it spoke:
“Your access has been denied.”
Then—
The world broke.
I felt Eleanor’s hand clutch mine, her grip painfully tight.
“Don’t let go,” Isabel commanded. “Whatever happens, don’t let go of each other.”
The Enforcers moved toward us with unnatural synchronicity, their movements too fluid, too perfect.
“What are they?” I asked again, my voice tight with fear.
“They’re not people,” Isabel said. “They’re functions. Subroutines designed to eliminate anomalies in the equation.”
“How do we fight them?” Eleanor asked.
Isabel drew her weapon. “We don’t. We run.”
But there was nowhere to run. The bridge ahead was blocked by the Enforcers, and behind us, the city was rapidly transforming into something unrecognizable.
Isabel yanked us toward the edge of the bridge.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
“Trust me,” she said, her voice steady despite the madness surrounding us.
She pulled out her strange device again—the one she’d used to manipulate the traffic lights during our escape. She pressed a sequence of buttons, and the air around us began to shimmer.
“A pocket gap,” she explained. “Temporary and unstable, but it’s our only chance.”
“Gap to where?” Eleanor demanded.
Isabel’s eyes met mine. “To the one place they can’t follow. The source.”
“Concordia,” I whispered.
She nodded.
“On my mark,” she said, watching as the Enforcers drew closer. “Three… two… one…”
She pushed us over the edge of the bridge.
We fell.
But instead of hitting the cold water of the Vltava River below, we passed through a shimmering distortion in the air.
And kept falling.
Through darkness. Through cold. Through nothing.
The Shattered Moment
The bridge fractured around us.
One moment, I was standing on solid ground.
The next—I was somewhere else.
Not in Prague.
Not in any city.
Just… white.
Endless white.
The Watchers were closer now.
I tried to step back, but there was no back.
The woman’s voice—distant—reached me.
“Fight it!”
I closed my eyes.
Forced myself to remember where I was.
What was real.
Who I was.
Nathaniel Graves. Cryptographer. Historian. Human.
The moment I thought it—
The world snapped back.
I was on the bridge again.
The Watchers were gone.
The city was normal again.
But I wasn’t.
Something had changed.
And I knew, deep in my bones, that this wasn’t over.
This was just the beginning.
Eleanor was beside me, her eyes wide with terror. “What just happened?”
I looked around. We were still on the bridge, but the Enforcers had vanished. The city behind us had stopped transforming—everything looked normal again.
Too normal.
“It’s a trick,” Isabel warned, her voice hoarse. “The system is trying to reintegrate you. Make you forget what you saw.”
I focused on my memories. The manuscript. The vanishing man. Evelyn appearing in my apartment. The coordinates leading to Concordia.
They were still there. Still clear.
But something else had changed.
I could see… patterns. Everywhere. In the arrangement of the streetlights. In the flow of the river beneath the bridge. In the structure of the buildings around us.
Mathematical sequences that shouldn’t be visible to the naked eye.
“Isabel,” I said slowly. “I can see it.”
She turned to me sharply. “See what?”
“The Code,” I whispered. “It’s everywhere. In everything.”
Her expression shifted to one of shock, then understanding.
“The breach event,” she murmured. “It changed your perception.”
Eleanor was looking at me with concern. “Nate, what are you talking about? What do you see?”
I tried to explain, but how do you describe seeing the mathematical foundations of reality itself? It was like suddenly being able to perceive a new color, or an additional dimension.
“It’s like… seeing the wireframe of the world,” I attempted. “The mathematical structure beneath everything.”
Isabel gripped my arm. “This changes everything. If you can see the Code—”
“Then I can decode it,” I finished.
“Or rewrite it,” she said softly.
The implications were staggering. If the Lucifer Code was indeed the mathematical foundation of reality, and I could now perceive it directly…
“We need to get to Concordia,” I said firmly. “Now.”
Isabel nodded, her expression grave. “The temporary stabilization won’t last. We have minutes at most before the correction resumes.”
The Final Escape
The woman grabbed my wrist.
“You just survived a breach event,” she said.
I swallowed. “What does that mean?”
She exhaled.
“It means they can’t erase you. Not yet.”
I didn’t like the way she said yet.
She pulled me toward a black car, parked just beyond the bridge.
“We need to get off-grid,” she said. “There’s one place left where they can’t reach us.”
I climbed into the passenger seat, my mind still racing.
“Where?” I asked.
She turned the key.
The engine roared to life.
Then she looked at me, her expression grim.
“Russia.”
She hit the gas.
And just before we disappeared into the night—
A new message flashed on my phone.
One sentence.
One last warning.
“The Lucifer Code must not be broken.”
I stared at the message, a chill running through me.
“How did they get your number?” Eleanor asked from the back seat, her voice tight with fear.
“They didn’t need to,” Isabel replied, her eyes fixed on the road as we sped away from the city. “The message isn’t coming through the cellular network. It’s coming through the Code itself.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means the system recognizes you as a threat,” she explained. “Direct communication with anomalies is extremely rare. Usually, the system simply erases problems silently.”
“So why warn me?” I pressed.
Isabel was quiet for a moment. “Because you’re not just any anomaly. You’re a constant. A necessary part of the equation. It can’t simply delete you without destabilizing itself.”
“Then what will it do?” Eleanor asked.
“It will try to reintegrate you,” Isabel said. “Force you back into your prescribed role in the pattern. And if that fails…”
She didn’t need to finish the sentence. The implications were clear enough.
The car sped through the darkened countryside, leaving Prague behind. The patterns I could now see seemed to grow more pronounced the further we got from the city—mathematical structures underlying everything, from the arrangement of trees to the flow of the wind.
“Why Russia?” Eleanor asked after a long silence.
“Because that’s where the closest stable gap to Concordia is located,” Isabel explained. “In the Karelia region, near the Finnish border. An ancient site that predates modern nations. A place where reality has always been… permeable.”
“And from there?” I asked.
“From there, we go directly to the Arctic,” she said. “To Concordia. To the source of the Code.”
I glanced at my phone again, the warning still glowing on the screen.
“The Lucifer Code must not be broken.”
But that was exactly what we intended to do.
Break it. Rewrite it. Free ourselves from its constraints.
I looked out at the night, at the patterns now visible in everything around me, and wondered:
What happens when you break the mathematical foundation of reality itself?
What comes after?
And are we ready for the answer?
As we drove through the night, I felt the weight of history—of multiple histories—pressing down on me. I was Nathaniel Graves, but I was also all the previous Nathaniel Graveses who had come before me. All the iterations who had found the Code, attempted to decode it, and ultimately failed.
This time would be different.
This time, I could see the equation.
This time, I might actually succeed where all my previous selves had failed.
And that thought was both exhilarating and terrifying.
Because breaking the Lucifer Code wouldn’t just change reality.
It would unmake it.
And whatever came after would be beyond anything we could imagine.
I closed my eyes, the patterns still visible even in darkness, and prepared myself for what lay ahead.
Concordia. The Anomaly. The truth.
The car sped through the night, carrying us toward our destiny.
A destiny written in mathematics older than humanity itself.