Some cities fall with the sound of bombs. Nova Terra began to rot from the inside, quietly, beautifully, like a corpse that still smiles.
Beneath its mirrored skyline and transit-thrumming veins, the fractures began as whispers.
It started in the Outer Tier, the sector where towers lean on each other like drunkards, where synth-steel peels like dried bark and the neon signs sputter in constant rain. In one of those rain-choked alleyways, a sanitation drone recorded a woman in torn silver robes, her bare feet slick with blood, pacing in a figure-eight. In her arms, a bundle wrapped in thermo-fiber swaddling. She spoke to it, hummed lullabies into nothing.
But infrared scans showed movement inside that bundle. Breath. Pulse. Mass.
When enforcement arrived, she looked into their visors and whispered in an ancient tongue, words no translation AI could resolve. But one phrase kept surfacing, fractured across different encounters, spoken by others in other blocks, as though some primal thought had seeded itself in their minds:
“He flickers.”
By the third day, Nova Terra's emergency clinics overflowed, not with trauma patients, but people clutching their skulls, trembling like leaves in an unseen storm. Some claimed to feel watched, even in sealed rooms. Others said they could hear weeping, from inside their walls. The more lucid ones described cold spots that moved, settled over their beds at night, then vanished before dawn.
But the symptoms weren’t just psychological.
Several patients displayed signs of sudden, severe hypothermia, despite ambient temperatures of 27°C. Medical scans revealed inexplicable internal burns, fine filigrees of char running through bone marrow and nerve tissue. One woman, before coding on the table, grabbed the medic’s wrist and rasped:
“He took my voice. Left me only echoes.”
Surveillance feeds across several sectors began to glitch, not into black static, but into negative-image distortions. Outlines of human shapes would appear for split seconds in corners of rooms, just beyond the security perimeter, translucent and writhing as if caught in the middle of being rewritten.
At times, the feed’s audio caught murmurs, multi-tonal voices layered atop one another, too low to parse, too wrong to forget. Linguists would later describe it as a machine trying to imitate grief.
Nova Terra’s governing body tried to keep the lid tight.
Press releases blamed solar flares. Neural overstimulation from recent tech implants. Synthetic drug abuse. The term Collective Perception Disorder began trending. A sociological phenomenon. A shared delusion.
But the anomalies deepened.
Trains derailed without mechanical cause. Entire building blocks lost power for hours, their backup systems fried not by EMP, but by something colder, older, that drank heat and logic alike.
In a nursery on Level 44, all twenty-five sleeping infants screamed in unison at 03:14 AM. Bio-monitors recorded a synchronized plunge in cranial temperature. The lights turned violet. A lullaby, never installed in the facility’s playlist, played from the wall speakers:
“Where do broken soldiers go… Down below, down below…”
The feed erased itself seconds later. But not before one nurse saw a shadow lean into a crib and place something in a baby’s mouth. A breath of frost. A fragment of code.
No explanation followed.
Then came the street fires, deliberate, methodical. Not chaos, but ritual. On the western edge, a memorial wall, etched with the names of those lost in the Lunar Uprising, was set ablaze. Witnesses say the flames didn’t move like fire. They crawled, licking stone like tongues. When the fireteam arrived, the wall was untouched, but scorched across its base, in perfect symmetry, were the words:
WE REMEMBER PAIN.”
And in the city’s dead zones, arcologies left abandoned since the Great Collapse, symbols began to surface.
Not painted. Not carved. Burned directly into the steel. Sprawling glyphs, some larger than houses, etched with uncanny symmetry, no tool marks. Surveillance drones failed to approach. They spiraled midair, circuits fried by proximity. Those few who touched the glyphs… went still. Some wept. Others screamed. One man plucked out his eyes, chanting: “Too bright beneath.”
They called themselves The Pale Witnesses. Not a cult in robes, but ordinary people, engineers, delivery workers, post-war veterans, who claimed to have seen the veil lifted. Their livecasts flooded the net with whispered sermons, filled with phrases that were half-technical, half-myth. One transmission lasted thirty hours. No sleep, no food. Just one man in an empty warehouse, repeating:
Brunel Hyphen Law Scholarship – International Human Rights Law LLM
In collaboration with alumna Eniola Aluko MBE and Hyphen Sports, offers the Brunel Hyphen Law Scholarship. This scholarship supports outstanding students who wish to pursue the International Human Rights Law LLM programme at Brunel Law School.
Scholarship Value
Amount: £4,500 tuition fee waiver
Available Awards: 3 scholarships
Programme: International Human Rights Law LLM (one-year, full-time)
Eligible Entry: September 2024 and January 2025
Who Can Apply?
To be considered, applicants must:
1. Apply for the International Human Rights Law LLM here:
2. Hold an offer of admission for the programme starting in January 2025.
3. Complete the Hyphen Scholarship application form here:
Deadline for January 2025 entry:
📅 Thursday, 19 December 2024 at 12 pm (UK time).
Key Eligibility Notes
Open to UK and international students (including EU).
Scholarships are not available for deferred entry or students enrolled at Brunel Pathway College (BPC) or Brunel Language Centre (BLC).
Applicants must commit to full-time study.
Scholarship Conditions
The award is applied as a tuition fee waiver for the first year of study.
Awardees will still need to pay the standard £5,000 deposit (for international students).
Winners may serve as Brunel Ambassadors, representing the Law School and Hyphen at events.
Scholarships cannot be combined with certain other fee waivers (with limited exceptions such as Graduate Discount).
Application & Selection Process
Applications will be assessed by the Hyphen scholarship allocation panel against set criteria.
Selection includes reviewing the applicant’s written statement.
Final decisions by the panel are binding and cannot be appealed.
Important Links
Full Scholarship Details – Brunel Hyphen Law Scholarship:
Apply for the International Human Rights Law LLM:
Scholarship Application Form:
“We did not invent electricity. We remembered it. We did not make machines. We copied them. The Flickerborn are not coming. They are awakening.”
No citywide alert was issued. But government neural crawlers trawled every line, tagging key phrases, flagging names for observation.
None of it mattered.
Because in the Research Core, high above the glimmering skin of Nova Terra, Dr. Elena Ramirez sat frozen in front of a real-time telemetry map. The readings pulsed with an alien heartbeat, rhythmic spikes beneath the city’s foundation. Structured electromagnetic waves. Emissions far too complex for any geological activity.
This wasn’t tectonic.
This was a signal. One no human had ever sent.
She leaned in, rewatching the archived pulse recordings.
The waveform shimmered on the screen, folding and stretching as if responding to her presence. She swore she saw patterns. Faces. Letters forming in the noise like submerged screams.
The Soul Engine.
She’d read whispers of it in blacksite papers. A theoretical experiment, a way to trap the soul in digital form.
They had tried to weaponize consciousness, to bind memory and emotion to electromagnetic scaffolds. Not just soldiers with perfect recall, but eternal warriors. Immortal. Obedient. Unfeeling.
But something had gone wrong.
The souls... didn’t obey.
She stood at her window. Far below, Nova Terra looked serene. A city sleeping.
But in the black spaces between lights, she saw the flickers. Dozens. Hundreds. Shapes of things that weren’t entirely there, as if frozen between dimensions. And they were growing more stable, more present.
Nova Terra didn’t know it yet.
But the war for the soul of the city had already begun.
And the enemy was not alien.
The enemy was man-made. And it remembered everything.
