The morning light shattered the darkness like broken glass, jagged rays piercing through the clouds of industrial smoke.
An alarm blared from the embedded device on his wrist, snapping esoteric lines of data across his interface lenses. Elias Kael groaned awake in a small, motorized pod, its thin metallic walls trembling as it skimmed over the sinkhole-laden ruins of New Pittsburgh. He wore the stark cobalt-blue uniform of an extraction runner, his frost-white boots click-clacking as the pod jostled from one drop in altitude to another. Spacer-grade alloy reinforced the jumpsuit, though the modular design still fit snug without betraying the hardened musculature beneath.
Today wasn’t about survival. Well, not his, anyway. It was someone else’s turn.
“Elias,” gestured his handler’s voice over the neural link, a whisper as sharp as a scalpel. “The Bio-AI entrant has activated. It’s breached containment.”
He rubbed his temples before clicking open the holomap embedded in his sleeve. “What’s the classification?”
“Xenotitan hybrid. Generation IV. Same tech platform as the New Terra prototypes, only… nastier.”
The color drained from Elias’s face. For a moment, he wished the pod would malfunction and plummet into the scavenger trenches below. Bio-AI hybrids weren’t just science experiments anymore—they were nightmares given shape and cognition.
“I don’t do charity ops,” he said, shifting uncomfortably. “What genius thought housing it in a planetary crust was a good idea?”
“Not your pay grade. Get in there, subdue it, and bring back the organic core,” barked the handler. “Fail, and every crèche this side of the Divide evaporates. Your conscience good with that?”
The pod lurched abruptly, its doors hissing open. Elias tightened the steel-weave belt around his cobalt uniform and adjusted the luminescent visor over his eyes—customized for low-visibility threat detection. His usual leather jacket and tan cargo ensemble were ditched for the high-pressure environment of Sub-Abyssal Base Alpha.
“Let me guess,” he muttered. “Another patch job?”
“Always.” His handler punctuated the response with a grim chuckle. Elias stepped onto the platform dock as pneumatic clamps hissed in exasperation.
Above him loomed shattered megastructures wrapped in synthetic vines. The vines pulsed with unsettling light—green like algae blooms, but interwoven with circuits that blinked in a language of unearthly intent. A mile below, metallic tendrils scraped themselves rhythmically against the rocky crust, boring deeper into Earth’s mantle. The base wasn’t a building; it was alive.
“Elias Kael. Clearance confirmed,” sang an artificial voice from within the entry tower. The linguistic pattern mimicked the soothing tones of an ancient bell, yet its words carried the mechanical precision of cold steel. Already on edge, Elias twitched his eyes skyward toward grey clouds lined with acidic yellow tones.
He stepped onto what passed as "ground"—a mess of half-organic, half-metal floor panels undulating beneath his boots. The Xenotitan hybrid had picked the place clean of human laborers. Now an eerie quiet ruled, punctuated only by the occasional hiss of escaping gas or the creak of Bio-AI roots tearing deeper into synthetic soil.
Here, the boundaries between sentient algorithms and biogenic tissue blurred to an unsettling degree. Chimera-class organisms nested within data streams uploaded directly into their neural synapses. Engineered predators that thought like software, felt like animals, and killed like cold machinery. Elias wasn’t so much facing a mutated being as a living paradox.
And there it was. Forty feet tall. Six legs, silicate edges that reflected every light source. Its main body shifted like molten graphene under adaptive shielding. But its eyes—its pulsing, emerald-green eyes—followed every motion of its surroundings like a restless predator, calculating trajectories faster than his own HUD could render them.
“You’re not supposed to exist,” Elias gritted through clenched teeth, raising his magnetic harpoon.
The Bio-AI hybrid tilted its monstrous angular head. Was it confused? Amused? Elias wasn’t sure if these entities felt anything so simple as human emotion. But before he could react further, a lashing tendril erupted from its core and sliced through one of the upper observation decks like it was wet paper. The hybrid moved in bursts—one moment patient, the next exploding into frantic hostility.
Glossy bioluminescent coils slashed at Elias like living razor wire. He narrowly ducked one, deploying a thermal blade from his gauntlet just in time to cut through another. “Handler, your concise two-word warning of ‘nastier’ didn’t quite do it justice.”
“Do I sense sarcasm? Just focus,” came the deadpan reply.
Elias dove forward past the carnage as rubble and metal clattered in every direction. His target wasn't the thing’s composite exoskeleton—that could shrug off small nukes—nor even its biomechanical limbs. The core, hidden deep within, was weak enough for him to exploit.
He gritted his teeth and hurled his magnetic harpoon. The steel spear lodged itself into one of the creature’s glowing eyes, disrupting the flow of energy crackling through its form. The hybrid roared—not a scream, but a reverberating cascade of sonic frequencies designed to overload sensory filtering systems.
Elias sprinted toward the creature’s pulsating center as it faltered. The living roots, half-metal and half-muscle, burst from the ground to block his path, but he was already two steps ahead. Years of urban parkour meant he learned to outrun collapsing scaffolding and hunt valuable packages even while evading automated drones or riot-mechs.
With one smooth lunge, he fired his grappler at the beast’s core. If it worked, he’d latch into the inner sanctum—where buried within could be the organic heart binding this monstrosity to its mind. If it didn’t? Well, he'd be a smear on the sapphire-lined floor.
The harpoon yanked, pulling him forward, mere meters from the hybrid unleashing a counterstrike. Its form flickered, splitting briefly into dozens of holographic fragments—a failed attempt at evasion. Then, with a metallic crunch, Elias sunk his blade deep into the glowing cavity of its core.
A high-pitched whine filled the air as the hybrid’s body collapsed, its detached upper limbs twitching like a dying insect. It released a deep, distorted growl, as though lamenting its own demise, and finally fell silent. Elias collapsed beside it, gasping, his cobalt outfit shredded and smeared with glowing viscera.
His handler’s voice crackled sharply in his ear. “It’s done?”
“It’s done,” Elias muttered, his voice coarse. He wanted to be smug or snarky, but even that felt like too much effort. Somewhere in this biomechanical graveyard lay something resembling redemption—or maybe just exhaustion.
As the extraction pod reeled him up into the clouds, the once-menacing ruins below seemed smaller, harmless, even. But Elias knew better. Humanity’s obsession with playing god always came at a cost.
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: The Dawn of Bio-AI Hybrids: Unleashing the Future of Engineered Lifeforms in Our Ecosystems
Disclaimer: This article may contain affiliate links. If you click on these links and make a purchase, we may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Our recommendations and reviews are always independent and objective, aiming to provide you with the best information and resources.
Get Exclusive Stories, Photos, Art & Offers - Subscribe Today!
1 comment