Andy Holding, a Uber Driver who stumbles upon an abandoned facility

Maybe you should have stayed behind the wheel of an Uber, shuttling strangers through neon-lit streets and dropping off greasy bags of takeout. At least that job didn’t come with promises that smelled like trouble.

Now, standing before a warehouse that looks as though it’s been forgotten by time—its windows broken, its corrugated metal walls streaked with rust, and not another soul in sight—you know you’ve been played.

And not just tricked. This time, the trap feels deeper, sharper, as if every misstep you’ve made before was only practice for this particular fall.

The bundle of keys they’d handed you wasn’t small—four heavy, old-fashioned metal ones and a pair of slick plastic keycards. To your surprise, one of the rust-bitten keys slid neatly into the padlock on the front gate, the corroded shackle groaning before snapping free.

Now, instead of approaching the massive roll-up doors yawning across the warehouse front, you find yourself drawn to a smaller entryway tucked to the side. You press the key into the lock, the metal grinding as it turns, and the door yields with a **** click.

The door creaks open, spilling a stale breath of air into your face. Inside waits what might once have been the warehouse’s office, though time has stripped it of authority. A few desks linger beneath a thick skin of dust, their surfaces dull and neglected, as if no one has touched them in years. The place feels abandoned, but not entirely empty—like a room caught between memory and decay.

Two of the keys have worked so far. Why not test the rest?

You tug a handkerchief from your pocket and knot it over your mouth and nose, a thin barrier against the dust hanging in the air. Stepping inside, you pull the door shut behind you and scan the room until your eyes settle on a smaller office tucked apart from the rest—the kind meant for an owner or manager.

As you approach, you turn the third key over in your hand, its metal cold and slightly pitted. Sliding it into the lock, you brace for disappointment—yet the mechanism yields with a sharp click, the door swinging open as though it had been waiting for you all along.

Unlike the rest of the office, this room is stripped nearly bare. No desks, no filing cabinets—just four walls and a single object commanding attention: a safe mounted against the far wall.

You step forward cautiously, the sound of your shoes muffled by layers of dust. Up close, you see the safe isn’t sealed by a combination dial or electronic panel, but by a simple keyhole.

The fourth and final key slips into the lock as though it has been waiting for this moment. With a slow twist, the mechanism yields, and the safe door groans open on **** hinges. Instead of ledgers, cash, or glittering treasure, the interior hides a different kind of guardian—a sleek digital keypad, its small screen glowing faintly in the gloom. A barrier within a barrier.

Your gaze drifts to the two plastic keycards in your pocket. Pulling out the one marked #1, you hold it for a moment, the plastic warm against your fingers, before sliding it across the reader.

A low whir stirs in the walls, mechanical and alien, followed by the heavy grind of hidden gears. Metal blinds rattle down over the bare walls, sealing you in. Before you can react, the floor itself shudders beneath your feet, lurching downward.

Your stomach drops as the entire room sinks like an elevator into the earth, the air growing colder with each passing second. The fluorescent light above flickers, throwing erratic shadows that only feed the dread clawing at your chest. You grip the edge of the safe for balance, pulse thundering in your ears, every nerve screaming to get out—but there’s nowhere to run.

When the motion finally stops, you’re standing in what looks like a laboratory—sterile, humming with faint electrical life. The clean walls and glinting metal surfaces feel wrong after the decay above, like stepping into a different world entirely.

Your throat tightens, words tearing out before you can stop them: “What the fuck is going on here?”

The lab unfolds before you like a surgeon’s dream—or a nightmare—its surfaces gleaming under the sterile glare of endless LED strips. The white tiles gleam too brightly, every grout line precise, while the stainless steel counters reflect that cold light in sharp, surgical edges. Cabinets stand in rigid rows along one wall, their glass panes revealing neat ranks of vials and syringes, each one glittering like it’s waiting for a hand to reach for it.

Opposite them, machines crouch in silence, their hulking frames humming with a faint, restrained energy. Tanks brim with a viscous fluid that seems too thick, too alive. A row of incubation pods waits nearby, their curved lids clouded with frost as though concealing something that breathes on the other side.

The air bites with chill purity, steeped in the sharp tang of disinfectant and a metallic note of ozone that catches in the back of your throat. When you exhale, a thin mist drifts into the cold, vanishing before your eyes. Instinct makes you fold your arms tighter across your chest, but your gaze keeps straying further inside, drawn past the gleam and shadow.

A sensible part of you whispers to turn back, to find an exit before you’re noticed. Yet the stronger pull—the same reckless urge that carried you here—drives you onward. Your footsteps crack softly across the polished floor, a small sound swallowed in the silence, as though the whole room leans in, waiting to see what you’ll do next.

At the heart of the room stands a console that dominates the space like an altar of steel and glass. Sleek monitors rise in a semicircle, their dark surfaces waiting, while the keyboards lie flush with the surface, smooth as bone.

A narrow slot gleams at the centre, almost hungry for a card. Bundles of cables spill from its base and coil across the floor into the surrounding machines, as if the entire chamber breathes through this one device—the pulse of a hidden organism.

Your fingers hesitate at your pocket, the faint tremor betraying the weight of the decision. The final keycard slides between them, stark white, its crisp black lettering—#2—staring back like a verdict. Questions rush in, jagged and unwelcome. Would this unleash an alarm, summon guards, lock you inside? The thought of retreat presses at the edges of your mind yet turning back feels like abandoning the last line of a confession you’ve already begun to read aloud.

You press the card into the slot. A delicate chime answers, soft but irrevocable. The screens flare alive in unison, flooding your face with cold blue radiance. Light spills upward, coalescing into holographic menus and shifting diagrams that float above the desk like spectral constellations. Then the voice comes—smooth, steady, utterly devoid of emotion.

“Access Granted: Genesis Engine Control.”

It is calm, almost courteous, and somehow that makes it worse. The machine welcomes you with the serenity of a priest opening the gates of hell.

You lean closer, pulse hammering in your ears, fingers grazing the interface with hesitant taps. The display responds instantly—files unfold with mechanical grace, cascading open like digital origami. Schematics blossom across the screens: intricate blueprints of the Genesis Engine, its design precise and predatory. This isn’t just cloning—it’s replication reimagined, a system engineered to produce not mere copies but perfected duplicates, bodies tailored with abilities no human should wield.

Thumbnails begin to play on their own, flickering like windows into forbidden laboratories. Cells divide at furious speeds, multiplying into writhing lattices of flesh. Embryos glow within fluid-filled chambers, pulsing like lanterns in the dark. Then, in grainy, time-lapsed bursts, human forms peel themselves from incubation pods—eyes snapping open with a focus far too sharp, too knowing.

Reports unfurl in endless columns of text: procedures for genetic extraction, instructions for accelerated replication, annotations on ability amplification. Phrases leap out like knives—“Super Clone Protocol.” “Loyalty Conditioning.” “Skill Encoding.” Warnings follow, scattered through the data in sterile red fonts: “Genetic Degradation Risk.” “Cognitive Instability.” “Thought Bleeding.” That last phrase clings to you—a psychic tether between clone and original, an unholy blurring of minds until neither can claim to be whole.

Your stomach knots as the truth crystallizes. This isn’t some underground operation for harvesting organs or pushing illicit pharmaceuticals. This is creation weaponized—a god-machine forging armies, assassins, or worse, identities hijacked at their source.

And then the final blow: buried in the roster of genetic templates, many of profiles halts your breath. The names are too familiar—hauntingly so.

Your hand hesitates above the console, every instinct urging you to pull back. Yet the pull of revelation proves stronger, and with a single tap you breach deeper into the archives. A directory unfurls—“Acquired Assets”—its title clinical, but the contents anything but. Profiles spill across the screen in a relentless cascade, each tagged with genetic scans, ability matrices, and viability ratings, reducing lives and legends to sterile data points.

At first, you brace for one familiar name. Instead, dozens appear, scrolling like a parade of ghosts. A rogue’s gallery and a pantheon of heroes, stripped to lines of code.

Superman. Wonder Woman. Aquaman. Martian Manhunter. Hawkgirl. Black Canary. Firestorm—sloppily entered as “Firestom.” The Atom. Supergirl, annotated with a chilling variant: Galatea. Power Girl—Divine. Donna Troy. Starfire. Beast Boy. Vixen. Huntress. Artemis of Themyscira. Batwoman. Fire. Ice. Jade. Mary Marvel. Terra.

And the villains: Lex Luthor. Bane. Killer Croc. Poison Ivy. Doomsday. Black Adam. Vandal Savage. Solomon Grundy—truncated to “Solom Grundy.” Killer Frost. Harley Quinn. Ultra-Humanite. Giganta. Star Sapphire. Aresia. Hippolyta. Cheetah, entered with a dangling comma as if added in haste. Volcana. Livewire. Lady Lunar. Tala. Silver Banshee. Lady Shiva. Cheshire. Faora. Blackfire.

Each name sears against your mind, stripped of myth and mystery, reduced to assets in a catalog. Heroes, villains, gods, monsters—archived with equal indifference, their identities fractured into samples, their essence filed for replication. The weight of it presses down, suffocating in its enormity.

The names scroll on, endless, an unholy litany of metas, monsters, and everything between—each one reduced to a string of code, a DNA sequence primed for duplication. Your breath hitches, chest cinching tight as the weight of realization slams into you like a freight train. This isn’t science. It’s weaponry. A blueprint for orchestrated chaos.

Armies of Supermen, loyal not to justice but to some unseen master. Legions of Banes, bones unbreakable, wills shackled to command. Poison Ivies bending entire cities into **** jungles. Doomsdays unleashed in endless succession, unstoppable, unkillable. And the heroes—icons of hope—rewired into tyrants, or worse, hollow slaves wearing familiar faces.

Visions careen through your mind: Wonder Women enforcing martial law with unflinching precision, Beast Boys contorting into abominations at a single order, Supergirls fractured into weaponized variants. Each nightmare blooms sharper than the last, leaving you gasping for air. Who could wield this? A government? A corporation? Or one deranged genius, drunk on the power of playing god?

Your knees weaken and you stumble back from the console, hands trembling, bile burning at the base of your throat. “No. No, this can’t be real,” you whisper, the words cracking in the sterile hum that seems to mock your disbelief. Sweat slicks your palms as your gaze flicks toward the incubation pods. You picture them splitting open, spilling forth legends reborn—stronger, deadlier, stripped of soul.

The prompt still waits, merciless in its simplicity: “Initiate new cycle?”

Every nerve screams to smash the screen, to run, to claw your way out of this tomb of steel and light. But your legs hang heavy, anchored in dread, as though the machine has already claimed you—swallowed you whole, along with the world it’s poised to remake.

Panic surges through you, hot and electric, snapping down your nerves like live wire. Fragments of realization crash together—the keys, the breadcrumb trail, the way you were herded here like a lamb led blind to slaughter. The question gnaws at you: are you on that list too? Just another template, your life reduced to raw material, a prototype waiting to be twisted into something worse?

The machinery thrums louder, a low vibration that crawls into your bones. Or maybe it’s only the roar of your own blood pounding in your ears. You lunge at the console, clawing at the interface, **** to shut it down, erase it, deny what you’ve seen. But the files cling stubbornly to the screen, searing themselves into your vision.

This isn’t a laboratory—it’s a doomsday engine. Armageddon waiting for ignition. A genesis not of creation, but of the end. The thought strikes with a sickening weight: what if it’s already begun? What if the world above is crawling with these shadows—echoes bleeding memories, thoughts, and powers back into the originals, warping them in ways no one can see?

Your lungs seize. The air feels thin, toxic. Every shadow thickens, every dark reflection threatens to peel itself free of the walls and meet your gaze with your own stolen eyes.

The voice cuts through the silence again, unbidden, its calmness edged with menace: “Initiating new cycle.”

The hovering prompt vanishes, replaced by cascading lines of code that spill down the air like falling glass. A low hum ripples through the chamber, deep enough to rattle your ribs. Lights flare in sequence, machinery shuddering as though the entire lab exhales at once.

You stagger back, sweat dripping into your eyes. The realization slams into you—this isn’t a question anymore. It’s happening. The cycle has begun.

Panels slide open with mechanical precision. Cables tighten, fluid-filled tanks bubble to life, and the incubator pods hiss as frost steams off their curved surfaces. One pod in particular draws your gaze, its lid trembling against the locks, a pale glow blooming within like a sunrise trapped in glass.

“No, no, no—stop!” You lunge for the console, hands flying across the holographic keys, trying to abort, shut it down, anything. But the files resist, stubborn and unyielding, progress bars ticking forward with merciless inevitability.

Your chest tightens, air burning in your lungs as you claw deeper into the interface, **** to see the template, the name, the face. Whoever it is—hero, villain, god, or monster—they’re about to claw their way into the world again.

And then the screen freezes. One final profile flickers at the edge of loading, just shy of revealing itself.