"When man found he could split the atom, he turned to the soul and wondered... could it break too?"

1946. Somewhere beneath the Pacific.

The doors sealed behind them with a hiss of decompression. Thick, iron slabs lined with rubber and bolted tight against the outside world. Down here, the air no longer belonged to Earth, t smelled of iodine, rusted blood, and burnt insulation. The walls pulsed faintly, sweating condensation like veins under stress. Somewhere far above, the war had ended. But here, in this forgotten chamber of the world, it had just begun again, this time against the veil between life and death.

The theater wasn’t one of healing.

It was a slaughterhouse, dressed in the mask of science.

A large domed room, once white, now jaundiced with age and smoke. Fluorescent tubes flickered overhead, casting a weak blue hue on steel gurneys soaked in arterial splatter. Surgical saws and bone shears hung from rusted racks like ancient instruments of torture. The scent was unmistakable: copper-rich blood, burnt hair, ozone, and something worse, fear, old and fresh.

The center slab held Subject 39. A man condemned for war crimes, a walking corpse in the eyes of society. Strapped down with thick leather bindings. His mouth was gagged but trembling. Not from fear. From memory. He had already watched the first two subjects die, screaming, thrashing, and then... silently twitching, like puppets whose strings were still pulled by invisible hands.

Dr. Kenjirō Masuda, gaunt and hollow-eyed, leaned over the subject. His rubber gloves were stained black at the fingertips. A curved surgical blade gleamed in the blue haze. It moved with the calm of a man who had done this hundreds of times. Not out of cruelty, but faith. The purest form of scientific belief: that something greater than man could be made if one dared to desecrate what nature held sacred.

The blade sank into the chest with a wet, slow slice.

The room reacted. The sound was flesh parting, thick and reluctant. It hissed like hot meat on steel. Blood gushed in a slow arc, coating the gloves, the wrists, the edge of the slab. The body jolted, eyes wide, breath kicking in ragged surges.

Masuda did not blink.

"Initiate neural vein resection."

The assistants moved like ghosts. No voices. Only the mechanical whir of bone saws and the electric hiss of sterilizers. A chunk of rib was removed with a pop of tearing sinew, then dropped into a steel bowl that rang like a funeral bell. Underneath the ribcage, wires, black, vein-thin, were inserted, threading through soft tissue like parasites burrowing toward the brainstem.

Then came the hum.

The Machine, suspended above the slab like a ritual idol, activated. Its core spun, glowing with an unnatural blue that shimmered like liquid moonlight. Cables slithered down, latching into spinal nodes, chest cavities, cranial ports, linking flesh to current, nerve to circuit.

The room smelled of ozone.

And then… screams. Real. Not from the lungs, but from deep inside. The soul protesting.

The man convulsed.

Eyes rolled back into the skull as his limbs arched against the straps, bones threatening to snap. Electricity surged, not just through the body but through reality itself, cracking the light fixtures, warping the floor tiles, making the metal walls ripple like disturbed water. The screen next to Masuda spiked into the red.

Heartbeat: Gone.

Brainwaves: Active.

Alive. But no longer human.

And yet the procedure wasn’t over.

“Inject the tether serum.”

A black syringe was plunged into the base of the skull. The serum hissed, reacted, and lit the veins under the skin like burning rivers. The body thrashed violently. Blood vessels in the eyes burst. Teeth cracked under the pressure of clenched jaws.

Something passed into this world , through the body.

The lights shattered overhead.

The scream that followed wasn’t the man’s.

It wasn’t human.

And then, silence.

The body lay still. The straps smoked. The machine slowly shut down, steam hissing from its vents. Masuda removed his gloves and stepped back.

The room was quiet.

…The light dimmed.

What lay on the slab was no longer simply Subject 39.

The body's flesh had grayed, not from death, but from controlled necrosis. The blood in its veins had been chemically suspended, thick like oil, preserving muscle and nerve tissue despite the absence of true life. The lungs no longer moved. The heart had been removed entirely, replaced by a cold-fusion core that pulsed with internal blue light, steady as a ticking bomb.

The brain had been partially harvested, its frontal lobe peeled back to expose the core node, where the soul was extracted.

Not severed.

Rerouted.

A soul condenser array, half glass, half alien alloy, floated beside the gurney. Inside it, a storm churned. Blue and violet streaks twisted in arcs of electromagnetic distortion. It pulsed, not like a heart, but like a radar beacon, each beat releasing an invisible wave that set every metal tool in the room to rattle in its drawer.

That was his soul.

Not a metaphor. Not a belief.

It had been isolated. Reprogrammed. Bound in a state of quantum inertia, neither free nor destroyed, but trapped, pressed into service as weaponized current.

Dr. Masuda whispered:

"He is now Flickerborn."

A codeword. A curse. A triumph.

From death, they had drawn a new kind of entity, one that could pass through walls, ignore bullets, fry circuitry, and scream inside the minds of the living. A soldier made of resonance, powered by its own untethered essence, decayed and pulsing in permanent agony.

On the table, the body's skin began to quiver, as if something inside was shifting beneath the surface.

It twitched.

Not in reflex, but in recognition.

The eyes opened again, but this time, they were hollow sockets, yet lit from within. A flickering blue ember danced in the dark recesses of the skull. The soul, now electromagnetic, surged through empty veins, animating the necrotic flesh like lightning animates a thundercloud.

Then came the first shriek.

Not from the lungs.

Not from the machine.

But from the condenser array, glass screaming with pressure as the soul surged harder, flickering uncontrollably between frequency bands, seeking release. The lights in the lab exploded, raining sparks down on the floor. The assistants backed away, shielding their faces.

Masuda stood frozen.

Because he knew:

It was trying to find its body again.

And it was learning how.

The soul hung above the cadaver—, not returning.

Feeding.

It hovered like a storm held in place, tendrils of translucent energy unfurling from its shifting frame. Each flicker revealed its anatomy, not organs, but chambers of pulsing light, geometries that defied natural law, unfolding and refolding in alien rhythm.

Below it, the corpse began to smoke.

Not with heat. But with extraction.

The veins blackened as if reversed. The implanted circuits, once embedded by trembling hands and soaked in brine, pulsed one last time, sending residual electroplasma spiraling upward into the entity. Copper wires embedded in the spine snapped taut, then burst as the energy leeched from them.

Tubes, clamps, surgical rails, all bent toward the hovering being as if magnetized.

The body had become a carcass-furnace, fueling the soul into a higher, more volatile state. Bone matter cracked open like dry wood, marrow liquefying into liquid light that siphoned skyward. The soul absorbed not just energy, but identity. Memories flared like ultraviolet fire. Screams echoed in the air, unspoken, not from any throat, but recorded in the essence.

The laboratory trembled.

Above, the entity screamed, but not in voice.

It was a resonance.

A deep, cathedral-tone hum, like stained glass shattering across multiple realities. Steel buckled. The overhead monitors, long dead, blinked and displayed footage of events no one recorded, memories of death, played like film through broken machines.

A nearby doctor collapsed.

Not from terror.

But from visceral knowing, he saw, in a flash, what the being now was:

A soul untethered. Enhanced. Empowered.

The flickerborn had no more use for flesh.

Its body was a chrysalis, never meant to live again. Only to power its metamorphosis.

Now it was radiation given will. Memory given motion.

And hatred given mass.

The electromagnetic field grew so intense that the lab’s titanium plating began to bend inward. Vats imploded. The reinforced surgical theater burst open like a rusted can, flinging rust and old blood across the walls.

Then came the sound.

Low.

Haunting.

Not a scream, but a pulse.

And every piece of powered equipment still wired to the base’s buried core answered it, lights strobing, hydraulics firing, cryo chambers shuddering as if something long dormant beneath them had heard the call.

This was never resurrection.

This was activation.

The Flickerborn had awakened.

An alarm screamed to life.

It wasn’t the standard tone for contamination, or lockdown, or code red. It was something deeper, low-pitched, fluctuating, almost sentient in how it pulsed through the sublevels like a sonar from hell. Emergency strobes bathed the corridor walls in feverish crimson. Light stuttered. Sirens throbbed.

The underground complex began to convulse.

Scientists in blood-spattered coats burst from sliding doors, their eyes wild, hands trembling with clipped data pads and sample cases. Some screamed. Others stumbled in silence, glassy-eyed, as if their minds were still trapped in the vision the soul had unleashed.

“Breach! We have a containment breach in Theater A-3!”

“It’s feeding! It’s not bound to the host, God, it’s not going back in!”

Footfalls thundered down the metal stairwells, like rats abandoning a furnace. The air sizzled. A wave of electrostatic force surged outward in bursts, shorting out retinal visors, cracking lenses, melting the interface ports of surveillance drones.

Overhead, the monitors glitched.

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:

Not with error codes.

But with foreign geometry, symbols that weren’t programmed into any software, scrolling vertically, like something alien was rewriting the system from within.

The armed containment units deployed. Tactical squads in reactive armor descended the vertical shafts, magnetic rifles drawn, their optics flickering between thermal and low-light, but nothing showed on screen. They could feel it, but couldn’t see it.

“Eyes on the corridor,Sector Five is null! I repeat, null! We have no visual!”

“Switch to sulphur flare!”

One soldier launched a canister into the air. It cracked with a dry hiss, scattering sulphuric dust particles,and then, they saw it.

Like a shadow moving through a lightning storm, tendons of light, fractal veins pulsing in semi-visible outline. It slithered in angles they couldn’t predict, its shape shifting like vapor caught in strobe light.

And then it struck.

One man screamed as his armor lit up from within, not pierced, but vibrated apart. Every screw in his rifle twisted out mid-air. His bones shattered inside his skin before he hit the floor. His eyes boiled.

The creature moved on.

“Retreat! Zone Six compromised! Shut it down! Shut it all down!”

Back in the command deck, top-level engineers smashed keys, entering override codes, trying to isolate power to the wing. The system refused.

Every input was rerouted.

Every command devoured.

As if the network had been possessed.

Monitors bled static. From somewhere deeper in the server core, a voice began to play, a voice that belonged to no one in the building.

“You wanted weapons.”

“You fed us blood.”

“Now, Let us burn.”

The general overseeing the project made the call no one wanted to hear.

“Protocol Black. Annihilation sequence.”

The failsafe, massive demolition charges wired beneath the foundation. If they couldn’t contain it, they would bury it again, with fire.

With trembling hands, a technician unlocked the arming sequence. The countdown began: 60 seconds.

Through the glass viewport, the entity rose, just above the scorched table. It had grown.

What had been a flickering soul was now a storm, swirling with echoes of every man it had touched, glowing with the memories it devoured. Its form was not humanoid. It was built from energy, nerve, vengeance, and pattern.

And it looked down at them with no eyes at all.

Only knowledge.

00:09

00:08

00:07

The last thing seen on surveillance was the creature folding itself into the walls, disappearing into the conduits like a virus slipping into the bloodstream of the world.

Then

silence.

Fire.

The ground above the lab erupted in an obsidian bloom, ash towering into the sky, smoke swallowing the horizon.

They thought they’d ended it.

They believed they’d turned the nightmare to rubble.

But electricity moves.

And so do souls.