Somewhere Over Siberia
Five Days Ago – 2:17 AM
The plane cut through the night sky, leaving civilization far behind.
Outside the window, the landscape was an endless white void.
No cities. No lights. Just the Arctic wilderness stretching to infinity.
The turbulence had stopped as suddenly as it had begun. One moment, we were plummeting through churning clouds, reality itself seemingly tearing apart around us; the next, everything was calm. The engines hummed steadily, the sky cleared, and the mathematical patterns I’d been seeing in the clouds simply… vanished.
But something had changed. The plane was different—smaller, older, a Russian-made craft rather than the sleek private jet we’d boarded. The interior had transformed from modern luxury to utilitarian simplicity.
And Isabel…
She was Selene again.
Not just in name. Her entire appearance had changed. Where Isabel Chen had been compact and athletic with short dark hair, Selene Voss was taller, with auburn hair pulled back in a severe ponytail. Different face. Different voice. Different person.
Yet she acted as if nothing had changed, as if she had always been Selene Voss.
Eleanor was gone.
I opened my mouth to ask about her, then stopped. The mathematical patterns I could see around Selene warned me not to mention it. Not yet. Something fundamental had shifted in our reality—we had been “corrected” in some way, our journey rewritten.
But my memories remained intact. I still remembered Isabel, remembered Eleanor, remembered the Enforcers and the collapsing gaps and everything else that had happened.
I was still me. Still Nathaniel Graves. Still able to see the Code.
Selene sat across from me, watching me carefully as I scrolled through the decrypted files on my laptop.
We were less than an hour from The Ghost Archive.
And the closer we got, the more I felt it—something was wrong.
Not just fear.
Something deeper.
A sensation that I was heading toward a place I was never meant to see.
Because the files I had just decrypted…
They suggested that this place had never stopped running.
The Distorted Coordinates
“Look at this,” I said, tilting the screen toward Selene.
I showed her the data I had just uncovered—a topographical scan of the Arctic taken from an old Russian military satellite.
At first glance, it was normal.
Just endless ice, tundra, nothing but frozen wasteland.
Except—
There was a distortion.
A shifting ripple in the image, like something was bending the satellite feed.
A glitch? A technical error?
No.
Because the distortion wasn’t random.
It was a pattern.
The same Fibonacci sequence that had been hidden in The Lucifer Code.
Selene leaned forward, her expression unreadable.
“The base was supposed to be abandoned in 1951,” she murmured. “But this scan is from three months ago.”
I nodded slowly.
“Something is still there.”
We exchanged a glance.
For the first time, I saw hesitation in her eyes.
A flicker of doubt.
Like she was finally asking herself the same question I had been asking since this started.
What if we weren’t supposed to get this far?
I studied the mathematical patterns surrounding Selene, trying to understand what had happened to us. The equations suggested a significant reality shift—a full “correction” rather than the partial ones we’d experienced before. Our timeline had been rewritten, with Eleanor removed entirely and Isabel transformed into Selene.
Yet I remembered everything.
“Selene,” I said carefully, watching her reaction, “do you remember a woman named Eleanor?”
Her brow furrowed slightly. “Who?”
“A colleague. She was with us in Prague.”
Selene shook her head. “It’s just been you and me since Prague. Since you found the manuscript.”
I nodded, not pressing further. The patterns around her flickered with uncertainty—suggesting that somewhere, buried deep in her consciousness, there might be fragments of the original timeline. But for now, this was her reality.
And I was alone with my memories.
“We should prepare for landing,” she said, checking her watch. “The weather looks worse than expected.”
Outside, the endless white expanse of Siberia stretched below us, swirling with snow and darkness. We were approaching one of the most remote regions on Earth—the perfect place to hide something that shouldn’t exist.
The Descent into the White Silence
The pilot’s voice crackled through the radio.
“Five minutes out. Dropping you in as close as I can get.”
Selene and I strapped into our gear. Thermal suits, oxygen masks, and weapons.
As much as I hated to admit it, the last one felt necessary.
The files we had uncovered didn’t just suggest scientific anomalies.
They suggested disappearances.
The last documented Soviet expedition to the Ghost Archive had never returned.
And now, we were going in blind.
As I checked my equipment, I noticed something in my pack that hadn’t been there before—a small journal, bound in worn leather. I flipped it open, finding pages filled with handwritten notes.
My handwriting.
But I had never written these words.
The journal contained detailed observations about the Lucifer Code, about the nature of reality itself, written as if I had spent years studying the phenomenon. There were references to experiments, to mathematical theories that I recognized but had never personally explored.
It was as if another version of me—perhaps from the timeline that had been erased—had left me a guide.
I quickly tucked the journal into an inner pocket of my thermal suit. Whatever had happened in the correction, this journal might be the key to understanding what we were walking into.
The plane banked hard.
Below us, a massive ice field stretched endlessly toward the horizon.
And at its center—
A shadow.
A structure buried beneath the ice.
I swallowed hard.
This was it.
The Landing
The rear hatch of the plane opened. The wind screamed into the cabin, an icy blast that cut to the bone.
The pilot gave a final warning.
“I don’t know what you two are looking for, but if you’re not back in four hours… I’m leaving without you.”
I clenched my jaw.
Selene didn’t even flinch.
She stepped to the edge, looked down at the ice field below, and jumped.
I followed.
We hit the ground hard, rolling into the snow, our parachutes collapsing behind us.
And just like that—
We were alone.
The wind howled around us, temperature well below zero, the kind of cold that doesn’t just chill but actively tries to kill. I pulled my thermal hood tighter, checking the oxygen system that would keep us alive in the harsh Arctic environment.
Through my goggles, I watched the plane bank away, quickly disappearing into the swirling snow. Our only link to civilization, vanishing back toward warmth and safety.
I turned to face our destination.
And as I did, the mathematical patterns in the landscape became immediately apparent. The snowdrifts weren’t random accumulations—they followed precise geometric progressions. The ice formations grew in perfect Fibonacci spirals. Even the wind itself seemed to move in calculated vectors.
Nature wasn’t creating these patterns.
Something else was.
“This way,” Selene called over the howling wind, her voice muffled by her mask and the storm.
We trudged forward, each step a battle against the elements. But as we approached the shadow in the ice, I noticed something strange—the storm was actually less severe near the structure. As if the natural laws of weather didn’t fully apply there.
As if reality itself bent around whatever lay half-buried in the ice.
The Structure That Shouldn’t Exist
The wind howled.
The snow swirled in violent spirals, turning the world into a white blur.
But through the haze, I could see it—
A black structure, buried in the ice.
It was massive.
Not just a bunker. A facility.
Half of it was collapsed, swallowed by the glacier over time.
The other half?
Still intact.
Waiting.
Selene exhaled sharply.
“This place is bigger than the records suggested.”
I nodded, gripping my rifle tighter.
Because something about this place…
It felt wrong.
Not just abandoned.
Like it was waiting.
The structure was unlike any Soviet research facility I had ever seen or studied. The visible portions were constructed from a material that resembled black glass or obsidian, yet it had survived decades of Arctic conditions without cracking or eroding. No normal material could withstand such punishment.
And the shape was wrong—the angles didn’t seem to follow normal geometric principles. The building appeared to be simultaneously rectangular and… something else. Something my mind couldn’t quite process.
The mathematical patterns I could see were most intense here, swirling around the structure like a storm of equations. The Code was active, alive, vibrating with energy.
“What is this place really?” I asked, my voice barely audible over the wind.
Selene was checking some kind of handheld device, her expression grim behind her goggles.
“According to the Soviet records, it was called ‘Объект Разрыв’ – Object Rupture,” she replied. “Officially, it was a meteorological research station. Unofficially…”
“It was where they tried to break the Lucifer Code,” I finished.
She nodded. “But I don’t think they built this. I think they found it.”
The implications of that statement hung in the frozen air between us.
“If they didn’t build it, who did?” I asked.
Selene didn’t answer. Instead, she moved toward what appeared to be an entrance—a dark rectangular opening partially visible in the ice.
The Entrance
We reached the exterior doors—huge steel slabs, frost-covered, marked with faded Soviet insignia.
Selene examined the locking mechanism.
It was rusted, ancient. Shouldn’t have worked anymore.
And yet—
As soon as she touched it, the door unlocked.
Not like an old door giving way.
Like something inside had let us in.
I exhaled, my breath turning to vapor in the freezing air.
“Tell me that’s normal.”
Selene didn’t answer.
She pulled her rifle off her shoulder, clicked on the flashlight, and stepped inside.
I followed.
And the moment we crossed the threshold—
The facility came to life.
The mathematical patterns intensified as we stepped through the doorway, the equations shifting from static formulations to dynamic calculations—as if the Code itself was suddenly active, processing our presence, deciding what to do with us.
I reached for the journal in my pocket, my fingers brushing against the worn leather. The other me—the version who had written these notes—had experienced something similar. His notes described the sensation perfectly: “The Code recognizes constants. It adapts to their presence, reconfiguring reality to accommodate them.”
I was a constant. And the facility—or whatever intelligence governed it—knew it.
The Resurrection of a Dead Lab
Lights flickered on deep within the tunnels.
Emergency power.
Pale white fluorescents buzzed weakly, lining the corridor ahead.
A generator? Impossible. The power supply should have died decades ago.
Yet here it was.
Still running.
Like it had been waiting for us.
We exchanged a glance.
Then, slowly, we moved forward.
The corridor stretched into the darkness, cold steel walls covered in Russian warnings.
⚠ НЕ ВХОДИТЬ – DO NOT ENTER ⚠ АНОМАЛИЯ В ПРОГРЕССЕ – ANOMALY IN PROGRESS
I shivered.
Not just from the cold.
From something worse.
Something I couldn’t name.
The architecture inside was a disconcerting blend of Soviet utilitarian design and… something else. The outer sections were clearly built by humans—steel corridors, practical workspaces, military functionality. But deeper in, the structure changed. The walls became that same black material we’d seen outside, and the angles began to defy conventional geometry.
“The Soviets built around it,” I realized aloud. “They found something in the ice and constructed their facility to study it.”
Selene nodded, her flashlight beam revealing frost-covered control panels and abandoned equipment.
“According to the classified files, they discovered it in 1946, during an Arctic expedition. Initially they thought it was a natural formation, but when they realized it was an artificial structure—one that predated human civilization by thousands of years—they built this research station to study it.”
“And then they found the Code,” I said.
“Yes. Embedded in the structure itself. Mathematical patterns that shouldn’t exist—equations that seemed to describe not just physical laws, but reality itself.”
We passed a room filled with ancient computers—massive machines that would have been cutting-edge in the 1950s, now frozen relics of a forgotten era. Yet the monitors glowed with life, displaying streams of data that shouldn’t have been possible.
“How is any of this still running?” I asked, my breath visible in the frigid air.
Selene shook her head. “The facility draws power from somewhere else. Not electricity as we understand it. Something… deeper.”
I consulted the journal again, flipping through pages of increasingly frantic notes. The other me had theorized about this: “The structure generates its own energy by manipulating quantum fluctuations in spacetime itself. It doesn’t need an external power source because it exists partially outside normal physical laws.”
We continued deeper, the cold intensifying with each step, yet strangely, I felt less affected by it. As if my body was adapting to impossible conditions.
Or as if reality itself was adapting to accommodate me.
The Hall of Names
We passed a row of doorways, leading to old research labs.
Inside, frozen skeletons lay slumped over control panels, their bodies perfectly preserved.
I stepped into the first room, brushing ice from a nameplate.
Dr. Elias Holt.
The lead researcher.
The man who had sent the last transmission from Concordia.
His body was still here.
Like he had died mid-thought.
Like the facility had been frozen in time.
Selene exhaled.
“This isn’t a normal base.”
I nodded slowly.
Because I was starting to realize something.
This wasn’t a ruin.
This was a tomb.
I stared at Holt’s remains, trying to process what I was seeing. According to everything we knew, Dr. Elias Holt had disappeared at Concordia, the Arctic research station that had vanished in 1951. Yet here he was, thousands of miles away, in a Soviet facility that supposedly operated years later.
“This doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Holt vanished with the rest of the Concordia team. How is his body here?”
Selene moved closer, examining the remains. “Maybe the Soviets recovered him? Brought him here to study what happened?”
But that didn’t explain the position of the body—not like someone who had been transported and examined, but like someone who had been working at that very station when death came.
I checked the other rooms. More bodies. More familiar names.
Dr. Evelyn Sartori. Dr. Nathaniel Graves. Dr. Eleanor Reid.
My blood ran cold.
“Selene,” I called, my voice tight. “You need to see this.”
She joined me, her flashlight beam illuminating the nameplates of the dead.
“These are the Concordia researchers,” she breathed. “All of them. But they can’t be here. They disappeared in 1951.”
“And look at the dates on these reports,” I said, pointing to frost-covered documents on the desks. “1962. 1973. 1985. Some as recent as five years ago.”
“That’s impossible,” Selene whispered. “These people would have been dead for decades.”
“Unless…” I hesitated, the implications almost too much to process. “Unless time doesn’t work the same way here. Or unless these aren’t the original people, but… iterations of them.”
I flipped frantically through the journal, finding a passage that suddenly made terrible sense: “The constants repeat across realities, across iterations. Each time the equation resets, we appear again, in new contexts, new scenarios, but always circling the same center. Always drawn back to the Code.”
The mathematical patterns around us shifted, equations rewriting themselves as if responding to our realization.
“We need to find the control room,” I said. “We need to understand what happened here.”
The Control Room
We pushed deeper.
And then—
We found it.
A massive control room, still intact.
Screens still glowing with data.
An interface still running calculations.
And at the center of the room—
A single chair, facing a monitor.
I stepped closer.
And when I did—
The chair turned on its own.
And there, sitting before me, was a body.
Or at least—
Something that had once been a body.
It was human-shaped, but frozen, burned into the chair like a fossil.
And on the screen in front of it—
A message.
A single line of text.
One last warning.
“We were never meant to break the pattern.”
I stared at it.
Then, my phone buzzed.
A new message.
From an unknown number.
“Correction in progress.”
The lights flickered violently.
And then—the facility began to shift.
Like it was waking up.
Like something deep inside had noticed us.
And now—
It was coming for us.
The mathematical patterns exploded around us, equations multiplying and transforming at impossible speeds. The air itself seemed to thicken, reality becoming malleable, unstable.
“We need to get out of here,” Selene shouted, grabbing my arm. “The facility is initiating a full correction!”
But I couldn’t move. My eyes were fixed on the screen, where the message was changing, new text appearing as if typed by invisible hands:
“Nathaniel Graves. Iteration 37. You have come further than any previous version. But you still do not understand.”
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the Arctic cold.
“Who are you?” I whispered to the screen.
The text continued:
“I am what remains. The observer at the edge of the equation. What you call the Lucifer Code is merely the visible portion of a much larger system—a system that maintains the cohesion of your reality.”
Selene was pulling at my arm, but I shook her off, transfixed by the dialogue unfolding before me.
“What do you want?” I asked.
The response came immediately:
“To complete the cycle. To resolve the paradox. You are a necessary variable in an equation that must be balanced.”
The walls around us began to shift, the black material flowing like liquid, reconfiguring itself. The Soviet architecture was melting away, revealing the true structure beneath—a geometrically impossible space that seemed to extend infinitely in all directions.
“Nathaniel, we need to move!” Selene shouted, her voice sounding distant despite her proximity.
I finally turned to her, but stopped short. The mathematical patterns around her had changed drastically. They no longer resembled those of a human being.
“You’re not Selene,” I said, backing away from her. “You never were.”
Her expression didn’t change, but the patterns did, shifting into configurations I recognized from the Lucifer Code—the same patterns I had seen around Evelyn Sartori.
“No,” she admitted, her voice now different, deeper, more resonant. “Selene Voss never existed. She was a construct—a placeholder created to guide you here.”
“Who are you really?” I demanded, though I already suspected the answer.
The woman who had been Selene—and before that, Isabel—smiled. A cold, calculated smile that never reached her eyes.
“I think you know, Nathaniel. I’ve worn many faces throughout our iterations. Many names. But you’ve always known me as Evelyn.”
The walls continued to shift around us, the control room expanding, transforming into something that resembled a vast chamber. The frozen body in the chair dissolved, revealing a pedestal at the center of the room, upon which sat something impossible:
The Lucifer Code manuscript.
Not a copy. The original. The one that had vanished from my apartment in Prague.
“It always returns to its source,” Evelyn said, following my gaze. “As do we all.”
I reached for the journal in my pocket, suddenly understanding its significance. It wasn’t written by another version of me—it was written by me, in a previous iteration. A record of my experiences that had somehow survived the corrections, passed from one version of Nathaniel Graves to the next.
“Why am I here?” I asked, my voice steady despite the impossible transformations occurring around us. “What do you want from me?”
Evelyn moved toward the manuscript, her form shifting subtly with each step, becoming less human, more… mathematical. A living equation.
“You are here because you must be,” she said simply. “Because the cycle is approaching completion. Because after thirty-seven iterations, the equation is finally ready to evolve.”
“Evolve into what?” I asked.
She looked at me, her eyes now glowing with the same patterns I could see in the air around us.
“Into the next phase of reality,” she said. “But for that to happen, a choice must be made. Your choice, Nathaniel.”
She gestured to the manuscript. “You can attempt to decode the final sequence—to break the Code as all your previous selves have tried and failed to do. Or…”
“Or what?” I pressed.
“Or you can become part of it. Integrate yourself into the equation. Become a conscious variable rather than a blind constant.”
The facility continued to transform around us, the last vestiges of human architecture dissolving away. We now stood in what appeared to be the heart of the anomaly—a vast chamber of shifting black material, pulsing with mathematical patterns, equations flowing like blood through the structure itself.
“What happens if I break the Code?” I asked, moving toward the manuscript.
Evelyn’s expression turned grave. “The same thing that has happened in every previous iteration. A catastrophic correction. A reset of the timeline. And you—this version of you—will be erased, replaced by iteration thirty-eight.”
“And if I… integrate? Become part of the equation?”
Her eyes met mine. “Then you help shape what comes next. You gain agency in the system rather than remaining subject to it.”
I reached for the manuscript, my fingers hovering above its ancient pages.
“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” I asked. “How do I know this isn’t just another manipulation?”
Evelyn—or whatever she truly was—smiled that cold smile again.
“You don’t,” she admitted. “That’s the nature of the choice. Faith versus skepticism. Integration versus disruption.”
My phone buzzed again.
Another message:
“Final warning: Correction imminent.”
The chamber began to vibrate, the equations swirling faster, reality itself becoming unstable around us.
I had seconds to decide.
Break the Code. Or become part of it.
The choice that thirty-six previous versions of me had faced—and failed.
I opened the manuscript to its final page, where a sequence waited to be decoded.
And made my choice.