Dr. Malhotra didn’t sleep that weekend. By Monday morning, dark circles hollowed his eyes as he locked his office door and booted up his encrypted laptop. His hands trembled on the mouse as he opened the feed from Room 412-C, fast-forwarding through the mundane hours of Friday night.
At 2:14 AM, the footage changed.
The screen flickered. The digital clock on the camera feed began to lag, skipping seconds as if a heavy electromagnetic field was passing through the room. The door to Room 412-C didn’t open, but a dense, chilling shadow seemed to detach itself from the corner of the room, slowly moving toward the comatose firefighter.
Arjun leaned closer, his breath catching in his throat.
The shadow began to take a human shape, but it wasn’t a doctor or a trespasser. It was an ethereal, glowing silhouette. As the entity leaned over Rohan Mehta, the vitals monitor beside the bed went completely haywire. Rohan’s flatlined brainwave activity suddenly spiked into a violent, hyper-conscious state.
Suddenly, the screen went completely black. Ten minutes of footage were entirely wiped out.
When the video cut back in at 2:30 AM, the room was empty again, but Rohan was breathing heavily, sweat glistening on his forehead.
Arjun slammed his laptop shut, his mind racing. It wasn’t an intruder. It wasn’t a biological infection. It was something far outside the realm of modern medicine. He grabbed Rohan’s medical file and sprinted to the records department. He needed to look at the firefighter’s history—not just his medical charts, but the incident report from the day he fell.
As he dug through the old, dusty files of the fire brigade, Arjun found a detail that had been overlooked for three years. Rohan hadn’t just fallen from a burning building. He had been rescuing a woman from an illegal underground laboratory funded by a radical biotech firm called Astra Genesis. The woman had died, but the lab was experimenting with experimental, airborne synthetic pheromones and gene-altering cellular pathogens designed to forcibly pass on genetic material through physical proximity.
Rohan hadn’t just suffered brain damage. His body had become a living, breathing biological incubator…
