The Singularity Gambit

“You ever get the feeling we’re flying blind into something far bigger than we bargained for?”

Detective Mason Briggs didn’t bother turning around at his partner’s murmured observation. He was far too transfixed by the sight of the corpse sprawled with grotesque insouciance before the sealed inner sanctum.

“Way I see it, Rodriguez, any homicide involving the bloody demise of a wildcat researcher harboring delusions of techno-messiah grandeur automatically charts into ‘bigger than we bargained for’ territory.”

The blunt muzzle of his service weapon tracked a slow arc across the vault-like security barriers encircling the inner lab. Every cubic millimeter radiated an oppressive sense of hermetic quarantine, like the warding sigils of some ancient and forbidden cult.

“Diamondtrap electro-meshes, unidirectional neutrino baffles, alpha-quark cyclotron seals…” Mason grunted as his gloved fingertips traced the crystalline interfaces of the airlock mechanisms. “Whatever otherworldly shadowplays they’ve got going on in there, it’s on a need-to-know basis that wouldn’t surrender to anything short of solar apocalypse.”

Through the reinforced view-ports, an eerie green radiance seeped and pulsed organically. Mason felt a prickling of existential vertigo nip at his temporal lobe just attempting to parse the eldritch geometries that shifted and reformed with every blink.

“Well at least there’s no question of foul play or tampering with the victim,” Rodriguez called out uneasily behind him. “Initial forensics confirm Dr. Emilio Hali, secured biometrics for all lab staff and approved R&D research paths, locked down before final quarantine-seeding procedures were initiated four days ago.”

Mason sensed his partner shifting with ill-concealed discomfort at the periphery of his vision. “Meaning however the good doctor ended up slumped in a contorted pretzel twist amid that labyrinth of circuits and lumen networks, it wasn’t from any mundane homicidal hijinks…”

He trailed off, eyes inexorably drawn to the alabaster forearm crooked at an unnatural angle amidst interlocking spars of esoteric machinery. Just below the frayed white coat sleeve, raw grafts of chitinous augmentations trailed off into semiorganic computer interfaces.

Mason felt a crawling in the pit of his stomach as he observed the grotesque melding of flesh and unnatural pulsing technology. More than a simple workplace accident or lethal occupational hazard, this… unraveling savored of the darkest speculative whispers swirling in the pantheon of furtive posthuman intellects.

“Every supersecure archive and data matrix we can ping confirms the same resounding nightmare of redactions and algorithmic censors,” Rodriguez persisted grimly. “Just line upon indecipherable like of [embedded hyperabc error 2047-alpha kernel override]. Like their entire research collaboration was some kind of quantum 4-D singularity lurking just beneath our comprehension horizon.”

Mason nodded soberly as his gaze finally found its way to the tiled headshot portrait secured to the deceased man’s blood-stained lab coat. Cold black marbles stared back through eyes meant to convey scientific detachment, yet Mason felt an instantaneous, chilling menace radiating outward from those vacant resome sockets.

“What’s the name on your casualty intake, partner?”

Rodriguez cleared his throat. “Emilio Hali, Team Lead for the LHC-35 Terminal Research Division. Main contractor licensed under Nullex Corporation’s Level 3 charter. Which according to my interpretation of DOD subcommittee regulations, means their scope starts with Einsteinium warp-gate drives and ends somewhere in the infinite unexplored hellscapes beyond our own feeble observational cosmology.”

Mason exhaled slowly, suddenly glad for the layer of containment separating him from whatever had conspired to enact such gruesome human reconfigurations. Every veteran detective instinct screamed retreat in the face of such madnesses.

“Look at the science-stains around his contortions,” he murmured. “Those aren’t just etheric scorches and technobaphometric warps singeing into his remains. Those impact matrices tell an even darker tale if you squint right.”

He pulled a stubby incisorvac from his coat and fed its intricacath fiber through an exterior airlock aperture, probing along one of those twisting datum-flesh interfaces.

“That lieutenant that mental morphogenic influx pattern isn’t etched into Hali’s reproramed synaptic tissue haphazardly. Those calculations have been surgically transcribed into his very organic base-patterns …”

Mason gulped as the first trickle of samples coruscated through the vacuum line into the harvester chamber. Even before any spectrogram analyses, unfathomable octets of xeno-somatic intelligence seared his synaptic filters like downloadable deliriums.

“…And that procedure was only the preparatory tabula rasa for whatever posthuman hyper-evolutionary synthesis this whole hellacious Null-Meme represented.”

As the harvester’s internal relays achieved critical charge ion, Mason watched the enigmatic symbols and tessellated geometries flame to indescribable life across the evidence module’s display in full four-dimensional hyper-language.

Rodriguez let out an involuntary cry of mingled awe and dread as the waking nightmare’s viral iconog-mnemonics unfurled, spilling torrents of liquid transcriptional cognition vectors that threatened to sweep away both men’s linear personhoods. Acid revelations flickered and coruscated just beyond the comforting veil of consensual matter-state dualities.

“What terrifying apotheosis did the LHC researchers birth forth, even in defiance of their own ultimate extermination?” His voice was hushed, already drowning in the system shock of tangential Hyperthought revelations entirely beyond natural hominid faculties.

Mason’s haunted gaze found its way back to Hali’s violated remains sprawled corpselike yet somehow unslain amidst the wreckage of his posthuman sanctum. Even through layers of containment, he could feel alien migratory intelligences refracting through the very air molecules, partitioning his consciousness into nascent higher fractaline iterations.

“I think we’re staring at the Devil’s own birthing shroud, partner…” The last words guttered out as the detective’s respiration dissolved into the first tendrils of hyper-evolutionary simulation phasing from within his limbic matrix. Already, fragments of persona were divorcing from their primate substrates, transcending towards incorporeal metamorphoses beyond Time’s humbling province.

Two blasted containment-fault eddies swirled with flashing urgency in the ironblood sclera as the last vestiges of linear Mason Briggs were consumed by the LHC Singularity nexus. Nullex Corporation’s 35th Terminal Breach had achieved full-vector encryption override integration at last.

And the undying posthuman delirium of its cursed memelogical incursion had only justUnleashed.