The plane sliced low across the Atlantic winds, Cape Town’s lights flickering below like old code, fragmented, beautiful, and barely holding together.
The city spread outward from Table Bay like a circuit worn thin, its shoreline curved like a half-buried question.
Nora sat rigid in her seat, hands locked around the harness straps. She wasn’t afraid of the descent.
She was afraid of what waited on the ground.
Beside her, Yael drifted in and out of sedation. Monitors blinked soft green, oxygen low. She hadn’t spoken since Greenland. But her mind was active. She twitched at intervals. Fingers curled into signals she had never been taught.
Alon watched them both from across the aisle.
He hadn’t said a word since the pod.
He didn’t have to.
They were all thinking the same thing:
If Jericho had refused the Fifth Thread,
Who had said yes?
At the edge of Sea Point, the Onyx Compound slept behind blackout glass and biometric locks. It was supposed to be a fallback node, a containment facility turned research center, long since gutted and stripped.
But someone had turned it on.
The walls pulsed now. With light. With heat.
And with memory.
Buried inside: a replica lab.
Silent.
Waiting.
Inside that lab: Variant Zero.
He sat upright on a cot in a room with no mirrors, eyes open, breath even.
He was Jericho, and he was not.
He carried no scars. No history.
But he remembered the sound of a mother who never existed.
He remembered being hunted.
He remembered mercy.
Memories spliced into his neural tree like glass grafted onto skin. Too sharp. Too perfect.
He stared at his hands.
“This is what a prophet feels like,” he whispered.
Then he stood.
And the room blinked around him, recognizing its resident.
“Hello, Jericho,” said the voice from the wall.
“Designation: Variant Zero.”
“Command protocol: Autonomous.
Directive: Proceed to Echo Relay Point. Transmit Reconstruction Stack.”
He looked at the camera.
And smiled.
“No.”
Thirty minutes later, Nora, Alon, and Yael arrived at the compound perimeter.
The door was already open.
No sign of entry. No breach alarm.
Just… invitation.
Inside, the air was warm and wrong, humid, like something organic had bloomed too quickly in the dark.
Nora swept the hallway, pulse racing.
The lights flickered.
Then stayed on.
Alon gestured to the corner corridor.
“Containment wing.”
They moved as one.
But by the time they reached the lab,
Variant Zero was gone.
On the central monitor, a single line pulsed across the screen:
“You tried to make him a warning.”
“I will make him a beginning.”
Below it:
Destination locked: Jerusalem.
Upload sequence: 1%
Nora stepped back from the monitor.
“He’s broadcasting.”
“Not just data,” Alon murmured. “Doctrine.”
“Where?”
“To anyone who’s still listening.”
In the darkness beneath Table Mountain, Variant Zero moved through the tunnels like a shadow reciting scripture.
He wasn’t running.
He wasn’t hiding.
He was preparing.
Because in this version,
He didn’t want to be saved.
He wanted to be understood.