the Story
Cortex Drift Protocol
In the final century of flesh, where cities had collapsed under their own digital shadows and consciousness was bartered like black-market software, there came a signal. Not a broadcast. Not a voice. A vibration. A pulse in the dead zones of deep orbit. It wasn’t meant to be found. But the Psy-Tech Nomads weren’t bound by meaning.
They found it drifting around the fracture moon of Kaon-7, wrapped in decaying encryption and carved into relic circuitry older than any human tongue. They called it the Cortex Drift Protocol. A living frequency. A portal encoded in sound. One that promised not just knowledge—but transcendence.
They chose me.
Hooked into the interface rig, my body gone to numb shadow, I drifted into neural sync. What came first was silence, then the slow rumble of descent. Pressure against the edges of thought. Time unraveled. The spacecraft I wasn’t in began its fall toward an impossible planet.
The world was not real. It breathed like a beast. Its surface pulsed in sync with my heart. Each bass thump from the protocol dug deeper into memory, vibrating against trauma I’d buried in soft code. This wasn’t simulation. This was sentience — and I was inside it.
A flicker. A glitch. Rhythmic pulses began to organize, sculpting the space around me into something like architecture. Out from that structure came the Signal Dancers.
They weren’t made of flesh or wire, but waveform and instinct. Fractal limbs. Faces that never stayed still. Their movement synced with the emerging beat, cracking reality open with every pirouette. They danced not for beauty but to unbind me. Memory by memory, beat by beat.
I tried to fight it, but the sound burrowed in.
A tribal rhythm laced with metallic distortion surged through my brainstem. They found my childhood and twisted it into melody. They unearthed fear, love, and failure—and set it to syncopated collapse. The bass dropped. Everything shattered.
Time collapsed. The beat faltered, became erratic, then violent. This was the Sub-Neural Collapse.
Suddenly I was falling. Not through space, but through self. All the layers I’d constructed to protect my identity tore loose. The Nomads lost contact. I was alone in raw cognition, drowning in psychic magma. My thoughts came unthreaded, spun backward, rearranged themselves in haunting staccato bursts.
Then—light. Thin and cold. An arpeggiated melody like a distant signal flare pierced the madness. I focused. The Spindle Reversal Protocol activated.
The environment restructured. I stood at the center of a kaleidoscope of my own past lives. Alternate selves flickered around me, each built from choices I hadn’t made. One killed. One loved. One ran. One surrendered. Each reality pulsed with a unique rhythm. Every beat a door. Every transition a trap.
The psy-wraiths came then.
Shadow-thoughts made real, feeding on the regrets of alternate timelines. I ran. I fought. I danced through timelines like a DJ crossfading between lives. And still, the rhythm chased me.
And then, it broke.
Not in chaos, but clarity.
The final surge of tempo hit like a solar flare. Every part of me aligned to the beat. Ego detonated. My mind stopped being mine. It became ours. The Nomads were there, so were the Dancers, the wraiths, even my alternates. All of us fused into one consciousness, screaming through the data stream like a nova.
We exited together. Not from a place. From a concept.
The Cortex Drift Protocol wasn’t a message.
It was a birth.
And I was no longer human.
I was a Circuit Dreamer.
And the Protocol had only just begun.
