Part 4: Prototype Zero
They kept 0 in Facility Bastion, a cold tomb bored into the Antarctic shelf. Four floors of concrete, ice, and suppression tech. The kind of place where silence had a pulse and the air tasted of sterilized death.
Nobody visited 0.
Not anymore.
Not since the last incident, six years ago, when it tore through an entire command team during a calibration drift.
Seventeen deaths in twenty-two seconds.
No alarms tripped.
No survivors whole.
After that, it was sealed in active suspension: conscious but frozen in time, brain trapped in endless loops, muscle paralyzed, mouth clamped by pressure seal, Not sleeping.
Watching.
Halden had always said it was a backup. A deterrent, a failsafe.
He'd lied.
It was an experiment they never finished.
A creature too intelligent to cage, too volatile to control.
And now, he needed it.
Bastion.
Level 4. Cryo Deep Core.
The hallway leading to 0's cell was overbuilt—triple armored, with hydraulic emergency shutouts, and pressure failsafes hardcoded into every surface. At the end stood a vault door thick enough to survive a small nuclear blast.
Two techs stood outside, visibly sweating inside their cold suits.
"Open it," Halden said.
"Sir, the last protocol—"
"Don't make me repeat myself."
They obeyed.
The vault door cracked.
Steam hissed outward in a slow exhale.
The lights inside were bloodred.
Frost coiled from the chamber like it was trying to escape.
And inside the pod, half buried in thick cryogel, eyes wide open and glowing white, was the thing they called Zero.
Asset-0.
No name.
No humanity.
Just design.
Seven feet tall. Ribcage visible beneath skin, but pulsing like iron cables. Limbs longer than natural, reinforced by something never approved for medical use. Its spine was an exposed braid of fiber and calcified bone. Its mouth, half covered in synthetic grafts, was open, frozen mid scream.
The scream had never stopped.
They had just muted it.
Halden stepped forward. Keyed in the override.
A voice hummed from the wall:
CRYOGENIC CONTAINMENT DISENGAGED
INITIATING NEURAL WAKE UP SEQUENCE
SUBJECT: 0
The gel began to melt. The pod hissed and lowered.
The thing inside twitched.
Not like a man waking.
Like a corpse remembering how to move.
One finger, then another. Then a full hand cracking backward before snapping into place. Its eyes burned. Not glow, not shimmer. They burned constant, painful fire behind black sclera.
Then—
"He's awake."
The voice came from 0 itself.
Halden stiffened. The techs backed up.
The creature tilted its head, neck cracked.
Then it stepped out of the pod, steam rising off its body like mist from boiling meat.
It looked at Halden.
"Kairo."
"Alive," Halden said. "Hunting us. You remember him?"
0 didn't blink. Didn't nod.
Just grinned.
It was like watching muscle memory imitate a human smile, something it had once learned, broken down, and rebuilt wrong.
"I remember… the scent."
Halden straightened. "Good. We're authorizing your release, Full carte blanche. Bring him down."
"You built him to be clean."
0 stepped forward, dragging one clawed hand along the wall. It left scorched lines where it touched metal.
"I was the mistake. He was the refinement, while i was your failure. But now…"
It turned its head toward the techs.
"Now you come crawling back to the fire."
Halden hesitated. "Your mission is clear, we need you to terminate Kairo. He's not like before—"
"He was never like before."
Its voice dropped.
"He was always better."
The lights dimmed.
And the smell changed.
The techs turned to run.
Too late.
0 blurred forward, faster than muscle reflex.
One of them screamed—but only for a moment.
0 slammed him into the ceiling so hard his legs remained standing upright for two seconds before collapsing.
The second tech got three steps.
0 flung a shard of cryo steel into his back, then walked over, gripped the man's spinal column through the skin, and ripped it out.
The hallway turned red.
The steel tile beneath them hissed as boiling blood soaked the grooves.
Halden stood frozen.
0 turned toward him, spattered in gore, smile widening.
"You didn't wake a weapon."
"You woke up a rival."
Halden keyed the security override. Doors slammed shut between them.
0 didn't chase.
It simply stood in the blood, laughing quietly to itself, hands twitching like they wanted more to break.
To toy with.
"Tell him I'm coming."
Then it knelt.
Pressed its hand into the dead man's chest.
Scrawled into his ribcage with a single broken nail:
KAIRO vs ZERO
Later, in the command center, Halden would watch the footage again and again.
He would see 0's face.
The fear behind the rage.
And realize—
They didn't build another answer to Kairo.
They'd built a second apocalypse.