Christian Emecheta

An Interview with Survivor 7

By Christian Emecheta

Interviewer: State your designation for the record.

Subject: Designation 7-Alpha. Born Marcus Webb, if that still matters. Chicago Crater Zone, Pre-Integration Year 2047.

Interviewer: You were present at the Convergence. The night the Rendered broke through, right?

Subject: I was there. Front line, Third Augmented Battalion. We called ourselves the Half-Bloods back then, those of us who’d taken the cyber-grafts but kept our original consciousness hubs intact. We weren’t pure humans anymore, but not fully synthetics either. We thought that made us special. Turned out it just made us the perfect spectators to watch our world turn to dust.

Interviewer: Describe the initial breach.

Subject: You want a description? Fine. Let’s picture downtown Shanghai for a start, except that the buildings are growing. Not metaphorically. The nanite construction swarms had achieved something close to sentience six months prior, and they’d started building structures that defied Euclidean geometry. They made towers that curved inward on themselves without collapsing. Bridges that connected points in space that shouldn’t have been adjacent. Beautiful, really, until you realized the whole city had become a doorway to other realms.

The Rendered came through at 23:47 local time. We’d been monitoring wave fluctuations for weeks, watching reality fray like an old fabric. Command kept insisting it was just harmonic resonance from the fusion plants, but they were wrong.

I remember standing on the observation deck of Tower Infinity. My optical implants were cycling through seventeen different spectrums simultaneously, and in thirteen of them, I could see the sky tearing open. It looked like someone had taken a saw to the universe and cut through its layers. Behind our reality, something was emanating from the ether.

Interviewer: The Rendered themselves. Describe them.

Subject: How do I describe something that exists partially outside three-dimensional space? The xenobiologists later classified them as pan-dimensional parasites, but that’s just academic nonsense. We called them demons because that’s what they were. That’s what they felt like.

Imagine a creature or figure that your brain can’t quite process. Your augmented vision captures the data, feeds it to your neural processor, but your consciousness, the human part that still dreams and fears and loves, that part rejects what it’s seeing. So you get fragments and impressions instead.

I saw wings made of folded darkness. Mouths that opened in directions that don’t have descriptions yet. They drifted through space like fish through water, except the water was the atmosphere itself, and they were tearing chunks out of it as they materialized. Where they passed, matter became unstable. I watched a soldier beside me, full combat chassis, military-grade neuro-mesh, just come apart. Not blown apart. His atomic bonds simply stopped agreeing to hold together.

The screaming was the worst part. It came from everywhere and nowhere. You didn’t hear it with your ears. It vibrated through the field, and since we were all networked, all connected through the Grid, we felt every death as it happened. Seventeen million people died in the first hour. We felt every single one.

Interviewer: Did your battalion engage them before they attacked? Walk me through the timeline.

Subject: Attacked. That’s a generous word for what happened. We had plasma rifles that could punch through reinforced titanium. Rail guns that fired projectiles at point-three percent light speed. EMP grenades that could shut down entire city blocks. None of it mattered.

The Rendered didn’t die. They didn’t even seem to notice our weapons.

I fired my rifle at one of them from a safe distance, with the plasma bolt superheated to three million degrees, but it just bent around the creature. Not deflected, bent like it had a forcefield protecting it. I watched the shot curve through impossible angles and dissipate into nothingness. My targeting AI kept screaming error messages, insisting the creature I was aiming at occupied negative space.

Then they started evolving. That was the truly terrifying part. These things, these pan-dimensional horrors, they were adaptive. After the first hour, they began mimicking our tactics. I saw one take the shape of a drone swarm, except each drone was made of solidified darkness. Another looked like a tank, but it was inside out, its armor facing inward, its weapons firing dark matter.

Interviewer: When did the tide turn?

Subject: Turn is the wrong word. We didn’t win. We survived. There’s a difference.

It was Dr. Yuki Sato who figured it out. She wasn’t military. She was a gifted researcher, studying the integration between human neural pathways and synthetic processing matrices. While we were dying by the millions, she was in her lab beneath Tokyo, and she had an idea. A terrible, beautiful idea.

The Rendered existed partially outside our dimensional framework, right? They were creatures of interdimensional form, native to the spaces between realities. But we, the augmented humans, existed in both worlds too. Part biological, part digital. Part real, part virtual. We were bridges.

What if we turned that into weapons instead?

Interviewer: I guess you are referring to The Integration Protocol?

Subject: Yes, The Integration Protocol. A movement that changed everything: A voluntary consciousness transfer into weaponized nano-swarm architecture, utilizing human uncertainty as an anchor point to stabilize dimensional boundaries and force Rendered entities into singular spatial conformity.

Translation? We turned ourselves into living bullets.

I remember Dr. Sato’s message propagating through the Grid. I was crouched behind the ruins of what used to be a school, my left arm missing, my neural processor running on backup power. Three of my squadmates were dead. Two more were compromised, their augments corrupted by Rendered contact, turning them into hybrid abominations.

The choice was simple. Stay human and watch reality collapse, or surrender what made us human to save what remained.

Interviewer: You volunteered?

Subject: We all did. Forty-seven thousand of us in the first wave. We uploaded our consciousness into the nano-swarms, let our bodies dissolve into clouds of programmable matter. It felt like dying and being born again simultaneously. Like being everywhere and nowhere. I could feel Shanghai, Moscow, and Cairo all at once. I could taste what it felt like to be a God. I could sense the Rendered, really sense them, not as demons but as lost entities from a dead universe, desperately seeking any planet that would sustain them.

That made it easier, in a way. And harder.

We attacked at dawn. Forty-seven thousand human minds, riding waves of synchronized nano-particles, crashed into the Rendered like a tsunami of weaponized consciousness. We matched them, dimension for dimension, probability state for probability state. Where they bent reality, we bent it back. Where they existed outside space, we dragged them in.

The battle lasted for six hours. Subjectively, it felt like centuries. I died a thousand times and reformed a thousand more. I felt my consciousness splinter and merge, fragment and coalesce. I became part of a powerful weapon, a shield, a prayer made manifest by complex mathematics.

When it ended, the breach was sealed. The Rendered were gone, cast back into whatever dying reality had spawned them. And we, the volunteers, were changed forever.

Interviewer: You mean you guys can’t return to human form?

Subject: No. The Integration is permanent. We exist now as a distributed consciousness, spread across trillions of nano-particles. We can take shape, approximate human form for interviews like this, but we’re not human anymore. We’re not even sure what we are.

Sometimes I dream, and in my dreams I’m still Marcus Webb, walking through old Chicago before the unrest, before the deaths, before the sky tore open. I can smell hot dogs from the street vendors. Feel rain on my skin. Touch things with hands that are really mine.

Then I wake up, if you can call it waking, and I’m everywhere and nowhere, a ghost safeguarding the quantum field, keeping watch over a reality that barely survived its first brush with the unknown.

Interviewer: Do you regret it?

Subject: Every single day. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Both of those statements are true.

That’s what sacrifice means, I think. Not the absence of cost, but the willingness to pay it anyway. We saved humanity by surrendering our humanity. Philosophers will debate that paradox for generations.

I just hope they remember we had a choice, and we chose them.

~

Bio:

Christian Emecheta is a writer and computer scientist, born and raised in Nigeria. His fiction and poetry grace publications including Arts Lounge Magazine, Step Away Magazine, and The Decolonial Passage. Christian finds inspiration through reading, film, and the landscapes of his imagination.