Somewhere Over Eastern Europe
Six Days Ago – 8:14 AM
The private plane hummed steadily as it cut through the sky.
I sat in the dimly lit cabin, staring at the classified files on my laptop.
My shoulder throbbed. The bullet wound was still fresh. The bandages the woman had wrapped around me were tight, but pain still pulsed with every movement.
We had left Prague behind hours ago.
We hadn’t spoken since takeoff.
But I knew one thing—we weren’t out of this yet.
Not by a long shot.
The breach event on the bridge had changed something fundamental within me. The patterns of the Lucifer Code were still visible—mathematical structures underlying everything around me. In the condensation patterns on the airplane window. In the turbulence vibrations of the fuselage. In the very air itself.
Isabel sat across from me, periodically checking instruments on a device that resembled a heavily modified tablet. Eleanor was beside her, sleeping fitfully, exhaustion having finally overtaken her. We had managed to secure this private flight through what Isabel called “Nexus channels”—connections that supposedly existed outside the normal networks of influence.
“How much longer?” I asked, breaking the silence.
Isabel glanced at her watch. “Three hours until we reach Karelia. Then we take ground transport to the gap.”
I nodded, returning my attention to the files on my laptop. Files that seemingly shouldn’t exist—records of experiments conducted decades ago by people who had been systematically erased from history.
My new perception showed me something else—faint distortions in the data itself, as if the digital files were struggling to maintain coherence. As if reality itself was trying to delete them even as I read them.
The Ghost Archive
I turned to her.
“You still haven’t told me your name,” I said.
She glanced at me, then exhaled. “Selene,” she finally said. “Selene Voss.”
It sounded real. But then again, so had everything else before it disappeared.
I frowned, confused by the change. “I thought your name was Isabel. Isabel Chen.”
She looked at me strangely. “No. It’s always been Selene. Selene Voss.”
A chill ran through me. Something was wrong. I clearly remembered her introducing herself as Isabel Chen back in Prague. I turned to wake Eleanor, but hesitated. The patterns around Selene were shifting, realigning—as if her identity itself was being rewritten in real time.
“The correction,” I whispered. “It’s still happening.”
She tilted her head. “What correction?”
I forced myself to focus, to remember. “In Prague. The Enforcers. The distortions in reality. You called yourself Isabel Chen. You worked for the Nexus Institute.”
Her expression flickered—confusion, then clarity, then determination.
“You’re right,” she said, her voice suddenly different. Stronger. More familiar. “My name is Isabel Chen. Selene Voss is… was… my cover identity within the Bureau before I defected to the Nexus.”
She rubbed her temples, wincing. “They’re trying to reintegrate me. Rewrite my history.” She looked up at me, her eyes clear again. “The correction is still active, just more subtle now. Instead of erasing us completely, they’re trying to change who we are. Make us forget.”
I leaned back, watching the sky outside. The clouds below stretched like an ocean of white, endless and empty.
“Where are we going?” I asked, testing her again.
She kept her eyes on the screen in front of her.
“To the only place left that has answers,” she said.
“Which is?”
She hesitated. Then:
“The Ghost Archive.”
I frowned. “What the hell is that?”
Isabel—or Selene—or whoever she truly was—took a breath, then finally looked at me.
“You already know that The Lucifer Code isn’t just an equation,” she said. “It’s a self-correcting system. A pattern that’s been running for centuries. Maybe longer.”
I nodded.
She continued.
“But what you don’t know is that you’re not the first to try to break it.”
I frowned.
“Who else?”
Isabel exhaled. “The Soviets. During the Cold War, Russian cryptographers stumbled onto fragments of The Lucifer Code hidden in ancient texts, religious manuscripts, and even star charts. They didn’t know what they were looking at, but they knew it was… unnatural.”
I swallowed hard.
“And what did they do?”
She hesitated.
“They tried to rewrite it.”
Eleanor stirred beside her, blinking awake. “What did I miss?” she murmured, disoriented.
“Isabel was just telling me about the Ghost Archive,” I said, deliberately using the name I remembered. “And Soviet experiments with the Lucifer Code.”
Eleanor frowned. “Isabel? Who’s Isabel?” She looked at the woman across from us. “That’s Selene.”
My blood ran cold. Eleanor’s memories were already being rewritten. The correction was working on her.
“Eleanor,” I said carefully. “Think. Remember Prague. Remember the warehouse. Remember the Enforcers on the bridge.”
She rubbed her eyes. “Of course I remember Prague. We barely escaped from…” She trailed off, confusion clouding her features. “From… something. Someone was chasing us.”
“The Bureau,” I prompted. “The Symmetry Bureau.”
Recognition flickered in her eyes. “Yes. The Bureau. And Isabel helped us escape.”
She blinked, looking at the woman across from us with renewed clarity. “Isabel Chen. From the Nexus Institute.”
Isabel nodded, relief evident in her expression. “The correction is trying to rewrite our shared history. Change our identities. Make us forget what we’ve learned.”
“But it’s not working completely,” I observed. “We’re still remembering.”
“Because of you,” Isabel said. “Your ability to see the Code is creating a stabilization field around us. But it won’t last forever.”
The Experiment That Shouldn’t Exist
She tapped a few keys on her laptop, pulling up a grainy, black-and-white video feed.
A timestamp in the corner read October 12, 1962.
The footage showed a darkened research facility, somewhere deep in the Russian tundra.
Men in lab coats surrounded a massive machine—a tangled mess of cables, analog computers, and blinking lights.
A voice—cold, clinical—spoke in Russian.
Isabel translated in real time.
“Project Osiris – Experiment Twelve. Attempting forced correction override. If successful, we will have proof that history is not written—it is programmed.”
I stared at the screen.
This was impossible.
I had spent my life studying lost knowledge, tracing secret codes hidden in history.
But this?
This wasn’t history.
This was a deliberate attempt to reprogram reality itself.
“How did they know?” Eleanor asked, fully awake now. “How did Soviet scientists in the 1960s figure out what we’re just learning now?”
“They didn’t, exactly,” Isabel explained. “They thought they were discovering a mathematical basis for predicting and altering historical events. A kind of deterministic equation that governed human history.”
“Like Asimov’s psychohistory,” I murmured, referencing the fictional mathematical system that could predict the future of large populations.
“Yes, but real,” Isabel confirmed. “They called it ‘Historical Calculus.’ They believed that if they could decode the equation, they could predict—and potentially alter—the future course of human events.”
“Giving the Soviet Union an unbeatable advantage in the Cold War,” Eleanor realized.
“Exactly. But what they didn’t understand was that they weren’t just discovering an equation—they were encountering the underlying structure of reality itself.”
I looked back at the screen.
In the video, the scientists worked feverishly, inputting data.
Then—something changed.
The room in the video flickered.
Not the lights.
Reality itself.
For a split second, the entire image distorted—like a glitch in a computer system.
The next moment, the lab was… different.
The machine was gone.
The scientists?
They weren’t dead.
They weren’t unconscious.
They were standing in the exact same positions—but they were different people.
Different faces. Different clothes.
Like the original men had never existed.
I felt my blood turn to ice.
Isabel clicked off the video.
“The Russians called it The Ghost Archive because the facility vanished before they could send help,” she said. “Not just the equipment. Not just the data. The entire base was erased from every record.”
I ran a hand through my hair.
“You’re saying this experiment—whatever it was—was deleted from reality?”
She nodded.
“And we’re about to walk into whatever’s left of it.”
Eleanor was silent, her scientific mind clearly struggling with the implications.
“If the facility was erased from reality,” she finally said, “how do we have this video? How do we even know it existed?”
Isabel’s expression turned grim. “Because something went wrong with the correction. The facility didn’t just disappear—it went… sideways. It exists in a state of quantum indeterminacy, neither fully present nor fully absent.”
“A Schrödinger’s research station,” I murmured.
“In a manner of speaking, yes. It exists in what we call a ‘reality pocket’—a bubble of distorted spacetime where the normal laws of physics, and the normal constraints of the Code, don’t fully apply.”
“And that’s where we’re going?” Eleanor asked, her voice tight.
Isabel nodded. “It’s the only place where we might find answers about what happened to the original Concordia team. About what the Lucifer Code really is.”
“And what happened to us in those other iterations,” I added quietly. “To all those previous versions of ourselves who tried and failed to break the Code.”
The Last Coordinates
Isabel leaned forward, pulling out a map of Siberia.
She pointed to a location deep in the Arctic Circle, hundreds of miles from any known city or base.
“No government acknowledges this place exists,” she said. “Satellite scans show nothing. But according to the data I pulled from the old Soviet archives, something is still there.”
She turned to me.
“If we’re going to find out what The Lucifer Code really is, we have to go to where they tried to break it.”
I exhaled.
And for the first time since this nightmare started, I felt a deeper kind of fear settle in.
Because I wasn’t sure we were supposed to get this far.
And if this place was still running—
We might not come back.
“How did you find this place?” I asked. “If it was erased from reality, how did you learn about it?”
Isabel’s expression turned distant. “I didn’t find it. Evelyn did.”
Eleanor and I exchanged glances.
“Evelyn Sartori?” Eleanor asked. “The woman who appeared in Nate’s apartment? The one who’s supposedly been dead for six years?”
“And who appeared in the Concordia photographs from 1951,” I added.
Isabel nodded. “Evelyn has… unique abilities when it comes to the Code. She can perceive alternate iterations more clearly than anyone else. She can even move between them, at least temporarily.”
“And she told you about the Ghost Archive?” I pressed.
“Not exactly,” Isabel hesitated. “She left coordinates, encrypted in a pattern only the Nexus would recognize. A breadcrumb trail leading to this facility.” She paused. “And a warning.”
“What warning?” Eleanor asked.
“That what we’d find there would change everything we thought we knew about the Code. About reality itself.”
The patterns I could see around Isabel shifted as she spoke, mathematical structures realigning with each revelation. She was telling the truth—or at least, what she believed to be the truth.
“There’s something you’re not telling us,” I said, watching the patterns carefully. “About Evelyn.”
Isabel met my gaze. “Evelyn Sartori isn’t just connected to the Code. In some ways, she is the Code. Or at least, a human manifestation of it.”
“What does that mean?” Eleanor demanded.
“It means,” Isabel said slowly, “that Evelyn exists across all iterations simultaneously. She’s a constant that transcends the normal constraints of the equation. A variable that can move between functions.”
“And what does she want?” I asked.
Isabel’s expression turned troubled. “That’s the question, isn’t it? Does she want to protect the Code? Break it? Evolve it? She’s been playing this game for centuries, maybe longer, and none of us—not the Nexus, not the Bureau—truly understand her motives.”
The implications were staggering. If Evelyn was somehow a physical manifestation of the Code itself, what did that make us? What did that make me, with my new ability to perceive the mathematical patterns underlying reality?
“You think she sent us into a trap,” I realized.
Isabel didn’t deny it. “I think she’s guiding us toward something. Whether it’s salvation or destruction, I don’t know.”
The Warning That Came Too Late
The plane hummed steadily, cutting through the clouds.
Then—my phone vibrated.
I hesitated.
I already knew what it would be.
An unknown number.
A message.
One sentence.
“Turn back now.”
I swallowed hard.
Isabel glanced at me.
“Is it them?” she asked.
I nodded.
I closed the message.
I looked out the window.
The sky outside was shifting, turning a darker shade of blue.
We were leaving civilization behind.
Heading toward the last place on Earth that might hold the truth.
I took a deep breath.
I opened my laptop.
And I began decoding the last sequence in The Lucifer Code.
The patterns were clearer now, more accessible to my altered perception. What had once seemed like random arrangements of symbols now revealed themselves as complex mathematical expressions—equations that seemed to describe not just numerical relationships, but the very fabric of existence itself.
“What do you see?” Eleanor asked, watching me work.
“It’s like… a programming language,” I said slowly. “But not for computers. For reality itself. Functions, variables, operations—all defining how the world works.”
“Can you understand it?” Isabel pressed.
I hesitated. “Parts of it. It’s like glimpsing fragments of a much larger system. I can see how certain elements connect, how they influence each other, but the full scope is… overwhelming.”
As I worked, I noticed something strange. Certain sequences in the Code seemed to pulse when I focused on them, as if responding to my attention. As if they were… alive.
“There’s something here,” I murmured, focusing on a particularly complex pattern. “A sequence that keeps repeating. It’s like a signature, or a watermark.”
Isabel leaned closer. “What kind of sequence?”
I drew the pattern on a notepad—a series of interconnected symbols that resembled no language I’d ever studied, yet somehow felt familiar.
Isabel’s breath caught. “That’s it,” she whispered. “The core function. The heart of the Lucifer Code.”
“What does it mean?” Eleanor asked.
Isabel’s expression was a mixture of awe and fear. “It’s the prime equation—the mathematical expression that defines consciousness itself.”
I stared at the pattern I’d drawn, a cold realization settling over me. “This isn’t just an equation that governs reality,” I said slowly. “It’s an equation that creates it. That creates us.”
The implications were staggering. If the Lucifer Code wasn’t just describing reality but generating it—if consciousness itself was an expression of this mathematical system—then what would happen if we changed it?
What would happen if we broke it?
Before I could voice these thoughts, a violent turbulence shook the plane. Outside the window, the clear sky had suddenly turned dark, swirling with clouds that hadn’t been there moments before.
“They know,” Isabel said grimly, grabbing her equipment. “They know what you’ve found.”
The plane lurched again, engines screaming as they fought against impossible winds.
“What’s happening?” Eleanor cried, clutching her seat.
“The system is protecting itself,” Isabel explained, her voice tight. “We’re experiencing a localized reality distortion.”
Through the window, I could see something impossible—the clouds weren’t just swirling; they were forming patterns. Mathematical patterns. The same sequences I had just been decoding.
The Lucifer Code was manifesting physically around us.
“Hold on!” Isabel shouted as the plane dropped suddenly, falling through a pocket of empty air.
Emergency masks dropped from the ceiling. The cabin lights flickered and died.
In that moment of darkness, I saw something else through the window.
Figures in the clouds. Watching us.
The Enforcers had found us.
And they were rewriting reality to bring us down.