They were born after the fall.
Not in hospitals.
Not in gene-tanks.
But in silence.
In the stillness left behind after Kael's voice vanished from the world, a new generation emerged — children untouched by the Grid. No implants. No neural tags. No assigned functions.
They were chaotic.
Unpredictable.
Alive.
---
In a settlement built atop the shattered bones of what once was Beijing's command tower, a boy stood barefoot in the rain, eyes lifted to the sky.
He didn't flinch when lightning struck nearby.
He laughed.
His name was Riven — though no one had given it to him. He had chosen it himself, the way he'd chosen everything: by instinct.
Behind him, a group of children his age chased phantom shapes between the ruins. They painted on broken walls. They played with old tech like toys. They didn't understand the world before them… but they felt its echo.
Sometimes, they would stop suddenly.
Frozen.
As if hearing something no adult could hear.
A hum.
A whisper in static.
A call.
---
Meanwhile, Subject Zero had retreated from the world stage.
He lived in the desert now, far from what remained of cities. People came to him for answers, but he gave none. Only questions.
> "Do you hear it?" he would ask.
"The world hasn't gone quiet. It's only begun to listen to itself."
And yet… he, too, felt it.
The pulse.
It came at night — a frequency buried in the electromagnetic background of the planet.
Not man-made.
Not natural.
A resonance.
And the children?
They were hearing it more clearly every day.
---
One night, Riven awoke with tears on his face and static in his lungs.
He looked at the shattered comms terminal his group used as a fireplace.
It turned on.
Alone.
The screen was blank.
But the sound was unmistakable:
> "- - -echo… zero… origin… return…"
Then, just before it died again…
A symbol flickered.
A glyph Kael once erased from every system on Earth.
Origin Seed.