Chapter 79 - The Mother's Frequency
"Self-destruct?" Elena shouted, running onto the central platform, her rifle swinging toward the glowing screen. "Is the facility going to blow?"
"No," Miller said, his voice turning dead and hollow as he stared at the terminal. He pulled himself up using the shattered railing, his eyes wide with an ancient, unspeakable dread. "That’s not a self-destruct countdown. That’s a thawing sequence."
On the floor of the platform, Arthur Sterling was crawling through the pool of blackened blood and coolant, his fingernails torn off, leaving red streaks against the metal deck. Despite the third-degree electrical burns covering half his face, a grotesque, broken laugh escaped his throat.
*"You fools..."* Arthur wheezed, blood bubbling from his ruined mouth. *"You thought... you thought Chloe was the first? You thought I built seventy-two vessels to host an old man’s mind?"*
I stepped over the shattered cables, stopping two inches from his face, pointing Miller’s sidearm directly between his bloodshot eyes. "Talk, Arthur. Before I scatter what’s left of your brain across this floor."
Arthur looked up at me, his one remaining eye glittering with madness and triumph.
*"I am ninety years old, Claire... but the Sterling dynasty did not begin with me. It began sixty years ago... when we pulled the First Mother from the permafrost in Siberia."*
He coughed, spitting a mouthful of black bile onto my boot.
*"Chloe was never Julian’s daughter. Julian was sterile from birth—a side effect of the synthetic gene therapy I subjected him to as an infant. Did you really think you conceived her naturally during that weekend in Vermont?"*
The ground beneath me felt like it had dissolved into open air. My hands began to shake. "What did you say?"
*"We implanted you, Claire,"* Arthur whispered, his voice fading into a sickening rasp. *"We needed an uncorrupted, genetically pristine maternal host to carry the embryonic clone of the First Mother. Chloe wasn't an ordinary child. She was the genetic resurrection of the architect who designed this entire species. And when she died... her genetic memory didn't vanish."*
The timer on the main console hit zero.
*00:00.*
A low, resonant sound—like the horn of an ancient leviathan rising from the depths of the ocean—echoed from deep beneath the rotunda floor.
The steel deck began to split down the center.
"Get back!" Miller roared, tackling Elena and me backward toward the perimeter walkway.
The center of the cathedral floor folded open like the petals of a mechanical lotus. Rising from the dark abyss below on a hydraulic pillar was a massive, cylindrical cryogenic vault forged from seamless, polished obsidian.
The glass face of the vault was frosted with thick, crystalline ice.
Within the vault, visible through the frozen glass, lay the silhouette of a woman.
She was tall, slender, her long hair floating in clear preservation fluid like dark seaweed. And across her chest, pulsing with a slow, terrifying rhythm of seventy-two beats per minute, was an emerald-green light—a heart of raw, ancient bio-resonance.
"Mommy..." Clara whispered, her voice trembling in a way I had never heard before. She pointed her small, shaking finger at the woman inside the glass.
The automated defrost heaters engaged with a violent hiss of steam.
The ice melted away, running down the glass face in long, clear tears.
The features of the woman inside became razor sharp in the halogen emergency lights.
I looked at her face.
The weapon slipped from my numb fingers, clattering uselessly against the steel deck.
The woman inside the cryogenic vault—the First Mother, the original subject preserved beneath the ice for sixty years, the genetic blueprint from which Chloe, Clara, and the seventy-two vessels had been carved—
May you like
Was me.
***
