20:00 – Vos's Private Quarters, Langley, Virginia
Present Day
The Langley flat was designed for isolation—white walls, matte surfaces, climate-controlled to the decimal. Vos sat alone on the edge of her bed, blazer off, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Her heels lay discarded by the door like trophies from a harder-won war. The datapad in her hand pulsed gently, waiting.
Outside, the Virginia woods whispered in the dark. Inside, silence was sharper. She tapped the pad, and the screen lit up:
ARCHIVE // EVA: 44 FILES.
Her thumb hovered.
She hadn't played them in years.
PLAYBACK: EVA_0049.wav
"Leny, you've got to stop wearing that grim frown into the lab. One of your undergrads asked if you were trained by wolves. You laughed once—do it again sometime."
A faint laugh escaped Vos's lips before she could stop it.
She closed her eyes.
Seville. The word hit her with the scent of iodine and polished steel.
Clinical trial results. Performance baselines. Failure rates.
But Seville was more than data. It was the first time she saw the needle fail on a child.
And it wasn't just about proving something to the NBOA or outmaneuvering Sentinel or Aurora. It wasn't just to bury Seville under a mountain of results.
This should've saved Eva.
Ten years ago.
She could still see the hillside. Still hear the metal folding. The guttural scream of the engine before it went silent. Her hand gripping the ambulance doors, white-knuckled and shaking.
Ruptured liver. Too fast. Too much bleeding.
No chance.
No time.
A second. That was all she needed.
Nanotech like this would've bought it. Bought a second. Or five. A window for the surgery. For breath. For the paramedic not to say I'm sorry, we did everything we could while her mother sobbed into her own coat.
Vos opened her eyes. The white room remained.
White walls, white floors, white noise.
Empty names on white papers.
Eva had been a name once too. Now just a justification on a funding slide.
She stood and walked to the mirror. The same one from her childhood home. The one Eva made her pack—the silver trim still chipped from the move.
The woman staring back was composed, clinical, collected.
And underneath?
Fractured.
Haunted.
More than tired.
"You always wanted to fix things, Leny. Not people—things. Machines, equations, systems. You thought people were too messy. But people break differently. They don't just reboot." — EVA_0012.wav
Vos tapped the playback off.
She leaned forward, both palms pressed to the mirror.
They break differently, Eva.
But they can heal differently too.
Tomorrow she'd return to Washington. The logs would be uploaded. The hold lifted. Ready or not, Subject A would move forward—whether the regulators understood what they were unleashing or not.
Tonight, she stood alone in the afterglow of ambition and grief.
And somewhere inside her—the child still watching a gurney vanish behind ER doors—she whispered back:
This time, I won't be late.
The mirror reflected nothing new.
Still Vos. Still the same too-tired eyes.
She turned away from her reflection, from the room, from the breathless silence that followed every recording of Eva's voice. But the past had already started leaking through the seams of the present.
On her desk, a sealed manila folder sat unopened since she returned from D.C.—a courier file from the Seville archives, recovered and restored by her own request. Inside: early biometric logs, procedural notes, autopsy records.
And a photo.
Vos picked it up, hands steady.
Three girls in summer dresses, leaning against a ruined fountain in Seville. Eva laughing. The light behind her too bright for the film to catch her properly. Vos, barely twenty, already serious. Already designing trials in her head while her sister danced barefoot across cobblestone.
Seville.
That's where everything began.
She sat back down.
Let the image burn in.
Closed her eyes.
13:00 – Seville Medical Research Center, Seville, Spain
Date: Wednesday, October 10, 2018 — Ten Years Before Present Timeline
"There are moments when time doesn't stretch—it snaps. And in that silence, everything you thought was enough suddenly isn't."
— H.V., Research Log (Redacted), 2019
"You told yourself it was science. You said it wasn't about her. But your hands were shaking, Leny."
— Archive EVA_007
You told yourself it was science.
You said it wasn't about her.
But your hands were shaking, Leny.
Your sister's eyes are closed, her face peaceful — a delicate thing you've been trying to anchor with promises of tomorrow. The room smells like bleach and blood memory. Monitors beep steadily, but that rhythm won't last.
Pressure spike.
Your voice cracks as you lean closer, the sterile hum of the lab pressing in on you.
"Recalibrate—override—force geometry cascade."
Your fingers blur across the console, desperate and precise. Too fast. Too late.
12.4 seconds.
The AI's voice is monotone: "Bond instability rising."
12.8 seconds.
You override again. You override the override.
12.9 seconds.
Flatline.
Silence.
No beep.
You freeze. The console blinks red. The screen flashes: Nanite cohesion failure.
The clinical world collapses to a single point: a cold algorithm pronouncing the end.
From the corner, Dr. Alvarez steps forward — the weight of experience in his eyes.
"You're brilliant, Leny. But brilliance doesn't bury bodies. It just explains them better at the inquest."
No reply. You swallow the lump in your throat.
You watch the paramedics pack up the emergency gear, their faces tight, rehearsed. Your sister is more than a name on a screen; she is the moment your science slipped through your fingers.
It was a hillside crash. Ruptured liver. Too fast for the medicine of that time. Nanotech like this—your nanotech—would have bought her seconds. Seconds for surgery. For breath. For life.
But seconds are a cruel currency, and you were bankrupt.
The white walls close in again. The harsh fluorescence. The cold silence.
You realize that the future you fight for is built on moments like this. Broken, bitter, and silent.
But you will move forward.
Because she broke, and you broke with her.
You just learned how to move while broken.
ESTÁS LEYENDO
Threshold Protocol
Ciencia FicciónThreshold Protocol - ICU Canon Description "Threshold Protocol" is a covert contingency measure embedded within the Phase II Nanocell Trial program, developed under the oversight of Dr. Helena Vos and select military-contracted biotech entities. It...
